“Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
— Katherine May
It is the end of 2025. Winter has settled in, the kind where snow falls heavy and the wind presses insistently against the windows. Outside, everything feels cold and unsettled.
Inside my one-bedroom apartment, I am sheltered and warm. I sit with a hot cup of coffee and my laptop early in the morning, just after Fajr, trying to write something I have been avoiding.
I am trying to make sense of the year I have just lived through. To put language to 2025, a year of discomfort. A year that forced me to face myself rather than escape or numb what I did not want to feel.
Whenever life has felt heavy or overwhelming, my instinct has always been to escape. For me, escape usually meant movement. Travel became my way of avoiding what I did not want to face, a way of staying in motion instead of sitting with my problems.
The first time I used travel as escape was in 2014, when I went to Cairo, Egypt. I did not know what I wanted to major in at university, and I did not have the courage to admit that university no longer felt right for me, especially to my mom. So I wrapped my uncertainty in something more acceptable: studying Arabic and Qur’an in Cairo. It was genuinely meaningful to me, but it was also a way to run from a difficult conversation.
When I returned, I came back lighter, physically and emotionally. I had lost weight, gained confidence, and finally told my mom that university was not for me and that I wanted to go all in on business. For a while, it felt like the escape had worked.
So I repeated the pattern.
On and off, from 2019 through 2025, I kept moving whenever life felt too tight. Looking back, much of the 2020s has been marked by escape. Maybe that is what happens when you enter your thirties, feel time slipping through your fingers, and experience the loss of siblings and a brother-in-law one after another. You try to outrun discomfort instead of meeting it.
I was escaping business failures, more than a few of them. I was avoiding the disappointment of not fulfilling my homesteading goal and the grief of not making Somalia my home, even though that was where I wanted to be. I was carrying the quiet ending of my tech career, the loss of loved ones I did not know how to mourn, and a financial pressure that made me feel far behind for my age.
After my plan to settle in Somalia fell through, I returned to the United States at the end of 2024. By the end of 2025, the weight of everything I was carrying made me want to escape again.
It was the middle of winter. Snow piled up. The cold cut through everything. Winter has always been my escape season, the time when I usually travel, and I felt the familiar pull to do the same.
Minnesota felt tense. With ICE raids in the news and Somali people becoming a public talking point, I found myself carrying my identification even on simple trips to the grocery store. Combined with the winter, my overthinking, and my sense of failure, it was exhausting.
I imagined myself on the coast of Kenya, in Lamu or Malindi. Sunlight, quiet courtyards, strong coffee, rich Swahili food. The image was comforting and familiar. Easy to justify.
But this time, something was different.
I knew that escaping might bring relief, but only briefly. It always had. This season of my life needed something more honest, more lasting.
That was when I realized I did not need another exit. I needed to winter.
Winter arrived for me both literally and figuratively. Instead of resisting it, I chose to enter it fully. Wintering was not dramatic. It was quiet. Simple. Ordinary. And it was exactly what I needed then, and what I am still in the middle of now.
Wintering began with creating space. I moved into my own place and, at my big age, finally flew the nest. As an introvert, I needed solitude more than anything, and that had been impossible in our busy Somali home.
More than anything, wintering meant sitting with myself. No distractions. No constant noise. No people to buffer me from my thoughts, especially my mom. I needed to face what I had been avoiding, alone.
Once I had my own place, I began building a routine gentle enough to let clarity surface. Some things were obvious: grief, unfinished goals, disappointments. Other things were buried deeper, and it took time and patience to even recognize them.
As an introvert, a middle child, and someone who avoids dealing with emotions, this became one of the most uncomfortable seasons of my life.
The hardest part of wintering for me was learning how to cry.
Crying does not come naturally to me. I feel physically sick when I am about to cry and deeply embarrassed at the thought of being seen doing it. I do not fully understand why my reaction is so strong, but I knew that if I was going to survive this season honestly, I needed to let myself cry without shame and without resistance.
So crying became a priority.
Strangely, crying has always come more easily to me through stories. TV shows and movies gave me permission to grieve. I could cry while watching characters mourn loved ones and tell myself it was because of the story, not my own life. It allowed me to release grief without guilt.
I also cry more easily when I am overwhelmed with happiness or anger. Maybe after years of suppressing sadness, the tears simply find other exits.
I know this may sound unhealthy. Maybe it is. But it is where I was, and where I still am, learning slowly how to feel without fear.
I have come to believe that crying is one of the most intimate things a person can do.
So in my wintering, in the cold and the quiet, I am learning to let myself cry freely. I have a lot to cry about. My grief. My failures. My unfulfilled goals. And instead of numbing or escaping, I am finally allowing those tears to come.
A few things have helped me stay present during this long season.
First and foremost, ibadah anchored me. Wintering is a season of worship. There is something grounding about pouring your heart out to Allah, about bringing pain, confusion, and longing directly to the Creator. In prayer, I found a kind of comfort the world could not offer.
I was also accompanied by Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. The book arrived at exactly the right moment in my life. It gave language to what I was experiencing and allowed me to see this season not as failure, but as a necessary pause.
Unexpectedly, I also found companionship in a Turkish show called Sahipsizler. I saw parts of myself in the character Azize as she carried grief, responsibility, and vulnerability. Watching her allowed me to cry freely.
“Thaw happens on its own timeline. It cannot be forced, only made space for.”
I am still in the middle of my wintering. It is January now, and I hope that by the end of Ramadan, I may begin to notice the thaw. For now, I am staying here, letting the cold and discomfort do their work, trusting that warmth will return when it is ready.