I don’t make a secret of the fact that I’m afraid of winter. I used to panic in October and try to steel myself for the inevitable abyss, which only made things worse. I worship the light that spring brings, and come Ostara in March I’m absolutely salivating at the prospect of the space that’s starting to open up around me again. I begin to believe again in the long, languorous days of summer, filled with hours of that precious photonic-bliss; induced by our altered proximity to our nearest star. Winter tricks me into thinking it was all a dream. Inversely, by the end of summer I worry that I’ll never hear the crunch of snow under by boots, or marvel at frost-fractalled leaves again. The mind is a funny thing.
We gain space in daylight hours, in terms of our productivity, wakefulness, libido, energy, fitness, cognition, capacity — I could go on. I feel so possible in the lighter months. Less pressured to get shit done in just five hours before I’m snoozing again. It’s a time of action and business. But that’s why winter is so essential — we need a place to rest, recoup. (Particularly us AuDHDer’s, am I right? How many little projects did you pick up this year? If the answer is too many, I can guarantee you’re not alone.). It’s why I’ve been teaching myself to ease into it, like a bath, rather than try to harden against it’s coming. Malleability; that’s how I survive winter. I take it as it comes, I respect it’s power, and I am grateful to it for giving me space in a totally different way to summer.
Instead of what I can fit into a day, space becomes about emotional awareness, gratitude, and inner growth. How? It gives us stillness; far-off, inked horizons, thinness. On any given summer day, we’re surrounded by bustle — whether that’s people, events, work, or simply life coming back into the world. The trees are bursting with leaves, the verges with flowers, everywhere you look there’s insect and bird life. It’s a feast for the eyes and the senses: lush, visceral, sensual. It’s external.
Winter erases it all.
It can be a blank canvas, or a turning of the page.
Every year I forget how far away the horizon is. Winter reminds me. I feel my smallness in the vastness of the earth as my eyes trace the horizon from any given vantage point peeked through the bare branches on my walks. This serves as a touchstone, something to hold on to in the otherwise disorientating blackness post-sunset (3.39pm in Edinburgh on the winter solstice!). I need that horizon. I need the thinness of the air, unmuffled by the acoustic cushion of foliage, so that my thoughts can ring out clearly. The horizon gives us a huge sense of perspective, it opens up our minds, and the lack of other visual stimuli and clutter encourages us to look up. Feel awe at the pastel gradients that wash the afternoons, and the slow, steady track of the stars soon after.
I have big feelings about snow, too: winter’s deepest, most quieting and humbling magic, but that requires a dedicated essay of it’s own… (watch this space).
There are many other ways to find expansion, particularly in these anxiety-inducing times.
We’re all feeling the anxiety of the world, it’s impossible not to. And if, like me, your inner world, your immediate world, has provided the greatest worry to you lately, you’re likely carrying the guilt of not giving all the big stuff a bit more thought.
But we are only human, and we can only do so much.
Here are some of the ways I’ve been finding expansion, when life seems determined to contract.
For starters, writing freely in this strange new experiment, where all my favourite people seem to have collected since I launched a year ago (there aren’t enough hours in the day for the sheer beauty, value and insight being shared on here. It blows my mind and you’re all wonderous). It started off with a bang for me last January, I was full of gusto, then two months later my dad died, my caring role for my mother got heavier, and a tidal wave of grief I’ve never known before flattened everything in it’s path. All my plans went out the window, and I couldn’t write. In fact, the first time I wrote again was on here, three months after, and it was about him. I was blocked, and I couldn’t do anything, take another step, without voicing the pain of losing him. It’s been sporadic since then, at best, due to burnout.
But, it’s a new year. A new opportunity to take what it’s shown me about myself and the world, and to write about that. I still, more than anything, want to write. To share feelings and experiences that might strike a chord with you. To just voice it: all the shit, all the beauty, the grit, the wonder. I want to speak. And that’s what I’m going to do.
Another way I’m expanding, is by drawing new, life-saving boundaries, invisible but irreversible. Creating space for transformation within is a power. Especially as monumental, weighty revelations and awareness wash in again and again; ceaseless waves on an undulating tide.
It's taken nine hard months of therapy (on top of past years) to unpick yet more life layers, peel them away like crisped onion skins, printed with the patterns of my life, a protective layer, but ultimately no longer serving their purpose. I'm tender. Between the ribs, below my left collarbone, and there’s a deep, gnawing ache in my hips. My skin may never fully heal from the sharp beak of wisdom, but I patiently, lovingly patch it with the jetsam of nature, until such time as I can gift myself a long rest without the grate of extensive inner work. Now is not that time. I am so close. I've uncovered the frayed edges of deeper things, so now, I know where to tug. This last year has been a mess of uncovering things, running from one place to the next as they appear in a taunting game of whack-a-mole, and I hold my breath until I'm ready to pick them up and properly inspect them, see what they reveal.
The future is up for grabs: in many ways more uncertain than ever before, and I wobble. There are things I can do to make it more concrete, but they are colossus and I'm Atlas — I don't know if I've strength enough for the expansions and contractions they will bring.
There's also hope. Stupid, futile, life-giving, joyous — painful hope. My old friend, I don't know how to live without you. Maybe these revelations won't obliterate you, but though I adore space, I am no astronaut and cannot exist in a vacuum when all the things I long for are sucked into oblivion.
I come to know that dreams and the unknown possibilities of life are what’s keeping me moving forward through unbearable things. How can I survive, with so much change on the horizon? So much that could be known?
I learn that with age comes less of the wonder and more of the fear. Perhaps earlier for me than others, though I daresay later for me than some. There are points of coming-of-age throughout our life, rites of passage that can’t be free of pain and increased awareness. The further away from innocence, naivety and wonder I become with the drudgery of caring, and unexpected traumas, the harder I fight to find it in other places. I can still find it; condensed on the micro-thin strand of the spider’s web in the cold bite of a winter morning; or woven through white feathers I find poking up from sand on the shoreline, or radiating from the low crescent moon above the inky trees.
It's vital to remember we’re still young. I am a babe in the universe, goggle-eyed at the spectacular fabric of the cosmos, which we’re so privileged just to witness. I'm reminded of Interstellar: how the sheer incomprehensible magnitude of the universe had to be condensed into a recognisable and digestible form — various time-points and memories anchored in a 3D design, so that Cooper could make sense of it — even though every rule had been broken, every belief suspended, and every certainty already disproved. He needed an anchor to help him comprehend his own vastness; the all-consuming nature of his existence, against the hard certainty of his own futility in it all.
Is it all a beautiful, extrapolated metaphor for our incomprehension at ceasing to exist? The utter realisation that we don't in fact matter? How pain is so annihilating, so lived, so intrinsic with living, that we can't imagine it's not worth it, in the end?
You can tell I've been dancing with my own mortality of late, such is the experience around loss, and disabled health. I've lost a parent and a parent-in-law within the last three years, and lost members of my disabled community to the harrowing hierarchy of survival brought forth from a global pandemic, all whilst navigating my own disabled existence within that space, and how that shapes my future.
I have been responsible for other’s lives in my caring role, no small thing (in fact, an exhausting, relentless thing) which has at times turned me into a binary star system, shrinking me as my energy is siphoned by my neighbouring body.
It's a gargantuan task to contemplate our existence, our meaning and purpose, in a way that makes sense to us and doesn't break our minds entirely. (Fitting, that the black hole Cooper falls into is called Gargantua, then.)
How do I move forward, if I'm afraid of what the future holds? How do I find meaning, before the inevitable (and hopefully far off) end? How do I keep going, when so much feels impossible, and the world is broken?
By creating room around me to contemplate, to muse, and ponder the great unknown. But also to root, to find the threads and pull me back to solid ground. However small, or fragile they seem.
Being a Gemini, air is my element: I spend a lot of time with my mind in the stars, the sky, the clouds and the great beyond. But Pisces is my rising sign, and I am always pulled by the unfathomable, immutable depths of things. I feel a strong connection to water: the way it can be liquid one minute, you pass through with little resistance, and totally solid the next, impenetrable, but translucent. A contradiction, in the most abundant compound on earth. Given we are mostly made of water, I think it makes sense that I can be many different states on any given day. Maybe you can be, too.
I also think it's why it calls me, when I don't know the answers or where else to turn. I go to the water, where I am buoyant, weightless, suspended in a welcome pause. I hand it over, whatever it is, to the water, and let it be carried away… if only for a moment. I am brought back to presence, to feeling support against my skin, on every inch, under every pore; such needed lift.
I climb out, go about my day, and lean into the space afforded by feeling held.
Later, I smile inwardly as I sip my water, crunch fractals of salt between my fingers tips to season my food, in the reverent knowledge that it’s all just cycles, molecules exchanging in a pendulum swing, back and forth across the membrane of life.
I am the universe.
The universe is me.
Does this resonate? How are you creating room to expand? In what ways? What’s helped you? What’s limiting you? I’d really love to hear from you in the community comments below. If this resonates or makes you think of someone, I’d love if you could share it, too.
If you’ve made it here, thank you so much for reading this — your support helps me to keep going with this Substack. And please let me know in the comments if there’s any particular subject or question you’d like me to write about, I’m curious about what you’re curious about :)
"I've uncovered the frayed edges of deeper things, so now, I know where to tug. " Was especially vivid to me somehow. Just the knowing where to tug. Not having to, no rush, just knowing that there's something there. It's hope, fear, anticipation. It's the moment before realisation. Just sang to me somehow! I don't know if that makes sense :) also, I really like your writing, it *sounds* like you.
I really get this. I used to harden myself in preparation for winter too. Used to find it unbearable, and it's still horrible but it's better than it was.