Hey Reader,

How are you? How was your week since our last conversation? For me, this week something shifted in me this week in a way that didn’t make any noise. It wasn’t a big moment, nothing dramatic, just a quieter kind of truth that arrived the way winter always does, not suddenly, but by slow degrees. I think that’s why I felt it so clearly the other evening when we took a walk through town to see the Christmas lights. They weren’t grand or perfectly arranged, just simple and warm, a soft yellow glow stretched across the streets, the kind of lights that don’t try to impress. And somehow that felt like the right tone for where I am. No sparkle, no performance, just presence.

Maybe it was also the cold, this unusual early-December cold here in Portugal that made everything sharper, even my thoughts. My body has been guiding me into slowness long before my mind understood what was happening, and this late stage of pregnancy keeps pulling me inward, almost as if life is whispering, “enough reorganising the outside, it’s time to listen inside.” And when I finally did, something unexpected surfaced. Old identities rose quietly, without drama, the way you suddenly realise that a piece of clothing no longer fits, even though you can’t pinpoint the exact moment you outgrew it. Smaller versions of me. Old reflexes. The Monica who always had to plan three steps ahead because she didn’t have the luxury not to. The one who kept herself composed because falling apart felt dangerous. The one who confused responsibility with identity.

These parts of me are not asking to be fixed, they’re asking to be seen. And this is where the metacognitive layer becomes impossible to ignore, because there’s a moment in your own thinking process where you realise that transformation is never about getting your life together or building the perfect routine or holding everything in place with clarity. It’s about telling the truth to yourself without running from it. It’s about staying long enough in the silence for the things you’ve avoided to finally meet you. It’s about noticing the thoughts you usually rush past, the sensations you minimise, the emotional truths that have been waiting the whole year for you to slow down enough to acknowledge them.

And this, I think, is what winter feels like in the body. Not a season on the calendar, but a recognition. A recognition that slowness is not a punishment but a permission. That quiet isn’t empty but integrative. That tiredness is not failure but the nervous system asking for the pace it needs in order to rearrange everything you have learned, felt, lost, received, resisted, and carried.

I keep returning to Katherine May’s “Wintering” and the way she writes about those life-seasons that slow us without asking whether we’re ready. Not as interruptions, but as necessary crossings. Not as endings, but as beginnings that happen in the dark. Threshold moments where the world pulls back just enough so you can hear yourself again. And I think that’s exactly where I am. Not fixing. Not reinventing. Not performing a new version of myself. Just telling the truth. Just receiving the truths that waited for me all year. Just honouring the parts of me that refuse to be pushed anymore.

So my questions this week come from this quieter, more honest place:

• What truth has been waiting for you to slow down enough to hear it?
• And what part of you is ready to be witnessed, not fixed?

If these questions stir something in you, even just a little, maybe this week can be a softer one. Not soft as in easy, but soft as in honest, the kind of softness that comes when you finally stop trying to be ahead of your own life. I’m learning that winter doesn’t ask for resolutions or reinvention, it asks for presence. It asks you to stay with what is true in this exact moment, even if what’s true feels unfinished or unclear. And maybe this is the whole point of a personal wintering, that you allow yourself to be held by what is slowing you down instead of fighting your way back into momentum.

So if you’re here with me, moving gently through your own threshold, I hope you give yourself a little more room to breathe. Transformation doesn’t always arrive with clarity. Sometimes it arrives with quiet. And sometimes that is enough.

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With warmth and curiosity,
Monica 🫶🏼
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