Wintering
Day 23 — December 16, 2025
Lately I’ve been thinking about how real life can get. Not in a philosophical armchair way, but in the oh wow, this shit is actually happening to me way. The kind of real that doesn’t wait for you to be ready, doesn’t ask if you’ve built enough emotional scaffolding first. It just arrives. Fully formed. Heavy. Personal.
And sometimes I catch myself mid-thought and think, holy shit… I’m really sharing this. Not a curated version. Not the softened, socially acceptable highlights. But the actual terrain. The raw, lived-in truth of it.
Which is probably why today felt the way it did.
Today was just a day.
Nothing flashy. Nothing dramatic. But my mind kept circling the same idea over and over: wintering. The kind Katherine May writes about. Not winter as a season, but winter as a state of being. A necessary withdrawal. A quiet reckoning. A pause that isn’t laziness or failure, but survival with intention.
That’s where I am. Wintering.
I didn’t think much today about recovering from trauma in the neat, clinical sense. Instead, my thoughts drifted toward uncertainty. Not just about what happened to me, but about life itself. My place in it. My footing. My future. That deeper, existential kind of uncertainty that hums underneath everything when the ground you trusted gives way.
Being violated the way I was — twice — and then threatened again in my own home months later… it didn’t just hurt me. It didn’t just scare me. It rearranged me. Down to the foundation. In ways I’m still discovering. In ways I don’t always have language for yet.
All at a time I was still learning how to move through the world as myself… visibly, honestly, unapologetically. I was looking for something simple and monumental all at once: a safe place to live. A home where I could exist without bracing.
I never imagined that search would end in unspeakable harm. Never imagined it would come from someone who held power over housing. Never imagined my becoming would be interrupted so brutally.
I know I don’t move through the world unnoticed. I also know I blend until I don’t. I know I carry myself in a way that draws attention apparently whether I want it or not. But knowing those things doesn’t make what happened make sense. It doesn’t make it comprehensible. It just makes it heavier.
And now here I am. A year later. A full year of living in fear. Some days it feels like I’ve lived ten lifetimes inside this one skin.
Everything feels like a lot. Life feels like a lot. Healing feels like a lot. Becoming feels like a lot.
But I’m here.
And maybe that’s what winter is teaching me. Not how to bloom, not yet. But how to listen. How to conserve. How to build quietly beneath the surface while the world looks still from the outside.
I’m learning the lessons this winter has for me. I’m paying attention. I’m laying foundations I couldn’t have imagined before.
Somehow, and I don’t yet know how, I’m going to take this unfathomable quiet storm and all of its fury, and I’m going to harness it. I’m going to turn it into power. Into structure. Into an existence that belongs to me.
Not despite this winter. Because of it.
Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.
And me wintering, listening, and still moving forward.
