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Emily Wiggins reflects on a tumultuous 2025, leaning on some Jewish wisdom, and the concept of “wintering” as she enters the fresh fields of the new year.
In her book Wintering, Katherine May writes that “wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.” When I read this book in 2020, I was experiencing the type of wintering the entire world was experiencing: the pandemic.
Five years later, the wheel of time spun back around to land on yet another fallow period in my life. This period, shockingly, was much harder than 2020, and the experience felt isolating. 2025 began with hardship in my long-term relationship. After four years, we were struck with the realization that our paths were diverging. Our whole world was so entwined, yet it was as though we had forgotten how to speak the same language to each other. Letting go of the relationship also meant letting go of his entire family, who had become my family. I felt orphaned.
Moreover, I was left with our house to tend to. It was my first time living alone as an adult, and it came with a paralyzing stasis. I didn’t want to load the dishwasher because then I’d have to unload it. I didn’t want to cook because I’d only be cooking for myself. I didn’t want to hang my cherished art because there was no one else to see it. I had to pay the bills, and no one was coming to bail me out. I was actively rejecting everything I’d been working toward my whole life: independence.
Aside from my personal turmoil, Washington and the greater DC area entered hardship with economic uncertainty and civil rights being threatened. Everywhere I turned, morale was low. Every time I went looking for the light, something else happened that made it seem all the more unreachable. My friends, some of the most talented and intelligent people I’d ever met, were left jobless. I wasn’t far behind, as the research team I’d helped build from the ground up and still consulted for part-time was also decimated, causing me to get RIFed by proxy.
As Spring arrived in DC, my mother called one day to warn that my aunt, her last living sibling, had experienced a health incident that landed her in the hospital on the precipice of death. When she called, I was sick with my first bout of COVID. I couldn’t shake the guilt that if something happened to my aunt, I wouldn’t be able to come home due to my own illness.
Over the next two weeks, though, my aunt miraculously recovered. My mother called daily to provide health updates. I bounced back from COVID in time to attend my friend’s bachelorette party, which I’d planned and had been looking forward to as a needed break from my wintering period. But, as my aunt was being discharged from the hospital, the news suddenly turned; she had not healed at all. In fact, she was going to die at any moment. The 180-degree turn in her health and the resulting whiplash it had on my family was incomprehensible. Upon hearing the news, I sped home in an Uber from the bachelorette party in so much disbelief that I trauma-dumped on my very nice driver, who was human in the moments I needed someone to be. My aunt passed away a day later. I attended her funeral but felt an overwhelming sense of disconnect. Still recuperating from the breakup and my own illness, I was desperately trying to survive myself.
On my way back to DC, I called my father, who could not attend the funeral. “In moments like this, when we’re all surrounded by family, I’m very afraid that you’re going to end up alone,” he told me. Behind the wheel of my car, 300 miles of I-95 in front of me, I listened to a Spotify playlist named “Flop Era” and sobbed. Again I returned to Katherine May’s wisdom: “[I]f happiness is a skill, then sadness is too. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need.”
Two weeks later, with my dad’s words ringing in my head, I met someone whose mere existence thawed the winter I’d been living in. During our first date, it stormed heavily. Afterwards we walked along the Georgetown waterfront, where I was obliterated by mosquito bites. I didn’t care. I wanted to bask in the light of this magical stranger. He pointed out birds and their behaviors, identified the plants along the waterfront, briefly explained the history of windows – this was someone who paid attention to the small details. In that moment, I forgot all about my hardships, and conveniently, about my quest for independence. We asked each other so many questions during that 5 hour encounter, including what we would give TED talks on and why. I said resilience, because there’d never been a moment in life I couldn’t tackle so far. My own words reassured me. I was going to make it through my wintering period.
The magical stranger would call me on trips that took him to the West coast. At the same time, I was reading Lost & Found, a memoir by Jewish author Kathryn Schulz, which detailed her losing her father and meeting her wife in the same short period of time. As I described the book to him, I mentioned that it found me at a time where I’d needed it most, when my aunt died and I was grappling with how I felt about it. I stopped short of delusionally remarking to him that I was finding it fitting that I, too, was finding love again after death, and holding gratitude and grief as two conflicting emotions like Schulz had in her book. We said goodbye, and I wondered if he’d put the pieces together.
Unlike Schulz, my story had no happy ending, and the magical stranger disappeared nearly as quickly as he’d appeared. I was wintering again, and the shift reopened the wounds I thought I’d been intent upon healing. Yet again, another shift was happening in my life: my best friend was spending her last days in the US before relocating permanently to the Netherlands. As a last hoorah, we went to see Garbage in concert together, and I cried the entire night.
“I’m so sorry your last night in the U.S. with me has to be like this,” I blubbered. “I can’t stop crying and I know it’s because my heart is broken for many reasons, and one of them is that I’m losing my best friend.”
It felt as though nothing could be easy. Finally, the High Holidays – the great reset of the year – arrived, and I was desperate for a spiritual breakthrough. Seeking spiritual sustenance beyond attending services, I read This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared by Rabbi Alan Lew. His interpretation of teshuvah stuck with me. “[T]eshuvah, this kind of moral and spiritual turning,” Lew writes, “is only complete when we find ourselves in exactly the same position we were in when we went wrong, when the state of estrangement and alienation began, and we choose to behave differently, to act in a way that is conducive to atonement and reconciliation.”
If I was ever going to heal, I needed to be radically honest with myself, and I needed a plan for how I would avoid repeating the mistakes of my past. Ultimately, I found my grief embarrassing, a mortifying reminder of my humanity and ability to feel. After the magical stranger disappeared, I realized I’d been trying to heal my pain with people in all of the wrong ways. I began talking about my grief with my friends, who met my strife with so much understanding. They offered to connect me with friends who had been going through similar experiences, a sort of chavruta of grief. I started challenging myself by leaning further into my extroverted tendencies, overcoming the embarrassing admittance that I needed more social support by seeing myself as a sort of cultural anthropologist collecting data. If I controlled X variable, what would be Y outcome?
I put myself around Shabbat dinner tables with new people, I danced with strangers in bars, I joined book clubs, I wrote and published a piece for a small food journal, I became committed to helping my friends achieve their own personal goals. I was exhausted, but I was finally becoming myself again. The difference was noticeable, as those close to me kept remarking on how much more myself I seemed. The winter thawed, once and for all.
As 2026 begins, I return to the words of Kathryn Schulz: “[D]isappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.”
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