My days were simultaneously tense and slack: I was constantly required to be somewhere and awake and vigilant; but I was also redundant, an interloper. I spent a lot of time staring around me, wondering what to do, my mind churning to categorise these new experiences, to find a context for them.

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.

The whole episode had the air of a Shakespearean farce,

can’t help but feel that I let the stress run so far out of control that it has begun to eat away at me; that I should have asked for help sooner. But then stress is a shameful thing, a proclamation of my inability to cope. I am slyly pleased that I have pain to contend with, rather than a more nebulous sense of my own overwhelmedness. It feels

profoundly unsociable way of living,

I feel as though I’ve been falling down an impossibly long elevator shaft, and have just landed at the bottom with a bump.

It’s a moment when I have to step into solitude, and into contemplation. It’s also a moment when I have to walk away from old alliances, to let the strings of some friendships fall loose, if only for a while. It’s a path I’ve walked over and over again in my life, perhaps. I have learned how to winter the hard way. It’s a skillset, of sorts.

I’m only buying

Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition, and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the