The Secret Winter Life: Pandemic, Depression, and Hope

There’s a dense fog outside my window. There’s a grey hue inside my mind. There’s a flat, dull affect to everything I see. There’s a murkiness to my thoughts. I reach for words, for memories, and they float through the fog, just out of reach. I have low motivation to go after them. Sometimes I’m angry for no reason. Sometimes I hate myself for no reason. I’ve been writing a lot about snow.

We’re two-plus years deep into a global pandemic. I’ve had it good; I’ve had a safe place to live, I’ve had food, I’ve maintained physically distant connections with friends, I’ve lived with wonderful people, and I’ve stayed well—relatively speaking as someone who navigates chronic illness.

I’ve also had significant adverse reactions to the vaccines, lost friends, felt trapped, lived through too-close wildfires with apocalyptic smoke in my home, sat in a pool of sweat as the temperature rose to 117 degrees Fahrenheit and dry winds blew through my garden, lost plants, lost a family member for whom we couldn’t have a funeral, missed meeting newborn babies, marched in the streets, held my breath as fellow Jews were held hostage, as fellow Jews were attacked in the streets, as fellow Jews were fired for being Jewish, held my breath as friends and clients recovered from being teargassed, attacked, and threatened for protesting our country’s deeply embedded racism, co-parented a teen who couldn’t attend school or see friends in person, missed my family who couldn’t travel, and counseled a lot of people who were barely hanging onto life and sanity. There’s probably more to that list. You’ve probably been through your own version of this. My actual, physical brain is tired.

It’s foggy outside my window. I’ve been writing a lot about snow. Winter is a time when perennial plants put their energy down into their roots, when the seeds of annuals wait in dormancy for the signs of spring, when fog and snow put a quiet blanket over the busy world. When food consists of stored-up roots and warm soups. When we wait, hibernate, sleep. North and south of the equator, winter is a normal part of life, but we act like it isn’t.

We talk a lot about “getting back to normal,” as if spring were normal but winter were not. As if a fast-paced, globally destructive, anxiety-ridden society were normal but responding to community need and protecting each other in times of dis-ease were not. In Game of Thrones, the North’s motto was “winter is coming,” repeated like a mantra to remind the coddled summer babies that winter, too, is a normal part of the cycle, that we must not rest on the laurels of spring and forget to prepare for all aspects of life. When we live in a culture that prizes only convenience, only productivity, only feel-good feelings, only busyness, we risk using up all our resources and being unprepared for winter. That is where we find ourselves now.

I wish to emerge into a spring that normalizes connection, that gently nurtures each person and plant and animal as part of an interconnected web, into a society that believes in being trauma-informed and health-oriented and Earth-rooted and full of love. I plan to emerge into this reality by creating more of it myself.

This reality is at the heart of what I teach, at the heart of what I live. I’m always learning how to live it more. I’m always healing my relationship with my ancestors, being more gentle with my body, learning more patience in relationship, de-colonizing my own mind, fighting for justice through love (not through more trauma), and giving myself more grace (which includes accountability). I practice loving the winter inherent in spring.

When I was twenty, I wrote a poem. In it, I described an evening snow as a gift with which to blend my tears and drink as the “sweet nectar of the secret winter life.” Where are you allowing yourself to grieve, to be held by this cycle that invites us back down to our roots so we can emerge, properly, into spring, having cleansed ourselves of the old ways? What is the new normal you want to create this spring?