I used to think winter was when the trees and flowers and birds paused in stasis. They weren’t dead, but done. For now. When I learned my bones were dying, I wished I could be a bear instead of broken. I wished I could sleep through the pain and wake with the spring after surgery. I didn’t want to watch my own winter. I didn’t want to feel the ice sting over my soul or feel the disorientation of snowstorms covering the land of my spirit.
I didn’t stop believing in God, but I stopped trying to bud belief in the bitter cold.
I didn’t forget my faith, but I let it lie fallow.
I let the limbs of my life stay bare and turned all my energy toward what no one could see. My hands felt ice instead of keys. I said sad things like, “Oh, back when I wrote books” or “Back when I used to have a life…” My body seemed to double in age overnight, and my 80 year old knees kept me stuck in bed almost around the clock because using stairs is a luxury young women don’t even know to praise. I thought about dying like it was a warm blanket. I had survived almost dying, only to be afraid to live. And it broke my heart in half. Before. And After. I worried and wept and mostly was bored out of my mind. I watched stupid TV for more hours than a healthy person could ever not judge. (Barely anyone talks about how being super sick often means being super bored, because even the most inventive of us can’t overcome the fatigue and nausea and terror of searing pain that doesn’t leave and bed is a refuge until it’s a prison and no one prepares you to still feel like a person when your days are emptied of other people and projects and just filled with pain.) I let my life humble the hell out of me and set down the pride of always expecting myself to be able to praise or push or pray.
When winter comes, a tree will lose her leaves, paring back every part that holds water to become more tolerant of the cold. The tree changes on a cellular level, consenting to the cold. Deciduous trees let their membranes become more pliable so water can migrate from cells to the space between them, offsetting pressure as the cells take up less space. Starch is changed to sugar, and the inside of a tree lowers its freezing point compared to the world outside.
We see bare limbs. But behind the bark is a life, allowing change to create strength.
This time last year we were buying our first house. The pictures in my phone show smiles and light, a sharp jawline, and the start of an epic adventure. Yesterday, I swam for the second time since before surgery four weeks ago. I’m living in my parents’ house, because ours can’t accommodate my needs in a wheelchair for now. My mom wheeled me in, pushing my wheelchair through double doors, and two staff members pushed a portable lift to the side of the pool so I could be lowered in. The contrast couldn’t be colder.
In the long winter of severe illness, I’ve learned to be more tree than tower. I’ve let the cold not so much teach me as change me.
For love to win, hate must die.
Body positivity and self-acceptance are awesome in abstract and annihilating in reality.
Will you love your body when you lose your looks? Will you accept yourself without more daily accomplishments than waking up or getting out of bed? When your heart looks like a library full of laments, will you hold it like a treasure or a traitor? When your pants size multiplies but your soul seems to shrink, will you label your skin and self lost or bad or brave? When your beliefs no longer ring a bell in your cold and broken heart, will you bang against the walls of your mind or let the silence speak? When your life changes, will you love the person who remains?
When the health I spent so long regaining suddenly crumbled, I couldn’t rise out of the rubble for months upon months upon months. I’ve written three whole books with body positivity and self-acceptance at their core, and I heard more hate come out of my mouth than I knew still lived inside me.
And, slowly, as I heard Hate’s voice howling over my losses and changes, I started to speak with kindness and hope over my body and heart again.
What dies when we love our changing, aging bodies and sinking, shrinking spirits is only the hate that never was native to our humanness to begin.1
And when the cold freezes the faith in your heart, maybe you can let winter be winter instead of trying to bloom before inner changes begin.
I stopped trying to understand or overcome this trauma and I let my spirituality contract with the cold. I decided to trust that like a tree, the barren surface of my life was only skin over a soul shifting to survive her coldest winter yet. I turned toward myself with trust that more was happening in my cells and bones and calling than I could name or see. I remembered my place in the order of things and received the rule that every living thing falls and rises with seasons that never stay.
We don’t have to claw our way out of the cold. We just have to let the seasons change.
We don’t have to grasp onto what makes us good. We just have to trust that life lives inside us, even when ice is all we see.
The first 2.5 weeks after my bilateral core decompression knee surgery was the worst pain of my life. I had somehow expected surgery to suddenly make everything so much lighter, and didn’t realize how major of a surgery it was or how challenging it would be to do both of my knees at once and not be able to step onto my feet for six weeks straight. I had high hopes, as always (lol), that I’d spend my recovery starting to write in earnest—getting back to the book illness had put on a permanent pause. Instead, I realized I had to keep practicing what I preach and decided to honor the fact that all of my creative energy was being used to create new bone and marrow and hope. Instead of writing new words, I visualized new cells taking shape and strength in the hollows that held my hardest pain. I blessed the hidden work of my body. And I let healing be my job. Sleep, followed by ice, followed by a nap, followed by ice. I wondered if healing would keep being my only job for seasons to come, and while I didn’t like that possibility, I trusted that Love knows when the seasons should shift better than I do.
A few days after calling my surgeon’s office in panic at how bad my pain remained, and maxed out on pain meds, somehow…the pain softened. I had been afraid my knees would feel awful forever, and then, somehow, their screams became shouts and then subtle screeches, less loud every day.
One day, I felt like I could attempt an outing—brunch with Ryan, before he left for home without me. I put on jeans for the first time in months, which is a feat when you can’t stand, and we relished the taste of normalcy more than our GF pancakes and eggs. We took a photo to see the signs that life was rising inside.
Another day this week, a friend who had recovered from cancer texted me a prayer and podcast devotional, and I actually felt like listening and felt resonance rise within.2
Yesterday, after I swam for 45 minutes 🤯, I experimented with my energy and returned to the Bozeman Public Library, where I wrote the majority of This Too Shall Last. I didn’t know if I’d last thirty minutes, but I knew the only way I’d learn was by trying.
As I wheeled myself off of the elevator, I saw the familiar wall of windows overlooking the Bridgers, and the tables where I finished the first book I wasn’t sure I could write. Every long hour of showing up with trust sat there like a sentinel, ready to remind me that trust lives in my body more than any disease.
When I got to my spot and opened my ipad and journals, I felt the presence of my younger, smaller, even healthier self, and the grief of all that has changed blossomed into gratitude for how far I have come. Tears streamed down my face, and I laughed out loud, surprised by the joy I wasn’t sure would return to me again.
I started stringing words together and the mystery of realizing you know things you didn’t know you knew held me in a trance of delight. The magic of writing returned, and I didn’t realize she’d be here again so soon. I expected to come back clawing, creating a routine that eventually turns into fun. But joy met me from my meager beginning. And I wrote from 1-5pm, with rain falling onto the metal roof like a cozy, comforting song.
Just a few months ago, Ryan would take me to doctor’s appointments and I’d collapse onto the exam table—too exhausted and miserable to even sit up to talk.
Seven hundred good words in, I looked up and out the windows, stunned. A rainbow covered the length of the mountains. And the belief that had felt barren or even lost, budded again.
And from a deeper place than my groans, knowing I have so much more frustrating and painful healing ahead, I finally could sense the spring in me again. I glimpsed what had seemed dormant and praised the miracle of the mending that crawls her way in. This slow resurrection has been here and growing in the silence within.
What is the season of your soul? What can you honor in your endurance? And where are you seeing yourself come to life again?
With so much tenderness,
KJ
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there isn’t a place for hate or a need for anger. Both can be holy, energies without which we cannot resist ruin or wholeheartedly choose love.
Thank you, KJ. You beautifully put into words an experience I had when I was in a winter season 10 years ago now. A college friend questioned why I wasn’t praying, fighting for my physical healing anymore. “It just seems like you’ve lost your fire for God,” he said. I didn’t know how to explain then that what I most desperately needed was the grace to wait out the winter, the strength to make it through each frozen day, just as I was. Praying for the grace of this spring to warm you, day by day, degree by degree.
Thanks for sharing your hard-won realizations about healing, KJ. We lost our 30 year old son in June and you have re-emphasized for me what counseling, lots of pondering, prayer and sharing with friends have taught me. Healing and God’s work are not brought to us by prescription. They take the time they’re going to take and this realization took great pressure off of me to do all the things to grieve well. I’m thankful for the healthy things that are in place in my life, but I need to free myself from a time-bound outlook on healing. Thanks for reminding me and helping me to trust that formation occurs in the dark and beyond my control.