March, and the Things I Cannot Control

I need to start with a confession:

I hate winter. Not in the charming, “I prefer summer” way. I mean, I resent the darkness at 4:30 pm. I resent the brittle air that hurts my face. I resent how everything feels suspended; color drained, movement slowed, possibility frozen.

Every year, I tell myself I will handle it better. Every year, by February, I am spiritually threadbare. But this winter was different. This winter was even more challenging. While the world looked dormant on the outside, I was quietly navigating something life-threatening on the inside. I haven’t talked much about it publicly. There is something about serious illness that rearranges your sense of privacy. It exposes you and protects you at the same time. You become acutely aware of how little control you actually have over your body, your future, other people’s reactions, timelines, and outcomes. And for someone who likes clarity, competence, and forward motion, that has been its own reckoning.

I have built much of my life around effort: work hard, show up, serve, name what’s wrong, try to be part of making it better. Whether I’m writing about white supremacy culture or wrestling with the ways white feminism distorts solidarity, there has always been an undercurrent of: If I do enough, maybe I can “bend the arc” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) just a little. Illness does not respond to effort in the same way. You can research. You can advocate. You can follow every instruction. And still, there are no guarantees. This Winter became a mirror for that. The trees do not negotiate with January. The sun does not rush back because I miss it. My body does not heal faster because I want it to.

I have had to practice surrender in ways I never have before. Not passive resignation. Not despair. But, surrender in the deepest sense, releasing the fantasy that I can control everything and choosing, instead, how I want to live inside what I cannot control.

Something else has shifted, too. Before this winter, my social justice work often ran on urgency. There is so much harm. So much to interrupt. So much to dismantle. And urgency can feel righteous. But urgency can also be fueled by fear. Fear of getting it wrong, fear of not doing enough, and fear of being complicit. Illness slowed me down in a way nothing else could. When your body demands rest, you cannot override it with ideology. When you are face-to-face with your own fragility, the performance layers fall away. I am less interested in being sharp and more interested in being rooted. I am less interested in winning arguments and more interested in building durable relationships. I have become less reactive and more deliberate. I still care deeply. Maybe even more than before. But the energy feels different. It's quieter and clearer. I don’t want my justice work to come from panic or fear anymore. I want it to come from love.

Love for the people most harmed.
Love for truth.
Love for a world that is possible even when I may not see all of it.

Facing my own mortality, even in the abstract, has clarified something: I don’t want to spend my limited energy posturing. I want to spend it contributing. There is a particular kind of fear that visits at 3am when you are dealing with something life-threatening. It is quiet and intimate. It asks questions you cannot answer. I have had moments this winter where I felt very small, very human, and very breakable. And here is what surprised me: Instead of hardening me, it softened me. I find myself lingering longer in conversations with people I love. I listen differently. I don’t rush the conversation. I don’t multitask while someone is telling me about their day. It has also made me more aware of how much I am loved by others. I am more aware of how easily we assume there will be more time. I believe in miracles, and I believe I can heal. I am staying positive. I am doing what I can. But I am not taking love for granted. Love feels less abstract to me now. It feels less ideological and more embodied.

There were days this winter when my energy was thin and my body unreliable. There were times when fear tried to take up too much space. Yet, every time I was able to show up for someone else, to write something that helped them think differently, to hold space in a hard conversation, to offer perspective, I felt something inside me steady. Service has always mattered to me. But now I understand it as medicine, meditation. Not in a bypassing way. Not in a “helping others so I don’t have to feel my own pain” way. But in the way that reminds me I am part of something larger than my diagnosis, larger than my fear, and larger than this crazy winter. Being even a small part of healing myself and others by interrupting harm, expanding understanding, connecting people, or creating spaces where accountability and compassion coexist gives me strength. It gives me energy, and it brings me a sense of fulfillment that illness cannot take away. I cannot control outcomes. But I can choose how I show up and how I contribute. That choice feels radical and grounding at the same time.

So, now it is March, and the light is returning slowly. When I went outside the other day, I noticed the air didn’t sting the same way. The ground is still messy. The trees are still bare, but something is shifting. And I realized: I am shifting too. I am not who I was when winter began. I am more aware of my limits.

More accepting of uncertainty.
More grateful.
More deliberate about where I place my energy.

I still dislike winter. I probably always will. But this winter stripped me of the illusion that I am in charge of everything. It forced me to practice surrender, not as defeat, but as trust. Trust in the people who love me, trust in the work I am here to do, and trust that even when I cannot see the full picture, I can choose how I respond and who I want to be. I can choose to heal myself!

As we move toward spring, here is what I want to carry with me:

  • Staying positive without denying reality

  • Refusing to take love for granted

  • Letting service fuel me rather than deplete me

  • Releasing control where it does not belong to me

  • Rooting my justice work in love rather than urgency

March doesn’t promise full bloom. It promises possibility. And right now, that feels like enough.

See you on the journey,

Robin

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Resources

PISAB: Undoing Racism and Community Organizing Workshop:

Center for the Study of white American Culture: https://cswac.org/

Embrace Race: Course talking with kids about race and justice in today’s world: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/embracerace-course-talking-with-kids-about-race-justice-in-todays-world-tickets-1980408842158?aff=oddtdtcreator

Robin Schlenger