letter twelve: an ode to winter

waiting for spring will not save the world

Dearest friend, 

How are you? How have you been? I know it’s been a handful of months since I last wrote, and I wish I could tell you that work has kept me busy — and it has, so very much, an insane amount of things just surging up from seemingly nothing since I got back from the holidays — but it’s hardly the reason I haven’t been able to write to you. Work is work, life is life, and while I’ve never been too good at work-life balance, that’s still no excuse not to send you at least a late Yuletide and New Year greeting, however you spent the season itself. 

It’s getting quite winter-y where I am, and I admit I’m more relieved than anything that we’re properly into the negative double-digits now. I was looking at all the slush on the ground over December and couldn’t help spiraling a bit about how wrong it is for the snow to look so much closer to rain and for the mouth of winter to still be this warm. But February has brought around that midwinter bite and stillness in the air that I love so much, and here’s to hoping I didn’t just jinx it. 

I’ve only just realized that I don’t mean it as much as I used to when I say that autumn is my favorite season. I think I’ve mostly just defaulted to it as an answer when I first moved here because it’s a nice middle ground between humid and freezing, and you don’t get to live in Canada without feeling at least a smidge of Mary Oliver-adjacent awe at having red and orange maple leaves crunching under your feet on your way down the street. But considering autumn the most picturesque of the four seasons doesn’t really mean it’s the one that feels most natural to exist within for me, and if that’s the criterion I’m using to decide my favorite season, then I’m afraid it’d have to be winter. 

That isn’t at all to deny the terrible effects that winter tends to have on people, especially in places that get greyer and darker for longer than is healthy for anyone to live with. I’m not immune to the awful depression that hits around this time of the year, not at all — yet at the same time, now that I’m older than the worst winters of my life so far, a part of me also embraces the perpetual melancholy in the air. If summer is the extrovert of the four and spring is the sensitive romantic, then winter is the quiet, introverted sibling with a capacity for both a chilling anger and endless introspection. In many ways, if I look at it that way, it’s the only season I get along with naturally.

But I truly do love the snow, the long nights, the suffocating silence. I love the coats and the scarves and the knits. I love how I don’t have to feel bad about staying home by the (electric) fireplace instead of being dragged to camping trips or sticky sugar-filled visits to lacklustre traveling fairs and beachside concerts or to nights out that end at 4 AM with everyone else drunk while I remain stone-cold sober. I love that I know when a snowstorm is finally over as soon as I hear the two sisters in the next unit over playing with another neighbor’s dog. I especially love the lakewater when there’s frost in the wind, how cartoonishly icy each small wave looks as it crashes against an outcropping. I love spending an hour in a bookstore and walking back out into the sunset. I love that people take their time to think before they answer, as if hushed by the freezing mornings and early evenings. 

I didn’t even notice that my region hasn’t seen the sun in more than thirty days until someone pointed it out, and I swear I do feel quite guilty about it, to owe my current mood to a phenomenon that doesn’t bode well for everyone else. I’m aware that it’s thanks to no small amount of privileges, being able to experience winter the way I do, especially with the current state of my city amidst record-high inflation and the widespread lack of support for local unhoused and disabled individuals beginning to finally strain at the seams. But a part of me just seems almost happier in the emptiness and melancholy of winter than I can ever be in any of the other seasons. Maybe because it justifies the melancholy that’s there internally anyway — if you’ll forgive the subpar wording — and there’s a recentering of the self that happens, I suppose, when what’s around you matches what you feel. You don’t have to explain anything to anyone. You don’t have to try to match the energy around you to the point of exhaustion. And I might even like the alone-ness. Not only the solitude, but the alone-ness. Winter gives me all of this without me having to bear the labor of choosing it in a world that won’t always allow me. 

They mean well, these people who find more brightness, if not exactly happiness, in more sunlight. But a significant part of me finds the sunshine so exhausting. There is so much responsibility in having to be a person in spring and summer. So much responsibility because there is so much existing that is necessary, and so much existing means so much perceiving. There is so much to see. There are so many ways to be seen. Winter is empty and still and cold, I know, but there’s nothing there that asks anything of me. 

Weirdly enough, this is the calmest I’ve been in a while. Maybe that’s the word I’ve been trying to arrive at this entire time. Maybe it’s simply just calm. I like calm. I love calm. And winter can’t be anything but that. It’s only ever endless calm, enough to suffocate you, but in that, it’s also nearly always more expansive than anything that feels too big inside my chest alone. There’s generosity in that, I think. In winter being what it is. A generosity that doesn’t feel like a burden because I owe it nothing in return. 

The truth is, this isn’t the letter I set out to write. I have a few unfinished letters from the past couple of months that I hope to return to eventually, most of them angry or passionate about this or that thing, but right now, I am sadder and emptier than I am angrier about the state of… everything, and it’s almost a nice little break to have. I haven’t felt sadness in a while, I think. It’s only just been anger and contempt and hopelessness, all of which are emotions that I’d argue just compound each other. You’ll get angry about your own anger, hate yourself for your own hatred, and hopelessness — Well, there’s no way out of that one. You spiral and you feed it and you feed on it without even knowing that’s what you’re doing, until hopelessness feels justified because at least it’s absolute. 

Next to all of that, sadness — or melancholy, or unhappiness — feels more like a manageable sort of ennui. A few years ago, on one of many trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, a friend and I were debating whether Edward Hopper’s paintings carry their own inherent loneliness or if it so happens that his style simply makes it possible for an onlooker to see what they want to see. As with any piece of art, of course, but the oil paintings that Hopper is known for (I’m personally more a fan of his watercolors) are generally acknowledged to be portraits of urban loneliness. Other words that people tend to default to also include liminal, or desolate, or empty. Olivia Laing often brings up Hopper’s work in her book The Lonely City, and I think part of the reason I struggled to connect with how she writes about loneliness is how she views Hopper’s paintings:

This is what Hopper replicates with his strange architectural configurations: the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with near-unbearable exposure. “I probably am a lonely one,” he once told an interviewer, and his paintings radiate an empathic understanding of what that’s like. You might think this would make his work distressing, but on the contrary I found it eased the burden of my own feelings. Someone else had grappled with loneliness, and had found beauty, even value in it.

It’s just strange, enough to feel alienating in its own way, to see loneliness viewed as something to be grappled with. Quite a bit of the book is spent on Laing trying to find value in loneliness, some sort of humanizing factor in feeling it, but even that seems too exhausting an endeavor to me. I don’t understand it, this need to attach value to something. Yes, I understand and agree that the ability to be your own self and spend time alone is valuable, but sometimes people speak of these as if it’s all just a precursor to the life you should be living. Resting during the winter months is fine, because then you’ll be better equipped for the spring and summer months. That kind of thing. A way of recharging yourself. A way of preparing you for the better that will inevitably come. 

There’s a lot of disillusionment there for me. I see all these web weaving posts on Tumblr about being kind and gentle because of course we don’t all have to worry about saving the world all the time, and I see these Tweets about how no one is built to be alone, and sometimes it just feels like artifice. Not the sentiments themselves, because kindness can never truly be fake, and yes, of course, if we all had the capacity to be kind and open all the time, we should absolutely choose it, but it’s also like watching someone else’s parent lie to their child. You know it’s necessary, and you can’t fault them for choosing the lie to protect their child’s innocence for just a little longer, but neither will change the fact that you see through it anyway. You don’t wish that your parents lied to you, too, though. You don’t wish to know less. 

The thing is, and I say this without cynicism or envy, kindness is a privilege. So is the ability to treat life like a never-ending game of hide and seek where the target is beauty, or meaning, or emotions that can be easily packaged into something tender knowing full well you will not be touched by anything that can poison it. The ability to look and walk away from something is a privilege. That doesn’t have to be such a dirty thing, and I know I’ve already talked about it before. But do you ever think about how the word despite is luxury in the form of a preposition? It worries me sometimes, how easily people use the words love and care and kindness to opt out of living their lives with all the things we must carry. It worries me, that people see beauty as a thing to be found and loneliness as a thing to be measured for its value. It worries me, how we now aestheticize even the things that are meant to make life easier to live with so that we’ll be better equipped to face the difficult parts.

No, we mustn’t let the world turn us hard and jaded. And sure, of course we need kindness and tenderness and care to make our lives bearable. But you have to look the world in the eye. You have to see all the desolation and violence — really, truly see it, without looking away in the name of staying soft or tender-hearted despite what’s right there. Kindness isn’t meant to be an escape. It’s a bridge. It’s a crutch. It’s a hand warmer on a freezing day that you chose to brave without any mittens. It’s the thing that tides you by, that anchors you to your own humanity. But it isn’t something you use to deny what’s real. Kindness does not erase pain. Kindness does not heal. It’s just the hand you hold, uncaring even if you grip it to numbness, while you grit your teeth as you let your wounds be dressed. Kindness will not be the thing to rid the world of the people and systems who inflicted those wounds, I’m sorry to say, but it can be the thing to remind you that the alternative is still possible, and that it’s worth it to do the work getting there. Yet it’s still work. It will always still be work. The point is that we accept that without needing to examine whether it has any value to us once it’s all said and done. 

In the opening scene of the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, the main character and his wife get into a debate about how they use their mood organs — these devices that can, essentially, alter someone’s mood to whatever the user chooses. The husband recommends setting up the organ so that it wakes its user in a chipper mood, ready to take on the day, while his wife insists on plunging herself into the depths of despair every now and then for hours at a time. Her argument is that it’s the saner choice to feel emotions that are congruent with what is going on with the world — that in fact it’s more inhumane not to despair, not to feel hopeless, not to feel all the anger and indignation at the world for being what it is, especially when at the end of the day, she will be able to press a button on this little device and turn away from all the bad anyway. That’s it. That’s all. There’s no explicit conversation about finding “value” in sadness, as if we’re all machines that here and there have to remember to simulate human behavior in exchange for capital to affirm us in our humanity. The bare minimum is, really, to look at what’s in front of you and feel for it. Is that not real empathy? To not deny this terrible thing the kindness of seeing how terrible it is? 

It’s such bullshit, you know? To constantly search your feelings for what benefit they bring? It’s so counterproductive to embrace loneliness solely because befriending yourself makes you a better person around other people. We spend so much time posturing with the right things, approximating the right emotions, embodying humanity through the body language we have learned to notice it through, yet we never learn to be more than one thing at a time. So we endure the worst with a little impatience, waiting to be rewarded with the good, the better, if not the best. We look at characters with gentle hearts, characters who choose to remain pacifists, and act as if the strength of their choice mirrors ours, when in fact we have never had to choose kindness. It has never been a matter of kindness versus an easier choice. We’ve never had to be kind as a survival stance. Not really. We say we have. But again. The fact that we get to say despite at all betrays the reality of what we live anyway. 

Something I’ve heard a lot about winter is, It’s okay, because before you know it, it will be spring. Just bear with it for now, they say, because it’s just something we have to live through to get to spring. April showers bring May flowers, after all. We will be rewarded for enduring the cold, the ice, the emptiness and stillness. It’s only temporary, all this unbearable cold. 

It’s just so removed from me. That’s all. What if we have no guarantee that spring will come? How long will winter have to persist before we even suspect spring isn’t coming? How many plants will wither and frost over for good before we stop expecting them to grow back anew? How many people will have to suffer the brunt of the cold in its entirety before we realize it’s much harder, and therefore more important, to learn how to give each other warmth in and with the winter right outside our walls? 

Am I making sense? I’m not sure I am. It doesn’t matter. I’m just wary of easy platitudes now, is what I mean to say. I’m also wary of people who give in to nihilism and to anger. Maybe that’s why this sadness feels so calm. More than anything, I’m just wary of any shortcuts to living that reject life for being what it is. That’s really about it. Maybe that’s idealism of its own kind, or maybe it’s cynicism. I don’t know. 

I just want to have the strength to never see what’s in front of me for less or more than what it is. I just want to have the strength to make it through the winter knowing that I didn’t love my melancholy solely because it might one day give me happiness. 

Anyway. Some things functioning as my own mood organ these days have been: Roadkill by Searows. Cheese bread. Cabbage soup. I’ve also inadvertently cornered my writing into experimenting with how well the Ship of Theseus thought experiment holds when applied to human beings; it will probably continue with the next project. I’d like to be sleeping more. I’d also like to be crying more; I’m at a point where it’s been so long since I’ve cried that I envy people who can sob if they let themselves. I’m itching for a good, healthy debate with someone who knows how to argue for a stance that I heartily disagree with. Something that’s debatable, of course, not literal human rights issues. It’s been so long since anyone around me has felt alive. But I hold out hope nonetheless that this will change. Maybe that’s the spring I secretly expect to be inevitable. 

Otherwise, inside and around me is a quiet winter landscape, and there is, for better or for worse, peace to be found there. 

I hope you’re staying warm where you are, my friend. Physically or emotionally, however you need it best. 

Your huckleberry friend, 

Sha