Unendurable: A Winter Lament
I was born in January, the worst month.
I don’t seem like a winter baby. I’m not hearty, I don’t have a strong constitution. I don’t do well in the cold or the dark. My skin is pale but olive-toned, giving me the appearance of a pallid, sickly transport from somewhere sunnier and more temperate that has been forced to endure the overcast greyscale of an East Coast winter.
There are these articles that go around every year about what date psychologists consider the most depressing day of the year. Some call it Blue Monday. It’s based on vague hypotheses and pseudoscience but the theoretical date hovers somewhere around my birthday at the end of January. The logic, to me, is compelling: it’s cold, the holidays are over with no more on the horizon, tax season begins, credit card bills from buying holiday presents come due, New Year’s resolutions are often already broken.
I usually find my birthday disappointing; an inadequate reprieve from hibernation that doesn’t do nearly enough to alleviate the existential dread and despair that takes hold once it starts getting dark before 5 p.m. After my 21st birthday (the last of the major milestones), I stopped trying to do something special, mostly in an effort to lower my expectations.
When I was young, I lived on a lake. It was murky and questionably safe, full of snapping turtles and water snakes, but it had a little beach on the bank and two parallel docks between which kids would swim around and from which fishing boats would launch. In the summer, we liked to take advantage of the cold water on hot days, traipsing across the street in swimsuits and inviting friends over to swim.
The beach had a little pavilion where people in the neighborhood could throw parties. Because my birthday was in January, we couldn’t throw a party outside, but I liked the sun and had very few indoor interests. So my mom came up with a compromise: we would do something small to celebrate my official birthday, but my big party with friends and family would fall on my half-birthday in July, when we could have a swim party at the lake.
In theory, birthdays are about celebrating the fact that you were born and are still around to eat cake and maybe dance around with your friends. I think you should choose when to do that. In the depths of the winter slog, I am far less inclined towards celebration and have often questioned if I’m glad to have been born at all. But then Spring comes, the ground thaws, the days get longer, and I start wanting to be alive again. This seems like a much more fertile opportunity for joy.
That being said, I do think you have to find something to be proud of in January. I don’t like New Year’s resolutions and this year I went to bed before midnight, only to be rudely woken by fireworks. Last year I was sick with COVID, this year I was sick with some kind of airport gunk I acquired on my way back from my family’s Christmas vacation in Mexico.
According to John Darnielle, a lot of people listen to “This Year” by the Mountain Goats on New Year’s Eve. This resonates with me. It’s a song about surviving even when you don’t want to. “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” To me, that’s what this time of the year is about. I am still here, whether I like it or not.
I’ll save the joyous cherishing of my birth and life and aging for the summer months. January is for congratulating myself on how much I have endured. This year, assuming I survive until the 24th, I’ll be 26 years old. I’m thankful that I have my own health insurance, because if I were on my parents’ plan, this would be the year I got unceremoniously kicked off.
I survived a lot this year, but I also had to survive less than in previous years. This winter has been a little less harsh, the holidays a little less embroiled with shame and anxiety. I’m almost 26 and I want to be alive.
Here are some poems for this time of year:
Night Walk by Franz Wright - about finding company in the loneliness of winter
What The Living Do by Marie Howe - about grief and cherishing the mundanity of being alive
Lines for Winter by Mark Strand - about persevering and accepting when you can’t persevere anymore
Here are some songs for this time of year:
If We Make It Through December, cover by Phoebe Bridgers, originally by Merle Haggard
Winter Song by Ingrid Michaelson and Sara Bareilles
Wintertime by Norah Jones
And here’s a poem I wrote years ago that never got published anywhere:
closing harvest
we were moon drunk and robbed of light for so long
that when the first crisp dots of white fell soft on our eyelashes
we almost wept.
the colder it became outside the warmer we made ourselves,
bundled and tied up like fresh deli meat wrapped in brown paper.
the dark had stretched past the sky and into our own consciousness,
embedded in our dusky souls.
but once the snow fell it shone with the sharp light of daybreak
it was so bright we could hardly see anything.