[2021-02-22] Wintering
I had less energy today. While yesterday I had the strength to go for a walk with Chris in the warm, February sun, today I felt cold and tired.
I took to the couch right after breakfast, burrowing under my blanket and pulling my fluffy sweater closer around me to try to get warm. The nausea caused by my medication seems worse in the morning. I dozed for almost an hour and a half while Chris was out picking up groceries.
When I wasn't sleeping, I continued to read Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. Author Katherine May defines wintering as follows:
Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you're in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you work for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.
Though Wintering was published in 2020, it was clearly written before the pandemic. Nevertheless, its timing is impeccable, as lockdowns across the globe contribute to feelings of loneliness, isolation and depression—a collective wintering that so many of us are slogging through.
Throughout the book, May describes various painful periods in her life, everything from walking away from a job that was toxic to losing her voice. Some winterings involved grief, rejection, depression and illness; others, shame, failure and despair.
I learned of Wintering through a friend of a friend of a friend—someone to whom my blog had been forwarded and who wrote to me in early December to say: "I'm reading this book now and thought of you." I immediately ordered it from my local library, picking it up last Friday when my turn on the waiting list came up. It arrived at the right time for me, a moment of physical discomfort associated with a month-long adjustment to a new drug, following the pain of chemotherapy and surgery and moments of fear as I grapple with a life-threatening disease.
Just as my cancer was unavoidable, dark winters are inevitable, says May. There is comfort in reminding ourselves of this reality. As much as we might imagine our lives as "one eternal summer," we get sick; we work for an abusive boss; we overextend ourselves; we find ourselves in the middle of interpersonal conflict; we lose a loved one.
As inescapable and universal as such cycles of distress are, we often don't anticipate them or talk about them when they come. May believes that we should. In fact, she argues that it is our responsibility to find the wisdom in our winter and to pass it along to others who will winter after us.
After she experienced her first bout of depression, May would tell anyone who would listen: "I had a breakdown when I was seventeen." Most people were embarrassed to hear this revelation, she says, but some were grateful to find someone with a shared experience. Still, writes May:
I am aware that I fly in the face of polite convention in doing this. The times when we fall out of sync with everyday life remain taboo. We're not raised to recognise wintering or to acknowledge its inevitability. Instead, we tend to see it as a humiliation, something that should be hidden from view lest we shock the world too greatly. We put on a brave public face and grieve privately; we pretend not to see other people's pain. We treat each wintering as an embarrassing anomaly that should be hidden or ignored. This means we've made a secret of an entirely ordinary process and have thereby given those who endure it a pariah status, forcing them to drop out of everyday life in order to conceal their failure. Yet we do this at a great cost. Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.
I am keenly aware that mental illness remains more taboo than physical illness. In my case, I believe that it's easier for relatives, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers to reach out to me as I deal with cancer than if I were battling depression. I don't say that to scold others, as I, too, am guilty of this double standard. I say it as a reminder to myself and others that we still have work to do in eliminating the stigma related to mental illness. Perhaps I've taken one step forward by sharing not just the physical impacts of cancer treatment but the mental impacts as well.
May discusses her guilt at taking time off work and her worry that she has created a burden for her colleagues. She wonders whether she really is unwell and whether she can justify being out on a walk. May writes:
I realise suddenly how this season of illness has rearranged my mind into a library of paranoia. I am afraid of being doubted, and I'm afraid of being found out. I am wondering what all those other people, whom I used to see every day, are thinking of me. Are they gossiping, or has some moribund discretion fallen over my name? I'm not sure which is worse. I'm feeling the full force of the guilt of being unable to keep up, of having now fallen so far behind that I can't imagine a way back in. That grinding mix of grief, exhaustion, lost will, lost hope. My only tenable position is to retreat into a dignified silence, but that's not what I want at all. I want to give an account of myself, force everyone to understand.
I relate to this statement. I wonder whether some colleagues are doing like I did early in my treatment: counting a few weeks beyond the end of chemotherapy and concluding that I should be good to return to work. The reality is that I feel so far from that point, and not just because I've started a new phase in my treatment that itself makes me ill. My job was like a marathon every day—from the moment I awoke at 6:00 a.m. and started to check emails and headlines to the point I finally collapsed into bed at midnight or later. I am not in game shape and don't expect to be so for some time after all the physical side effects are finally gone. Mental preparedness is as important to success at work as physical preparedness. As I write this, I feel like May: "having now fallen so far behind that I can't imagine a way back in."
But this is where I have benefited from the wisdom of others who have experienced the wintering associated with cancer before me. They have told me not to try to rush back to my old life. One sent me this wise message after I had finished chemo but before I had started my new medication:
Cancer is a full time job and many don't realize this is the case. You may find some who think you are 'done' now that you've finished with the chemo. There is still a lot of work to be done for the body to recover from your treatment so far and prepare for your upcoming meds. And most importantly you need time and space to sit with yourself, to reflect and absorb what has happened and is happening with you and your family. This is where you need to be really gentle with yourself.
This is the beauty of sharing our experiences of navigating tough times. May states that in addition to the responsibility to pass on our wisdom, "it's our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us." She adds, "It's an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out."
I am grateful to everyone who is following my journey and indebted to those who have shared their story in return.
