The Season That Saved My Spirit

I didn’t see it coming. At the time, I thought I was falling apart. Looking back, I know now that I was breaking open.

It was one of those seasons that arrive without invitation, the kind that sweeps through your life like a storm, rearranging everything you thought was stable. My spirit was threadbare. I was tired in the kind of way that sleep doesn’t fix. I woke up every morning with a weight pressing on my chest, dragging myself through the motions of work, friendship, and family obligations as if I were carrying bricks in my bones.

The worst part wasn’t the exhaustion itself. It was the hollowness. I no longer recognized myself—the way I used to laugh easily, the way I found meaning in small moments, the way I believed that beauty could heal even the sharpest wounds. Somewhere along the way, that version of me had gone missing.

I didn’t know it then, but the season that was about to unfold would become the one that saved my spirit.

Losing My Way

I wish I could say there was one clear reason for my collapse—a single heartbreak, a job loss, a major upheaval. But it was smaller than that. It was the quiet accumulation of disappointment: friendships that faded, promises I couldn’t keep to myself, a creeping sense that life was happening to everyone else but me.

I remember sitting in my car after work, gripping the steering wheel, and thinking, Is this it? Not in a dramatic way, but in a bone-deep exhaustion kind of way. I wasn’t suicidal. I was just spiritually numb, which felt even scarier.

I started avoiding invitations, convinced no one would notice if I slipped away. I told myself I was “recharging,” but really, I was disappearing. Each night, I scrolled endlessly on my phone, filling the silence with noise because I was afraid of what the silence might tell me.

The First Crack of Light

The shift came slowly. One afternoon, after a particularly heavy week, I walked outside with no plan except to escape the suffocation of my apartment. It was early autumn. The trees were halfway to gold, and the air carried that cool bite that makes you want to breathe deeper.

I sat on a park bench and just stared. At nothing. At everything. The sound of the wind in the branches, the sight of leaves skimming across the grass—it wasn’t spectacular, but something in me softened. For the first time in months, I felt present.

I came back the next day. And the next. That bench became a kind of altar, a place where I remembered what it felt like to exist without needing to perform or prove anything. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the season itself—autumn, with its riot of endings—was teaching me how to release.

Learning to Let Go

Nature has this quiet way of reminding us that letting go isn’t always a loss. Watching the leaves fall, I realized that the trees weren’t dying—they were making space. They were trusting that emptiness could be fertile, that the starkness of winter would prepare them for new life.

That simple truth landed in me like a revelation: I had been clinging to things that no longer nourished me—relationships, habits, old self-expectations—because I was terrified of emptiness. But maybe the emptiness wasn’t punishment. Maybe it was preparation.

That season, I started letting go in small ways. I cleaned out my closet and donated clothes I hadn’t worn in years. I ended a friendship that had grown more toxic than tender. I permitted myself to admit that certain dreams I once held were no longer mine to carry.

It hurt. But it also felt like oxygen.

Rediscovering Stillness

Once I cleared a little space, I found myself craving quiet in ways I never had before. I stopped numbing myself with endless scrolling. I started reading again, journaling without judgment, even lighting candles just to sit in the glow.

I had always thought stillness was unproductive, but in that season, it became medicine. The silence I once feared began to speak to me—not in booming revelations, but in gentle reminders: You are allowed to rest. You are allowed to change. You are allowed to be unfinished.

Mark Nepo writes that rivers teach us about flow and return. I didn’t know his words then, but I felt them. Sitting with the rhythms of the season, I realized that I, too, could return to myself—not the self I once was, but the self I was becoming.

The People Who Stayed

Something else shifted as I grew more honest with myself: I grew more honest with others. Instead of pretending I was fine, I began telling the truth in small doses. “I’m struggling right now.” “I don’t have the energy for that.” “I need some time.”

To my surprise, the people who truly loved me didn’t pull away. They stayed. They checked in. They gave me the grace to be messy and the encouragement to keep going. One friend started joining me on my park bench walks, both of us wrapped in scarves, talking about everything and nothing. Another friend sent me poems when words failed me.

I realized then that healing doesn’t happen in isolation. Even when it feels like a solitary journey, the presence of others—steady, gentle, patient—becomes part of the restoration.

Finding Gratitude in the Unlikely

By the time winter arrived, something in me had shifted so deeply that I couldn’t ignore it. I was no longer measuring my life by productivity or perfection. I was learning to measure it by presence—by how fully I could stand in the moment, even if that moment was painful.

I remember looking out my window one snowy morning, coffee in hand, and feeling something I hadn’t felt in a long time: gratitude. Not for any specific achievement, but for breath itself. For warmth. For the chance to begin again.

The season that saved my spirit hadn’t erased my struggles. It hadn’t magically fixed my circumstances. What it did was teach me how to live inside them without losing myself. It gave me new eyes for beauty and a softer heart for imperfection.

The Season’s Lasting Lessons

Looking back now, here’s what that season taught me—and continues to teach me:

1. Letting go makes room. Release isn’t about discarding what matters; it’s about creating space for what’s real and alive.

2. Stillness heals. Silence isn’t empty. It’s full of truths waiting to be heard.

3. Healing is communal. The right people won’t be scared off by your honesty; they’ll hold it with you.

4. Gratitude is available, even here. Even in the hardest seasons, there are small mercies—leaves falling, snow falling, breath moving—that remind us we’re still alive.

Why This Season Saved Me

If I had resisted that season—if I had filled it with busyness or drowned it in distraction—I think I would have missed the most important turning point of my life. Instead, I let it strip me bare. I let it teach me that survival doesn’t always look like thriving, and that thriving sometimes begins in the most barren of places.

The truth is, we don’t get to choose all the seasons life gives us. But we do get to choose how we move through them. That autumn-winter of my life became the season that saved my spirit, not because it was easy, but because it broke me open to a new way of living.

Even now, whenever I feel myself unraveling, I think of that park bench. I think of the trees releasing what no longer served them, of the quiet snow covering everything in a blanket of renewal. And I remember: I, too, can let go. I, too, can sit in stillness. I, too, can begin again.