A Letter from a Newly-Identified Winter Sympathizer

You won’t often hear me defending winter since it typically rips through my emotional and mental health like nothing else. So savour this message, a short and sweet love letter to the winter and the purpose it serves. 

That seems like a good place to start. Expressing my contempt for the winter is really just reflective of my frustration with the way it confirms the natural cycle of all things which includes, in many ways, forms of stagnation and literal freezing that make me feel stuck in more ways than one. So, we’ll start with the opposite.

This essay is not just a love letter to the winter or a white flag of surrender to the season I hate most, but is also a complement to the first blog I ever wrote. This first blog, which was about spring, is evidence I suppose, of the way I’ve changed since then. 

For those who haven’t read it, I’ll sum it up quickly: basically it was saying that I felt like shit knowing that the beauty of spring was coming and knowing what the sudden warmth meant for our climate and for our futures. That was an essay on the greatest concerns of our generation, and on our grief intertwined so intimately with the half-filled promises made to us by our parents that this planet was safe for us to grow old in; that the world they left us will be safe to grow old in. But it isn’t, and it won't be. But this essay isn’t here to talk about that. 

Though these fears, worries, and realizations permeate my thoughts more often than I’d like, this is instead an essay about winter, because it was a long one and I didn’t imagine the person I’d be on the other side of it. But here I am, the person I couldn’t imagine.

Winter is my antithesis. I’m a summer baby born just days after the solstice. I believe I was born to live primarily in the sun and to see as much of it as I’m allowed. At least that’s the entitlement I give to myself when I sit bitterly in the January clouds. It seems more poetic than noting my seasonal depression.

Four months ago, I felt that the poor rainy summer of 2024 was brutal and unkind and I worried about the impact the lack of consistent sun would have on my mental health. I was right to worry, but thanks to the support of my friends, my creative outlets and maybe most importantly my antidepressants, I made it out in one piece. So I thought since the first essay I put on here was a letter from myself to you, I think this one will be a letter to that other version of me, the one that worried about how I’d get here. It’ll be a letter about winter.

First I’ll start by saying hello and thank you for the decisions you’re about to make. Winter has a way of convincing us that there is nothing left alive, including us, including our spirits. It has the appearance of a barren world, one that lacks vitality and is frankly not worth staying in. Dramatic, but I know you feel that way more than you’d care to admit. You’ll show up despite this.

So, yeah, hello, I’m you but we have four months between us. Your worries never came to fruition by the way, or if they did, you handled it well. You believed, or were fooled into the trap of an inevitable winter death. You’ve forgotten what winter really is, and what it stands for. But you’ll remember.

This winter was interesting, and you have lots to look forward to regardless of the degree of comfort you’ll feel when it arrives. It’s all important in getting you here; in bringing you to me. You know the science and so I won’t pretend you don’t. You know that winter is instrumental in the natural world. Without winter we would really be dead, and not just in spirit. 

In the next four months you will be reminded countless times of the way winter is characterized by hidden movement. We know terms like adaptation, dormancy, and you are aware of the way microbes begin their process of preparing for spring before the fall has fully settled into the air. We know that the silent dynamism of the winter is invisible yet meaningful. 

You will feel frozen in the worst of times, and unable to freeze the best of them. Predictable are the climates of our human condition. But you know this already, even though you think you don’t. Winter is important to you, and the only reason you hate it is because it is symbolic of the necessity of dormancy in our lives. You will find practical reasons for your frustrations, but that is not the root of your dissatisfaction. You hate it because the winter means you must find stillness, and you’re afraid of being still. 

In four months, you’ll be brave enough to admit that your positions on the season are less about shovelling snow or slipping on ice and are really more about the way we feel trapped in our skin, and in our lives. But I cannot credit myself for this brave realization, I can only thank you. You, and the others you’ll become in pursuit of me, just as the version I’ll be in four months will thank me for something I can’t predict. You don’t know what I am grateful to you for and you won’t know until you get here. I can’t wait for you to get here. 

The point is, we know that the stillness of winter isn’t really still, is it? It’s a bit reductive to say that the winter is useless or stagnant when it is quite notably useful and dynamic. 

It’s funny how different you and I are, and how comfortable you’ll become in these types of seasonal contractions once you admit to knowing that they’ll end. You’ll learn that this is just a part of it, a part of the dynamism you’re addicted to. You’ll learn. I implore you to take your time doing so. 

The winter is easier now, especially as it ends. You’ll wonder where the time went as you spend it. It won’t feel like it is taken from you, like you think it will feel. It’ll be a meaningful winter, and it will be difficult too. But you’ll be okay. You know what it means now. You’ll learn about hidden movement.

Most importantly you’ll learn that the obviousness of the summer is no comparison to the subtleties of winter. The closeness we must have, the intimacy necessary to listen. You’ll learn the importance of doing so before action. These are winter’s lessons at their root.

So, you, or me of the past, I am writing to you now as a winter sympathizer, one that is both apologetic for the beliefs you hold and understanding of why you hold them. You’ll let it go eventually, there’s no use in forcing it now. These are simply the silent changes housed in this misunderstood season. You’ll get there, or here, faster than you think. In the meantime, you’ll learn about the winter.

With love,

The Sami of the Future 

(who is now becoming the past)