Dear Immigrant: The First Winter

Letter 04

Re: The First Winter

Dear Immigrant,

If you are going somewhere with winter, the first winter will be unlike anything you have experienced. I do not mean this only in the obvious sense of the cold, though the cold is real and it is more total than you have imagined. I mean it in the sense that winter will reorganize your interior life in ways you have not prepared for.

In winter in the northern hemisphere, the sun sets in the early afternoon. You will leave work in the dark. You will wake in the dark. The days will be short and grey and the cold will make going outside a transaction rather than a habit. The world will contract to the distance between the places you must go. You will spend more time alone than you have ever spent in your life.

The combination of isolation and darkness and cold produces something in immigrants that I have heard described many ways — as depression, as homesickness, as culture shock — but that I think of simply as the body registering an absence. You have left a place that had warmth and density and the constant presence of people who knew you. The winter makes that absence physical. You feel it in your chest when you walk outside. You feel it at four pm when the sky goes dark and you are not yet home.

Some things help: finding a community — a church, a cultural association, a sports team, anything that puts you regularly in the presence of people who will eventually know your name. Maintaining a physical routine. Getting outside even when it is cold, because the light, however thin, is better than the absence of light. Cooking food that connects you to somewhere warm.

The winter ends. They all end. But the first one is long, and I want you to know it is coming and to prepare your interior for it, not just your wardrobe.

From someone who made it through several winters,
A former immigrant

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