Wintering

We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on. That sometimes everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves: to give ourselves a break when we need it and to be kind. To find our own grit, in our own time.

If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt.

This is the opposite of caring. I’ve never believed—as others do—that social media is a place entirely constructed of fake lives and fake friendships, but I do think it’s another place to beware. There’s a collector’s mentality online; our social worth is given a single blunt number. We have to make sure that we’re not fooled by it. We have to make the same assessments that we always did about the quality of those connections, their individual meanings to us and the nurture that they can realistically offer us. Just as with the physical world, many of these friends will melt away at the first sign of trouble. The only difference is that the numbers are bigger online, and our missed connections feel more visible.

Misery is not an option. We must carry on looking jolly for the sake of the crowd. While we may no longer see depression as a failure, we expect you to spin it into something meaningful pretty quick. And if you can’t pull that off, then you’d better disappear from view for a while. You’re dragging down the vibe.

“Do you ever read your work aloud?” asked Philip.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Not as much as I used to.” The layers of truth hidden below that: nobody asked me anymore; I no longer really enjoyed the attention, or had the faith in my work. But I nevertheless spent all day performing, dancing with other people’s writing instead of my own, trying—sometimes in vain—to energise rooms of students who were already weighed down with their own thoughts and troubles.

“Nobody had ever said to me, ‘You need to live a life that you can cope with, not the one that other people want. Start saying no. Just do one thing a day. No more than two social events in a week.’ I owe my life to him.”

But it was there, too, that I came to a kind of acceptance: of my own limitations and of the future that lay before me. I learned that I was not invincible at this moment in my life, but also that it wouldn’t last forever. I learned to rest and to surrender. I learned to dream. I took photographs that I imagined showing to some future person, as yet unknown to me, and saying, Look, here you are under the northern lights.

In Tromsø, I learned that extraordinary things can flourish in the dark, cold polar night, but I also realised that, no matter how hard I tried to fight them, I simply had no defence against the changes that were happening in my life. I was missing my antlers. I had skittered over to a different country to convince myself that I could carry on just as normal, but instead I saw only my own desperation, mirrored in the ice.

As I finished my bowl, Trine hurried over to replenish it. “You do not have your antlers, Mama Reindeer,” she said, “so we must fill you up with soup instead.” I brimmed with tears, because she’d summed up something that I couldn’t articulate until now: pregnancy made me feel as though I was missing some defence or other, and I couldn’t fight for myself. The reindeer understood what was necessary to get through winter. I did not

In our winter, a transformation happened. We read and
worked and problem-solved and found new solutions. We changed our focus away from pushing through with normal life and towards making a new one. When everything is broken, everything is also up for grabs.