Six More Weeks of Winter
Or: a close encounter with the great malaise.
Content Warning: Vomit, Depression.
It’s Sunday, November 16th, 2025. You spend your first hour of consciousness puking into a toilet bowl.
Okay, that’s not exactly true. You spend your first hour lying dizzy in bed, perpetually stuck in the moment just after stepping off the tilt-a-whirl. After an hour of that, you decide the herculean task of locomoting your assortment of limbs to the bathroom is an acceptable price for at least temporarily alleviating the nausea. It works, kind of, but you still take a mixing bowl back to your room, which is an act of tremendous foresight: the rest of the day is a cycle of building up nausea until it’s enough that you can attempt another vomit without dry-heaving.
If it makes you feel any better, nothing comes up — nothing aside from acid, and not even very much of that. If it makes you feel any worse, this is the violent beginning of the longest winter of your life.
You ask off from work for a day, personally suspecting food poisoning (one of your managers brought in a dubious Shrek-themed cake the day before; against your better judgment, you had a slice just before you left.) A day becomes a week. A week becomes a month. A month becomes indefinitely.
The nausea comes and goes, but it mostly goes. That’s not what gets you — it’s the dizziness that gets you. It’s all well and good being able to keep down your pancakes, but that’s not much help when you can’t even stand to mix the batter. You also discover that not eating tends to make it worse, a sinister little variable which means you need to keep easy calories available at all times. Yogurt becomes a precious resource, to be hoarded and used on only the really bad days.
But there are a lot of really bad days.
Sometimes, you feel like you can walk just fine, only to find yourself veering directly into a wall, like driver trying to leave the scene of a collision with a busted axle. Even standing completely still fills your brain with a horrible fizzing, shutting down all your conscious systems and leaving you defenseless; not paralysis per se, more like a computer crash. Sometimes it happens when you’re completely still. It’s like you’re always drunk with none of the upsides and all of the next-morning downsides.
You see the UrgentCare, who tells you it’s an ear infection. You see the ENT, who finds no infection, but tells you to check for brain damage. You get an MRI, which finds no damage, but tells you to check for a neurological problem. Without any better name, you take to calling it “the bees in my head.”
The neurologist, when you finally see her, tells you (she thinks) it’s a chronic vestibular migraine. The good news is that it shouldn’t last forever. The bad news is there isn’t any telling how long it will last. Probably months. She’s a bit surprised it’s gone on this long already.
She prescribes you some magnesium pills and physical therapy. They only kind of work. You only know that because it’s worse when you forget to take them.
So, there you go. You have your answer. What do you do now?
The human body, when healthy, needs to maintain an internal temperature of around 99 degrees Fahrenheit, or around 37 degrees Celsius. Unrelatedly, the second law of thermodynamics states that heat naturally transfers from warmer to cooler areas. These two statements are both true, and that is where the trouble begins.
Most of us here in the Northeastern US have enough cold-weather clothing that we can easily build a layer of insulation around ourselves. This doesn’t eliminate heat transfer, but it does reduce it to a level our bodies can easily compensate, and we end up feeling roughly normal, if a little warm around the cheeks.
But on some days, days where the temperature dips low enough, most people don’t have enough clothing to make up that gap. On days like those, the battle can only be lost; the question is how quickly, and can you get back to somewhere warm before the chill burrows all the way into your bones. For the majority of people, at least in the United States, this is not a problem. The cold is just something to push through, another small frustration to complain about when warming one’s hands by the office coffeemaker. Because we don’t have to stay outside for long, that heat which they do lose is inconsequential and easily replenished.
But that’s not how it really works, is it?
A person can suffer through almost anything, so long as they know when it will end. But the reverse is just as true: a person can suffer through remarkably little if it seems the trials might continue forever. Fifteen minutes’ walk to a central-heated apartment twenty under freezing is a brief, energizing diversion. Fifteen minutes’ wait twenty under freezing for a bus that should have already been here is pure torture.
The thing that usually breaks first is not one’s body temperature. The thing that breaks first is one’s spirit. It breaks when you cannot see the length of the road ahead, nor whether there is somewhere to rest at the end. It is that which drives men (always men) mad during an overland voyage to the south pole, that which gives sirenic weight that little voice whispering how much much easier it would be to lie back and let hypothermia take you under.
It’s a hell of a thing, living only on hope. No wonder the Pennsylvania Dutch invented Groundhog Day.
You have to accept that, at least for the foreseeable future, this is your life now. If you were more on top of yourself, you’d find a way to spend this time productively, or at least in a way that’s fulfilling. But you’re not on top of yourself; you’re barely even parallel with yourself. So instead, you lie flat, staring at the ceiling, waiting for time to wash over your head and erode it smooth.
And the worst part is, it’s winter, so there isn’t even any baseball.
But there are upsides to going through this in the winter. The biggest one is what you aren’t losing: the weather outside sucks anyway, and there isn’t that much going on for you to miss. In fact, if you had been able to choose the date of your condition’s beginning, you would have chosen close to exactly this, so that you can be sure you’re recovered by the time it gets pretty again.
You will be recovered by then. Right?
Anyway, it’s not like you aren’t doing anything. Sometimes, you have it in you to read a book or watch a movie. Every once in a while, you have it in you to write. You don’t finish much that anyone else is going to see, but it feels good regardless. It’s like singing in the shower. You love singing in the shower.
You start getting really into chess. This is embarrassing, because you’ve been on the record many times about how you don’t like chess, including a few days ago. On the other hand, it’s nice to be pleasantly surprised by something for once, and it’s one less thing you have in common with Elon Musk. You used to always feel like the game was judging you, but you’ve managed to let go of the idea that it’s measuring your intelligence and started thinking of it as just another thing you can learn. Besides, Stockfish would never judge you. Stockfish is your best friend.
It’s ironic that now, when your brain is working at the lowest level since you were in elementary school, is the time you’d get into a game famous for being cerebral. But it can also be a game of instinct and pattern recognition, and that part is working just fine. It helps you learn how to trust the parts of your brain you can’t feel, but are just as capable of complex thought. There’s an addictive edge to learning to see the game, like you’re Neo from the Matrix beginning to believe. You love that this is something you could practice for the rest of your life and always have room to get better at.
But you love the history, too. You love the Victorian players who prioritized playing with style over actually winning the game, which has always been your habit no matter the game. You love that the Mechanical Turk toured 84 years before the public knew its secret; you love that two teenage boys from Baltimore figured it out 30 years earlier, but nobody believed them because they were poor. You especially love the Saavedra position, where a Spanish priest defeated a better player’s rook and king with only a single pawn, winning an endgame most people thought was impossible by under-promoting. You’ve always been a sucker for stuff like that. You love that that’s something human beings are capable of.
Also, you have a crush on Anna Rudolf.
By the way, you’ve become religious, albeit in your own needlessly idiosyncratic way. This isn’t a desperate attempt to get healing from God — you understand the problem of evil too well to expect any of that — but God is at least someone to talk to. You’ve never been an atheist per se, you just didn’t find any of the answers offered by major religions helpful or intuitive, and until now never had a good reason to find your own.
When you say God, you actually mean Gods, because you imagine two. To your mind, every act of creation is an act of love, so it follows that the greatest creation flows from the greatest love. Therefore, two gods, in love with each other. You don’t think of them as people except as a metaphor your tiny ape brain can understand, which is the excuse you need to imagine them both as women.
You don’t understand this mess, but it’s comforting to imagine there’s someone who does, even if they aren’t going to help you in particular. It’s a good reminder of all the things you do not know. It’s a good reminder that you can’t see the good things coming either.
Your roommate adopted cats at the end of last summer. By now, most of the time they’ve known you is as ‘that lady who stays inside the house all day.’ You try not to think about that. Sometimes they lie in your bed with you. You think anyone who believes cats aren’t capable of love has probably just never seen it, or never understood it when they did see it. You pity those people.
You try to remember that the humble, flexible blade of grass is better at surviving a windstorm than the proud, rigid tree. You try to remember you didn’t come up with that analogy.
Snow is one of the most underrated features of reality. That’s saying a lot, because snow is already the object of so much nostalgia, probably more so as less of it falls every year. Nonetheless it is still taken for granted in the way only truly wonderful things can be.
It feels like, if water freezes in the atmosphere, it should just turn into ice. It feels like the compound of rain and cold should create the most miserable conditions imaginable. It feels like the kind of weather a person drags themselves through one footstep at a time because there is nothing for it but to endure the endless torment of mother nature.
Instead, it turns into tiny crystals.
Snowflakes have a lovely array of features. There is, of course, their famous shape, an enchanting mix of six-fold radial and reflectional symmetry. And, as referenced pejoratively by Fox News pundits, each has a unique form due to the specific conditions of its forming; this means even the most slipshod of folded construction paper cut by a first grader is theoretically a valid shape that could be found in nature. That shape also forms a plane, allowing snowflakes to glide through the air, which makes them incredibly pretty as a weather event and catchable on the tongue as a bonus.
When snow accumulates on the ground, it forms a near-perfectly uniform layer of white. It erases all the lines we humans like to paint on the world, wiping it clean to be molded anew. It is shaped into igloos, into men, into balls that arc through the air and shatter harmlessly when they explode across their laughing target’s back. It turns regular park hills into public-access thrill rides, a sliding surface that is reliably frictionless when you’re freaking for speed and reliably frictionful to the dug-in boot when you realize freaking for speed is about to result in a concussion.
Snow makes children of us all. It is something wonderful the world gives us for free. Obviously, this means it is not to be trusted.
You’re autistic, which means you need expectations, routine, and structure almost as much as you need food or sleep. It helps to think of this in terms of a train, and for reasons beyond the obvious: the guiding structures of your life help you remember where to go and when. That is to say, if you lose them, your momentum goes too, and you grind to a halt on the gravel and ties.
You’ve measured out your weeks by having one activity to do before breakfast each weekday, alternating between your more complicated medical needs and at-home body-weight exercises. At your job, there are lots of procedures to follow, each with a clear and purposeful outcome; you even, to the bafflement of your coworkers, enjoy cleaning the bathrooms, despite the way bleach-smell clings to your nose. You need to know what you’re going to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner before you even get out of bed, and when you realize you’re missing the ingredients for something you were hoping to cook, you need to shut down for 15 minutes before you can reboot and make a backup plan.
You’ve never been diagnosed, entirely for lack of trying: you certainly know the names of enough mid-20th-century passenger aircraft to qualify for at least a preliminary screening (you have a soft spot for the Lockheed Constellation, but like, who doesn’t?).
All this is to say, a malady that comes and goes without warning, ruins any plan that doesn’t involve lying in your own bed, and without any clear timeline on improvement is one the most psychologically destructive things that could possibly happen to you. Not that anyone would be able to deal with this healthily, with the possible exception of a Buddhist monk.
(Maybe you should look into Buddhism. It does seem like desire and suffering have been spending a lot more time together lately. Oh my god, are they dating?)
This whole thing feels a lot like the pandemic to you. Actually, that’s not quite it — this whole thing feels a lot like other people’s pandemic to you. Your pandemic was awesome. You feel pretty guilty about because a lot of people died or lost their jobs, but what can you do? You started estrogen a month in, which meant you learned to love cooking and reading and writing and board games, even if over the internet. You had this perfect chrysalis in which to metamorphose, going in this weird gender-fucked creature and coming out an actual, real-life girl. Sure, a girl with a lot to learn about fashion and taking care of her hair (Jesus Christ, you really needed moisturizing conditioner), but a girl nonetheless. You know you’re not alone in this: many of your siblings discovered themselves during that year. Then again, for others of your siblings it was a prison.
But this isn’t like that. This is going an entire week without breathing more than ten minutes of fresh air, because it’s too cold out to open your windows. This is sleeping ten hours and staying in bed until noon on a good day, wearing the same sleeping shirt and pajama bottoms you woke up in, and dragging yourself through hour after hour after hour, watching the time pile up until looking at the aggregate would drive you existentially insane. You probably spend more of your waking hours in bed during these few months than you did in the entirety of college.
Even when you’re healthy, you get depressed sometimes — it’s one or two days a month, which is sort of like a period if you squint — but an extended stint like this hasn’t happened since you were younger. A lot younger. Living-under-the-wrong-name younger. And because you ground your sense of time in emotional memory, you start losing your grip on your sense of self. Some days you look in the mirror and don’t even recognize your own face. You get a pretty dramatic haircut. It helps, kind of.
If only there were some way to solve this problem — say, through selectively inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin. Unfortunately, such a thing does not exist.
Winter plays tricks on the mind.
It starts so gradually. The sunset is just a little earlier, the shadows just a little longer. The type of movement so slow that the average person doesn’t stand a chance of noticing without assistance. We become frogs in freezing water.
Yet the reverse is true for daily temperature; random enough that any given peak or trough doesn’t seem to be significant on its own. Instead of one great herald, we get a few dozen tiny ones, each of which is easy enough to ignore. It’s just one day of wearing a sweater, then it’s just one day of wearing a jacket.
Before you’ve noticed, it seems normal to leave for and return from work in the dark, to never thinking to step out the door without a parka. The world, it is passively accepted, is supposed to feel like a hostile alien world from which we must seek hermetically-sealed and insulated shelter.
Eventually comes a day when summer — the warm kiss of the sun on skin-bare legs, the green smell of a soft breeze through either kind of canopy, the melodramatic groan of a hammock under shifting weight — it feels like it never happened at all, as though it were something read about in a magazine or seen once in passing on vacation. It feels like one of those impossible dreams, a thing which can exist only in the rose-tinted past, like the smell of great-grandma’s house or quality Levi’s jeans. Something which may once have been real, but not in a way that can ever be accessed again. A Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, blurring away into static as entropy leeches it dry.
Spend long enough under the weight of the dark and cold, and you’ll forget it was ever any different. That it ever could be any different again.
That’s nonsense, of course. The Earth’s axial tilt alters its trajectory for vanishingly few measurable forces, but human despair ranks somewhere at the end of the list. Believe it or not, Spring will invariably return.
But not for you. Not yet.
Keep popping out of the ground, if you like. But for now, all you’re going to see is your shadow.