I stumbled across this book and was intrigued by the idea that maybe someone out there had captured what life feels like when you have a health issue or mental health episode. It wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was close.
May talks about periods in her life when something goes wrong – either in life or in her – that requires her to retreat from active life, to hunker down and regenerate her energy while taking care of herself. She argues that this should be a normal pattern in life, particularly linked to the winter and shorter days and staying inside more, but that in the modern world these natural ebbs and flows in life have been evened out, and we now expect ourselves to continue on at the same pace with only brief pauses for vacations that aren’t really about the same kind of self-care.
In this book she explores times in her life when, for one reason or another, she was forced into a form of hibernation or pause from normal life. She delves into how that felt – the guilt she had for “shirking” her work, how it was hard for her to go out for a walk when she was at home from work after surgery in case someone saw her and thought she was faking it (even though doctors had told her to try and get out for walks to slowly build strength). She talks about how being at home made her more aware of the problems with her home and the mess happening around her. She talked about how hard it was to slow down and not feel like she should be doing more. She also discusses the role of technology in our lives and how the amount of light we are exposed to affects our natural patterns of rest. One fascinating part of the book was when she talks about how people used to sleep early, but then wake in the middle of the night for a while, when they would sometimes walk or have more deep and meaningful conversations with partners than normally occur in daylight hours.
There are a lot of small discussions on different but related topics in this book, but overall it was a really good way to stop and think about how I view rest and down time, how I internalize external pressures and societal expectations of activity, how hard it has been to have to justify my own limits to productivity based on the medical issues I face, and how important it is to unlearn some of those patterns of thought and behaviour.
This book wasn’t exactly what I expected going into it, but it was a quick read (I listened to the audiobook which I would also recommend) and a great companion to some quiet “me time.” If you are someone who struggles to keep up in today’s world, who suffers from physical or mental health issues or who has experienced any kind of event in your life that has forced you to drop out for a while to recover, this is a great book to help you sort through those experiences and re-frame them in a more positive light.
Wintering is a poignant and comforting meditation on the fallow periods of life, times when we must retreat to care for and repair ourselves. Katherine May thoughtfully shows us how to come through these times with the wisdom of knowing that, like the seasons, our winters and summers are the ebb and flow of life. – Goodreads
Book Title: Wintering
Author: Katherine May
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook
Published By: Riverhead Books
Released: February 6, 2020
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Health
Pages: 256
Date Read: February 12-14, 2021
Rating: 8/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.97/5 (8,200 ratings)
Good review. Wintering was an interesting read. I was especially fascinated by the woman with severe depression who used frigid water swimming to help control it.
Yes! I find it amazing how many alternative treatments there are for depression, and how effective some of them can be. It’s also pretty interesting how individual it is. What works wonders for one person won’t make a dent for another. Each person kind of has to figure out what works for them, and it could be any number of things!