Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

May shows that a big part of wintering is the experience of isolation and a feeling of disconnect from society at large. These disconnects can be transitional and more-or-less constant for some people who are not white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, middle-class, able-bodied, or neurotypical. May writes, “[A]s one of the many girls of my age whose autism went undiagnosed, I spent a childhood permanently out in the cold” (9). While she does not elaborate on this isolating experience in Wintering, the book shows compassion for the truth that some people winter more harshly than others, and that life is not a level playing field.

Still, the greater part of the narrative focuses on winter as a transitory phenomenon, which can overcome a person suddenly in the form of a new illness or unexpected event. A feeling of rejection is inevitable, first from the relative good luck that has kept a person protected from harm thus far. Then, rejection occurs on the level of an intervention which excludes people from the norms of the society they have been used to. People sense, as May did with the winter that struck her when her husband fell sick in the middle of “Indian Summer,” that everyone else is carrying on normally without them, and that they are getting left behind in the cold. As May shows, wintering in summer can be even more harsh than wintering in winter, because a person feels like a freaks or failure of nature, cut off from the abundance that seems to touch the landscape and others around them. Such a feeling is exacerbated by the shame contemporary society attaches to unhappiness and the fact that people keep the stories of their wintering from each other.

May also addresses the universal, if taboo, wish that the inciting incident of one’s wintering will align with society’s understanding of what should make people sad. When she is beset with stomach issues and prescribed time off work by a doctor, May is almost relieved that she has something to show the outside world, besides the overwhelm and sense of unease that they would trivialize. She writes, “I don’t know what frightens me more: the possibility of a life-threatening diagnosis, or coming away with nothing other than shame at my own ability to malinger” (82). May voices the truth that rejection by a society one depends on for one’s sense of belonging can be just as devastating as an illness that takes the more conventional form of a tragedy. While the latter engenders compassion amongst one’s peers, the former sparks confusion and judgment. This is seen in the example of artist Shelly Goldsmith, who confesses that her deepest winter was not in the dramatic scenario of a coma, but the bleak time when she found herself cut off from her family, a former boyfriend, money, and a stable home. By telling Shelley’s story, May shows that people’s worst times may not be the ones that are most visible to the outside world. As she writes, “Shelly’s grief was invisible to everyone around her. Her friends just didn’t think it was big deal: nobody had died after all. They didn’t understand the cliff face between someone literally helping you to chew your food so you can stay alive, and then them leaving you behind” (74). The metaphorical “cliff face” alludes to the parents’ abandonment of Shelly after their intimate care of her, but also to the disjuncture between Shelly and the outside world, which does not acknowledge or show compassion for her predicament.

Art, whether verbal in May’s case or visual in Shelly’s, is shown as the antidote to this sense of isolation, as experiences of even the loneliest winterings are validated and given expression. The effect of a shared story or experience takes some of the sting out of winter, as it shows that people are not alone in their suffering and can benefit from each other’s experiences of sadness.