The Winter I Finally Stopped Bracing or, 'Growth Is Ugly and Does Not Photograph Well'

What I’ve come to understand (slowly, reluctantly, and with the emotional elegance of a rabid possum trapped inside a Panera) is that I fundamentally misunderstood what growth was supposed to look like. I used to believe that growth was a forward motion only. That to become more, you had to do more, achieve more, prove more. More productivity. More striving. More exhaustion disguised as ambition. I thought the evidence of a meaningful life would look like velocity.

 

But this winter taught me something quieter and, I think, more true.

That growth sometimes looks like retreat.
Like stillness.

 

Sometimes it means turning inward and tending to the abandoned rooms inside yourself—the parts that were neglected because survival demanded it. And I should note: this is not glamorous work. It does not photograph well. There are no inspirational montages. No one is posting “deep nervous system repair” content from beneath three blankets while eating stale crackers over the sink and trying not to cry during yet another prescription drug commercial.

But somewhere in the turning of this brutal winter, I realized something had changed.

The cold had finally left my body.

And I don’t mean the weather,  (although I'd like to petition that surviving a New York winter does make you feel eligible for frontier citizenship.) I mean the internal winter I had been carrying for far too long—the emotional frostbite that protected me from pain, yes, but also kept me from joy. The kind of psychic bracing that keeps a person functioning, productive, competent… and quietly absent from their own life.

Then, sometime in March, I noticed something almost imperceptible: I had stopped bracing.

I stopped apologizing for existing.
Stopped treating rest like moral failure.
Stopped experiencing my own life as something to endure.

And once that happened, something else suddenly became possible:

Expansion.

 

 

Of course, because life is not subtle, this period of stillness is now giving way to a season of extraordinary motion.  Spring into summer is arriving like a parade I did not RSVP to but am somehow expected to lead. Projects. Collaborations. Creative opportunities that feel not just exciting, but aligned. As though they were waiting for me to become the person capable of receiving them or, the version of myself capable of receiving them without immediately self-destructing.

 

This is new.

 

Before, work often felt like something I had to chase, or worse, survive.

 

Now, for the first time in a very long time, it feels like something I might actually be able to meet.