It is to the greatest chagrin of my Midwest heating bill (and my mother) that I demand to exist with a window open. Whether it’s sticky mid-July or unrelenting early January, the fresh Wisconsin air fills my asthmatic lungs with a chewy, luxurious bite and I need every last morsel I can get. I’m not sure how this saga began, but I am sure this ajar addiction is worse than it’s ever been.

If I’m being totally transparent, this time of year never leaves me fully inspired. I move through gloomy gray days with the momentum of a pine cone in molasses, and I find myself drowning in activities that will truly – for lack of a better description – occupy the darkness of my mind until I see the springtime sun. I become an anxious insomnia-ridden shut-in and I feel myself locking into a loop that ends up being an unimpressive autopilot. Mondays become Thursdays, 4am scrolling becomes an unwelcome familiarity, and leaving the house once a week is normalcy. It’s depleting and, quite frankly, a bit embarrassing. Also, spoiler alert: It does not make for the most fulfilling mind, body, or soul.

This year especially (about two months in!) has drained me. I’m not sure when it happened, but the monotonous mindset of going through the motions has taken its toll on my ability to really feel the world around me. I see laugh lines on my face but don’t remember the jokes. I see pictures in my phone of once close confidants who are now unanswered messages. I remember a starry-eyed twenty-something clawing her way into big ambitions and now feeling scared to even start something new. Half-baked poetry jotted down in a notes app on a sad Tuesday night, songs I once sang buried in my playlists, my favorite bridge-riddled walks through downtown seemingly distant memories collecting dust with my favorite jumpsuits in the closet. All shrill indications that the stale and stillness of summer’s brisk opposite have swallowed me whole.

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But then I remember the fresh air. I let the sharp breeze bite my shoulder blades and give in to the goosebumps, raising enough to remind me that I am in fact, not a casualty to the cold.

SARAH JAYNE JOHNSON

But then I remember the fresh air. I let the sharp breeze bite my shoulder blades and give in to the goosebumps, raising enough to remind me that I am in fact, not a casualty to the cold. I do what is, in my opinion, the absolute hardest thing to do: put on two (maybe three) layers of clothing and take my pity party to the pavement. I let the woes and the worries of the world around me that I cannot control wash away like chalk on a wet sidewalk. I inhale so deeply that it burns (again, asthmatic) and it reminds me that I am, for all intents and purposes, a mere mortal after all. And for a little while, I thank the former friends who formed the laugh lines. I thank myself for feeling things so deeply and so completely, painful poetry or not. I hold myself in this body that endured all the seasons so effortlessly and has gifted me with so many goosebumps. A body whose freckled shoulders will burn in the warmth of a summer sun soon and hopefully, if they’ll have me, the accompaniment of one of those jumpsuits.

I will never fully be capable of tackling the tumultuous changes in temperature that come with the gift of getting older, but I can show tenderness. I can invite that starry-eyed twenty-something to my darkest days and let her guide me to a greater good we both deserve. And maybe, if it feels right, I’ll pull up one of those old playlists and sing it through my open window.