11/21/2025
Enjoy this wonderful read this winter.
It's November now. The days are getting shorter, the cold is creeping in, and everyone's bracing for winter like it's something to survive rather than something to learn from. But here's what makes this the perfect time to read Katherine May's New York Times bestseller: winter isn't just a season on the calendar. It's a metaphor for the times in our lives when everything falls apart at once and we're just trying to make it until spring.
I read this during the worst winter of my life. Not the weather—though it was cold—but the kind of winter May writes about. The kind where your body quits on you, your job feels meaningless, you can't sleep but can't stay awake. I was functioning but barely, and everyone kept saying "stay positive!" like toxic optimism could cure what was actually happening to me.
Then someone handed me this book and said, "Stop trying to fix yourself. Just read this." And May—writing from her own season of falling apart—said the thing I desperately needed to hear: what she calls wintering is "the active acceptance of sadness." Not fighting it. Not white-knuckling through it. Just letting yourself be in the dark for a while because that's what winter is for. Whether you're entering the literal cold months or your own personal season of struggle, this book will meet you exactly where you are.
Here's what broke me open: May writes about trees losing their leaves and how we call that beautiful. About bears hibernating and how we call that natural. But when I needed to go dormant, to rest, to retreat into the dark for a while? I called it failure. I called it weakness. I called it something that needed urgent fixing.
May said no. What if your fallow season isn't a failure? What if winter is just doing what winter does—stripping everything down so something new can grow?
I kept waiting for her to tell me how to get better faster. She didn't. Instead she talked about the relief of stopping. About how our culture endlessly cheerleads us into positivity while erasing the dirty underside of real life. About how rest isn't laziness—it's the thing that keeps us alive. About how sometimes you have to let yourself be cold, be sad, be dormant, because that's the only honest response to certain seasons.
She didn't promise I'd come out transformed. She just promised winter would end. That spring always comes. That this darkness, like all darkness, is temporary even when it feels permanent. And somehow that was more comforting than any promise of transformation could ever be.
And if you're in your own winter right now—whether it's the literal cold settling in this November or the metaphorical darkness of life unraveling—read this. May won't fix you. She'll just sit with you in the dark and remind you that winter is a season, not a life sentence. That rest isn't weakness. That sometimes you have to fall completely apart before you can come back together as someone new.
Read it slowly. Let it sink in. Stop apologizing for needing to hibernate.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/49XOf7R
You can find and listen to the audiobook narration using the link above.
