the dying and the digging in

Every year, I find myself getting a little anxious as soon as the air begins to chill. 

I wouldn't go as far as to call it seasonal depression, but there's always a layer of heaviness that settles in as the days grow darker. I thrive in the warmth and the sunshine; the winter months feel a little like withering.

I want to like autumn, I really do—I love the idea of it, of cozy days and colorful leaves and curling up with a book and a steaming mug. But all year long, I dread it, because I know it means that winter is coming and soon everything around me will be dying.

So I grit my teeth and burrow in, waiting with bated breath for spring to come back around.

Normally I feel like I'm the only one—like everyone else is diving headfirst into fall, sprinting towards the -ber months with their PSLs held high. But this year I've seen reticence laced into so many conversations, friends just as hesitant as I am to bring in the new season. 

I still have so many friends who started rejoicing the second the temperature dropped below 70, but just as many are feeling like life has been one long winter for a while now. They aren't ready for the world around them to reflect that any more than their circumstances already are. 

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During one of the hardest winters of my life, I took up walking. 

It made absolutely no sense to anyone at the time, least of all me. To know me is to know that if it's cold enough to need a jacket, I'm probably doing my best not to go outside at all. But during that season, I found myself tugging on a beanie and wrapping myself in scarves on a near daily basis to trek up and down the streets of my neighborhood.

I felt stuck in nearly every area of my life, carrying so much that wasn't mine to hold anymore but that I had no idea how to let go. That I didn't want to let go. I walked thousands upon thousands of steps that winter, my health app happier with me than ever before as I tried to figure out what to meant to start new. 

My camera roll from those months is filled with pictures of trees—tall and bare and reaching for the skies. I would snap them as I walked, capturing the bleak afternoons for my own memory. I guess I wanted to remember the miles, even if I had no idea what they were leading me towards. They just felt like ruts in the road, a path worn down to the core.

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When I think of autumn, I think of my tiny university tucked away in the mountains.

The semester that I returned to campus after a year and a half of studying online due to the pandemic would be my last as I barreled towards a December graduation. Those months had a strange, dreamlike quality to them. Everything was just like it had been when I'd left seventeen months prior, and yet nothing was the same at all. Knowing it would be my last semester only added to the transience of it all. I watched the leaves flutter to the ground and knew that once they had all fallen, I would drive away and wouldn't come back.

It was like a ticking clock, watching the trees grow barer by the day. The day that I took my final class, I walked around campus afterwards by myself in silence. I took pictures of the leaves still hanging on. 

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The winter I walked, I couldn't shake the feeling that too many pieces of myself had died over the past two years.

So much of my life felt unrecognizable; I didn't feel like myself anymore. Or rather, I didn't know how I could feel like myself anymore with so much of me missing.

And sometimes I think autumn can feel like that—like everything around you is dying, and you're pretty sure that you're dying along with it, and you don't know how to reconcile it all. 

But here's the thing: trees lose their leaves as a form of self-protection. By letting the leaves fall to the ground, the tree is able to conserve resources to pull it through the winter. It's able to store the nutrients it needs to make it to spring—to growing again.

Without letting go, the tree wouldn't make it to the new season. It wouldn't grow the way it needs to. 

Sometimes, some things have to die in order for something new to spring up.

Friend, if it feels like you're losing more than you ever get to hold on to, know that this isn't your forever. Life is filled with so much ebb and flow, and the best part about the inevitability of change is that while we may not get to hang on to everything we want to hang on to forever, we don't stay stuck in the stagnant, pain-filled places forever, either. 

There is more there is more there is more.

And this place you're in—there's purpose here. There's growth happening, even when it's so deep below the surface you can't see it yet. 

Sometimes you have to shed.

Sometimes it's going to ache.

But the good stuff? Light, and warmth, and buds poking out from barren branches?

It's always on the other side.