Browsing Tag

winter

Guest Posts, Mental Health

Frostbite

August 10, 2021
cold

by Alec O’Hanson

Winter comes after me like a starving dog. I can feel its breath against my heels when the leaves turn, hear the snap of its bitter teeth in the coldness of the wind. I know that by the time the leaves fall, I will have fallen with them. There is no running from something that lives inside of you like a dormant parasite.

By August, I can already tell this winter will be far too long. The sky itself is as hollow as the space in my chest. With each drop of the temperature, I can feel warmth draining from me; a steady trickle that’s just significant enough to know it’s happening, but also just faint enough that I can’t convince myself it’s really there.

It is hard not to feel helpless against the bitter cold when it creeps upon you and tangles itself into your skin so quietly. There is no warning or noticeable first frostbite. I wake up in the middle of the week and I realize it’s far too cold to go outside without a coat to protect me against the winds, and by the end of the next week I’ve decided it’s far too cold to go outside at all.

Before the tides of September hit, I find myself submerged in carpeted walls and the low, noise-cancelling hum of a false sense of security. My mother says it’s strength and willpower that puts me here, but when I tell the new therapist that I think winter is trying to kill me, I feel nothing but fragile and weak.

“The first step towards getting better,” she said, half-hidden by the frost-bitten car window, “is wanting to do so.”

It feels almost futile to attempt therapy only when I am finding myself so cold that I can’t feel my fingers, much less my own heart. I do not want to be in this room in the same way I don’t want to be anywhere else. It’s an hour of my day and a shred of my energy that every fiber of me wants to hold onto for tasks that used to take no time or effort at all. It’s almost as if I have put myself on emergency rations. I have developed a scarcity complex towards life itself — there is only so much of myself to give when I already feel so empty.

I tell this to my therapist, and she asks if I’m still on medication, which I am. But I’ve found that all they do is stabilize, and that holding still at a low is still nonetheless a flatlining low. But it’s a compromise, and I figure that being able to settle a score with myself with my bargaining chips in scarcity is the best I can ask for. It’s just difficult to explain this to somebody who only feels the cold on the surface of their skin instead of running deep beneath it like mine.

I have memorized the answers to the quiz my therapist gives me halfway into October. They aren’t lies, because if I’m going to put energy into it, I don’t want to waste it by sabotaging myself in such a pointless way. But I find myself tired of being tired, and I don’t have the energy to try and stay positive about what is still a consistent negative because I don’t have the energy to attempt any methods of improving the state of it.

That’s a mouthful if I’ve ever heard one, and a confusing one at that, so I stick to my compromises. More than anything, I want to be understood, so I speak in tongues that don’t fully translate to the same truth.

Do I struggle to fall or stay asleep? No, but I am sleeping more than usual. It’s another hour towards spring; another minute away from the cold. Do I feel down, depressed, or hopeless? They like when I joke about exam season, so I do, instinctively. It’s a half truth, which isn’t an entire lie. More often than not I feel nothing at all, as if the coldness of winter has sunken itself into my bones and made me numb to its bite. Have I lost interest in things that I typically enjoy? I don’t remember what it feels like to laugh, but somehow I’ve managed to waste all twenty-four hours of my day without realizing it, so I must not be that bored.

I make it to exactly five of these weekly appointments before the cold finally makes itself a home within my bones and I decide that I’m too tired to keep thawing it off only for it to freeze back in place. I also decide that medication is making me far too aware of what day of the week it is, which is easy — the pharmacy stops calling after the first time and I reckon in hindsight that the medication wasn’t really meant to warm me up in the first place. When there is very little to rely on, and when I am so opposed to unsteady footholds, I have to make these kinds of compromises. I am helpless, I tell myself, against the direction of the northern winds.

I spend the next two weeks scraping the bottom of an empty barrel, shaking and vomiting but most definitely feeling something for the first time since I bothered trying to medicate myself in the first place. Cold as I am, even the lick of flames against my frostbitten skin comes as a relief rather than the searing agony it ought to be.

Sometimes, it’s so easy to get caught up in everything and forget about what’s most important. When November strikes down, I have been so caught up wallowing in the throes of nothing that I have forgotten what important even is. I am getting colder again, and it is getting easier to tell people I’m sick and that I’m sorry but I can’t make it after all.

Actions have consequences, but if you bury your head far enough in the snow you can convince yourself they don’t. People stop calling and visiting because it’s impossible to reach out to somebody who has been swallowed up in the tundra so thoroughly. The peace and quiet is nice, even if the silence leaves way too much space for misery to fill. It’s still a choice that I made, amidst a suffocating helplessness, and I know what’s best for me in the coming months. I am terrified to spread the frostbite that clings to my skin and spreads into everything I touch.

There is a snowball at the top of the hill in the middle of a windstorm. It’s probably December, but I don’t fully realize this until it isn’t December anymore. Which is fine with me. I always found December to be somewhat of a drag, though I’m frequently told that I’m the one that’s a drag.

Perhaps there is a sliver of truth to that. A small, cold, and bitter part of me hates the lights and the family dinners and the presents and the holiday. I have a reputation for being a grinch, but at least that means nobody wants to bother me.

It is only with the reprieve of New Year’s Eve that, for a fleeting moment, I feel the ice melt away. There’s very little comfort that comes with the sting of thawing. It’s as if I’m standing in the center of a hurricane, surrounded by what I’ve missed and what is inevitable. There are so many days in a year. There are so many days of waking up and getting dressed and talking to people, and I am already wind-beaten and exhausted from the thousands of days behind me of this exhausting sameness.

I write a list of resolutions out of habit and desperation, and as always there are two of them that I find myself making every year. I want to get better, and, I want to make it out alive.

I can say, at least, that I have seen the last one through every year since I made it. I don’t write it because I feel particularly like there’s a chance I won’t do so, but rather because I can at least make sure I reach one of these resolutions by the end of the year. I like to think of it as a safety net, because when you are standing in the eye of a snowstorm and seeing three hundred and sixty five or so days of broken resolutions, it’s easy to forget which direction you were heading in the first place.

As for the first, it’s hard to tell if I ever meet it, but I think that might be the point of making the resolution. It’s impossible to define “better” when you struggle to define “worse” or really anything of significance at all. Measurement of successes is futile, which is something I learned from my therapist, but that means my acknowledging this must be indicative of an improvement somewhere. I’ll take what I can get in that aspect.

Sometimes I do feel like I have gotten better, but then the winter comes after me again and pulls me back down into it. It’s hard to tell how close you have flown towards the sun when you are already drowning twenty thousand leagues back beneath the freezing sea.

I make a promise to myself every year to get better not because I feel like it’s a point I can reach, but instead because I think the resolution itself is the foothold I have in doing so in the first place. The first step towards getting better is wanting to do so.

For a moment, as I watch another year bury itself in the snow that makes itself a graveyard around me, I want to do so. It’s a stab of desperation, and it’s molten.

I know that beneath the sheet of white is something warmer, something bigger. I have made it through plenty of starving winters before, and with each one I feel the sharpness of the cold grow softer against my weathered skin.

Humans and beasts and what lies between them have all adapted to circumstances to survive. Survival, if anything, seems to be the best way of defining “better.” What doesn’t kill you inevitably must make you stronger, so if facing a dozen winters hasn’t frozen me to death yet, then maybe there’s a possibility I’ve developed a resistance to the cold.

Winter comes after me like a starving dog, but at least I know when it comes. There are only so many times a dog can bite you before you learn how to grab it by the teeth, after all.

January arrives, and this time, I brace myself against the cold.

Alec O’Hanson is a (closeted) transgender man currently finishing his last semester at New River Community College, aiming to transfer to Radford University afterwards in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in English. He has been writing in fervor for as long as he’s had access to words, and his goal is to make that everyone else’s problem, too.

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Margaret Attwood swooned over The Child Finder and The Butterfly Girl, but Enchanted is the novel that we keep going back to. The world of Enchanted is magical, mysterious, and perilous. The place itself is an old stone prison and the story is raw and beautiful. We are big fans of Rene Denfeld. Her advocacy and her creativity are inspiring. Check out our Rene Denfeld Archive.

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

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Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Guest Posts, poetry, Winter

A Winter Spell for the Changeling

December 31, 2020
ice

By Sandra LeDuc

Turn into the slide.

It’s the first thing you learn about driving on ice.

Do not pump your brakes.

Do not panic and overcorrect

lest you send the car into an unrecoverable spin.

You were probably going too fast for the conditions.

Because what the ice wants, it gets

a frozen wave seeking its shore.

You are a pebble, turned, lifted, spat out

against guardrail, snowbank, ditch, over the embankment down into a ravine

snow dusting the hood.

Or maybe you are flung into unending light.

Turn into the slide.

Incantation, blessing, plea to the unknown.

Strength in your hands as you let go of the wheel.

You are drifting.

Sandra LeDuc is a queer writer, adoptee, and musician. Originally from Minnesota, she lives in Seattle with her wife, two cats, and a dog named Noodge. Her work has been published in The Rumpus and Entropy. She can be found on Instagram as @sandrainseattle

Recommended Reading:

 

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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death, Guest Posts, loss

Under the Snow this Winter. By Zoe Zolbrod.

March 14, 2014

By Zoe Zolbrod.

I woke up this March morning to another four or five inches of snow. It was still coming down when I peered through the frost-free porthole in the center of my bedroom window. There was no question it had to be shoveled promptly, from the sidewalk and front steps at least. It was a heavy snow, and I had to heave it high to get it atop the piles we’ve been building since December.

We live in the Chicago area and as in much of the Midwest and Northeast, the winter has been brutal—a record number of inches of precipitation, a slew of record-breaking low-temperature days. In early January we were hit with a blizzard and then immediately after the temperature plunged to under ten degrees below zero.  Work and school were cancelled. On the second day at home I took my daughter a couple doors down to stave off her cabin fever with a visit to a neighbor boy, bundling us both up in layer upon layer until all that was exposed were our eyes. After I dropped her off I decided to take the long way home in order to experience this unprecedented environment. My boots crunched on snow frozen so hard the texture was that of crushed seashells. Cocooned as I was, the sound was as much an internal vibration as it was an external noise, as if I were listening through a stethoscope. I didn’t feel cold, exactly. I didn’t even feel gravity in the same way I was accustomed to. I felt like an astronaut—tethered to civilization by technology, but a speck in an uncharted vastness. It’s a sensation I’m going to carry with me. As I trotted that day, I recalled the time someone asked me to picture outer space and then told me that was how I felt about death. Walking around my neighborhood post-blizzard with the wind chill at minus thirty degrees seemed to me to be a closer approximation of what I imagine might wait for us when our hearts stop beating, when our bodies are burnt or buried to await decay. I had never experienced anything quite like it. And yet this winter has made me nostalgic for all of the winters that have come before, for all the ways I’ve kept warm in them, or haven’t. For all they’ve taught me about patience, and stasis, and change.

I grew up in Northwestern Pennsylvania, and the winter of 2013-2014 has brought me back to those of my youth, the memories of which used to make the Chicago season look unimpressive, if still tedious and ugly. The icicles that poured down from the gutter above the kitchen window in the home in which I was raised could grow thick as tree limbs, stab the entire height of the window so that we looked out through their bars. We had a long skinny driveway that my father had to shovel incessantly to keep passable, scraping away rhythmically in the dark of early morning, or the gloom of late afternoon, or the black of night with the snowflakes glittering in the glow from our light post. The piles quickly grew above my head and then, as the thawless weeks went by, up to my dad’s, the snow spilling over into the yard where the blanket of it was already deep enough for my brother and me to make tunnels through. The door to our house opened right into our small kitchen, no foyer, where we’d stand stomping and huffing like horses when we came in. There were four of us who lived there plus a dog to be walked, and we didn’t slow down for the fact of life that was winter, we were constantly in and out, letting in cold bursts and chunks of snow that would melt messily. The house was always chilly—a combination of thrifty parents and old windows and not helped by the frequent door openings—and my corner room especially so, with its two exterior walls. I shivered near the heat vent while I dressed. I slept under a featherbed that seemed almost as round as it was long. My fingers and toes were always cold, often painfully so. I hated the winter.

And yet there are warm memories—the family deciding despite the weather to drive to a basketball game at the college where my father worked, wondering if the car would make it up the hill, cheering when it did so, the steam from the hot breath of the players and crowd fogging the windows of the gymnasium. And I have warm memories of the snow itself, how the igloos we made could be really snug. And we lived in a place that could highlight the beauty of winter, with a woods across the street from our house that offered up its bare black branches to catch the snow and make a Narnia-like fairyland. Do we ever describe memories of summer as warm? Perhaps that’s why despite my antipathy to the season I never entertained the thought of choosing a college located somewhere it could be avoided.

I was always studying college possibilities, though. From the time I was about twelve I was actively plotting to get out of my hometown. I had good friends there, a solid family, but even as I made-out and partied and learned, part of me believed my real life wouldn’t start until I left, that the real me couldn’t emerge where I was. But here’s a winter memory that proves me wrong. One evening as a teenager on my way to meet friends at a basketball game already underway, I parked my car in the student lot and started walking across the snow-covered field that separated it from the high school, believing I was taking a short cut. My boots sank in the heavy snow, making each step difficult, and I was bitterly cold in the trendy thin coat I refused to button. It soon became clear I’d have been better off walking on the sidewalk. I paused for a moment and looked at the smooth, white expanse separating me from my destination. I ran cross-country in high school, and in the fall the field was part of our course. “It’s the same field,” I thought to myself. And I had the sensation of seeing—of being— at once both the green grass beneath my swift-moving feet and the moon-lit swath of unbroken snow that lay before me. I knew with a surety that made me less cold that spring would come, that it was coming even in the deadest part of winter, that—although I wouldn’t have used this imagery at the time— the very frozen stillness was the pause at the bottom of the exhale that makes the full inhale possible. I knew that in some way spring was as good as here.

It’s a clichéd insight, really—by that point in my life I’m sure I’d already been passed a roach clip with a ying-yang symbol dangling from it—but finding that ancient knowledge within myself felt huge. It’s a moment I’ve held close all the years since—only one of which was spent anywhere warm, and a few of which passed in an apartment without central heat where I’d sometimes wake up to see frost furring my bedroom wall. But no matter the quality of my outerwear or furnace, every winter there’s that month or so when the world is crusted with a layer of gray salt, and the snow banks are black and not going anywhere, and everyone’s puffy coat is deflated and filthy, and it only warms long enough to make a more miserable soup, and when I think: I can’t stand this! Why do I live here! Why does anyone! And then I’ll be visited by my self standing on that field outside the high school, the same self who emerges occasionally during moments of travel, or in a great yoga class, or on a walk, the one lodged most deeply within me but also who sees furthest outside myself, and I feel joyful, and calm, and sure. I picture the real me as a copper wire of energy that’s been pulsing through my core since the dawn of my consciousness, maybe even before that. Maybe it will even go on afterward.

A couple weeks ago a colleague died from the cancer that ravaged her within eight months of her diagnosis. She’s the fourth friend roughly my age who has died in the last three years. How early this inevitable falling off begins is not something that’s been encompassed by the worldview of my dawn-of-consciousness core self.  In my life, the proximity of death has come as a mid-life shock. Living as I have always in places with four distinct seasons, the markers of winter, spring, summer, and fall have been reliable signposts for me, symbols of continuity amidst change, but there is a different quality to their coming now. They’re also beads on an abacus, ways to count years without these other people in them, ways to count off my own.

We’ve had a thaw already this March, and we’re due for another later this week before the temperatures plunge again. My weather app shows more snowflakes in the near future. But even in this fearsome and dramatic winter, one of these days the last snow of the season will come. And then will come spring, for those of us here. I think often of my friends who have died, turning over their absence like a stone in my mind. How can they be gone when I sense them so firmly? It brings me up short. The first flowers that come up in my yard are the crocuses. After the morning snowfall the sky cleared today, and the sun’s staying up longer. Green shoots might be visible even before the full melt.

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Zoe Zolbrod’s first novel, Currency, received a Nobbie Award and was a Friends of American Writers prize finalist. Her writing can be found online at The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, and The Weeklings. She lives in Evanston, IL, with her husband and two children, where she works as a senior editor for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and recently finished a memoir that explores how child sexual abuse reverberates throughout generations of a family.

Poster by Bryant Mcgill SimpleReminders.com. Pre-order their book (which I am in!) https://www.SimpleReminders.info

Poster by Bryant Mcgill SimpleReminders.com.
Pre-order their book (which I am in!) https://www.SimpleReminders.info

Jennifer Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. She has been featured on Good Morning America, NY Magazine, Oprah.com. Her writing has been featured on The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Jezebel, Salon, and more. Jen leads her signature Manifestation Retreats & Workshops all over the world. The next retreat is to Ojai, Calif over Labor Day/New Years. Check out jenniferpastiloff.com for all retreat listings and workshops to attend one in a city near you. Next up: Seattle, Atlanta, South Dakota, NYC, Dallas, Miami, Tucson & The Berkshires (guest speaker Canyon Ranch.) She tweets/instagrams at @jenpastiloff.