An Autopsy of my Unspoken Feelings – A Philosophical Anatomy of my Winter Born Melancholy

Sometimes, without warning, a wave of unfamiliar heaviness brushes past me which is quiet, cold, and impossible to name. It comes like winter wind – invisible, uninvited, yet heavy enough to shift something inside me. There’s no reason, no memory, no trigger, just a sudden emptiness that settles in the chest.

So, let me ask you that have you ever felt a vague feeling of sadness or sorrow without an apparent cause, or a sense of melancholy or longing that lacks a clear reason, a feeling of emptiness or being lost that you can’t even explain…? All I know is that these jolts of sadness feel like echoes from a past version of me or maybe yours too – a reminder that healing is not linear and even strong people shiver sometimes.

Now, maybe you are thinking why it comes like a winter wind? Cold weather slows the world down, including your emotion too and winter has a strange way of touching wounds we don’t even know we’re carrying – a quiet shift in the emotional climate of the mind. So, the sadness that you usually distract yourself from finally catches up to you.

What I feel is that, sensitive souls are built different, like everything, they too feel seasons differently. People, who write deeply, love deeply, feel deeply, think deeply – don’t just experience life, they absorb it. For them winter silence turns into emotional silence. Cold wind becomes a reminder of everything they’ve carried and their heart becomes too quiet to hide its pain. Yet sometimes, it’s not just sadness, it’s longing maybe for comfort, for warmth, for the older version of yourself, for something/someone you lost, for a moment that never came back. The mind labels all these unfamiliar heaviness as “sadness”, but this isn’t actual sadness.

Obviously, growth doesn’t always look like progress. Sometimes, it looks like a sudden breathe that hurts and then unable to recognize this hurt and then when you start asking your friends or you try to search for it.

On such, many termed it as delusional; some referred it as a form of Seasonal Emotional Awakening (SEA) – where your psychological system becomes hyper–attuned to subtle cues that other ignores and when you tried searching about this, you got to know it as a Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) – which is a type of depression that goes in a seasonal pattern, also known as winter depression because many people feel it more intensely in winter. But, not everyone who gets winter sadness has SAD as it’s not always about depression.

Yes, I know you are not satisfied based on peoples opinion or what you just have found out when you have searched for it, because it’s neither delusional nor any sort of disorder. Some sadness isn’t biological. Some sadness is memory based – it’s your mind remembering something your heart hasn’t healed yet. The cold makes you feel everything you avoided all year. More merely, like a gust of cold wind that passes by and leaves an unknown sadness behind.

Trust me, based on my experience, this feeling is rare, beautiful and yet painful at the same time. It’s neither madness, nor disorder. It’s sensitivity meeting seasonality, emotion meeting environment, and memory meeting mood. Your mood dips – not into darkness, but into depth. I am not sure if this thing, that people like me/us feels in winter has a psychological name. But, it’s something only old souls feel or connect winter more. This is also why distant music, cold wind, quiet morning, and silent nights get amplified in your inner world – something familiar, yet unreachable.

Now, many of you reading this might be thinking, whys winter but not summer….?

Let me tell you, winter acts as a perfect catalyst to this emotion. Winter triggers the part of your brain that is responsible for reflection and emotional access. Which is why you suddenly understand emotions you couldn’t name before and due to this your inner monologue becomes poetic without trying.

Technically, winter carries sound differently. Cold air makes sound travel clear and sharper. A flute played far away feels like it’s entering your soul directly. Especially, melodic instruments like – flute, violin, xylophone, etc., vibrates in a frequency that awakens memories. Lost innocence, unspoken pain, unfulfilled love, dreams you kept aside, version of you that were softer –  that is why it feels “unrecognizable” but familiar. It’s like, you miss something, not a person, not an event, but a version of yourself. Winter brings it back not as a memory, but as a feeling. Your brain in winter becomes like an empty hall, even a faint note echoes beautifully yet painfully. What is “nothing” to others becomes “everything” to you.

This might be very wrong if termed as sickness because you feel what others ignore, and it’s a rare gift or undoubtedly it is one of the most complex emotional states a human can experience.

People understanding this, quietly shift themselves from their usual trajectory to a path that allows you to feel and see the world with a different lens where you get to know that you’re alive in ways that most people aren’t. This isn’t a problem; this is a gift – a rare one. You like exploring more about you. But staying there for too long can drain you. So, be careful. Explore it like you’d explore the ocean. Go in, feel it – but know when to return to the shore.

This is beautiful, right . . . because, it makes you feel alive as this comes from a place where your emotion, fear, memories, longing, nostalgia, loneliness, sensitivity, perceptive, etc., all meet and align together. Yet, it’s painful because it touches the part of you that still aches. You want to escape it because it exposes your wound. Yet, you want to stay in it as it makes you feel something real, raw, and unfiltered.

The emotion that haunts you is often the ones that define you. Not everyone will get this…! 😊

Sometimes, I used to think something was wrong with me because no one around me felt things the way I did. People who don’t feel deeply will always mock what they cannot understand. So, when you talk about something profound, they think: “Aree yeh kya bakwaas kar raha hai …!”

People today numb their emotions, distract themselves with phones, avoid introspection, fear silence, block uncomfortable feelings, don’t sit alone with themselves long enough to feel anything real and that’s the difference between them and people like us. Real sensitivity is rare. Most people avoid emotions, but we experience them, feel them, and connect with them.

People like us are emotionally wired in a rare way where –

·      we feel the energy of seasons,

·      sense subtle changes in nature,

·      feel nostalgia without a memory,

·      have a poetic soul,

·      process emotion through wind, sound, and atmosphere,

·      have a sensitive heart that listens and observe instead of reacts,

·      highly perceptive.

And this is not a curse, but something beautiful that others will never know. People who feel deeply usually grow up thinking something is wrong with them. Maybe…! Because, I do. And now, I know that not everyone is built to hear the wind, understand silence, or feel the ache of a season.

Some hearts are made deeper and mine is one of them. Winter gives you the permission to just feel fully, quietly, and honestly. And maybe, that’s why winter hits me differently, but for some, it is just a change in temperature.

 

 © Waquil Aziz Bhuyan