When the Winter Speaks: A Season of Truth, Alignment & Choosing Myself

Winter Is Honest in a Way Summer Never Is

Summer lets you hide.

You can laugh with friends, run errands after work while the sun is still up, sit by the pool, fire up the grill — everything feels light.
Summer lets you pretend.

But winter?
Winter strips everything bare.

The days get shorter.
The cold sinks into your bones.
The darkness stretches long, and there’s nowhere to hide from the truth.

Winter doesn’t entertain you —
Winter reveals you.

It reveals the things you’ve buried.
It pulls up the questions you’ve tried to outrun.
It forces you to notice what (and who) is out of alignment in your life.

And this winter?

Winter cracked me open.

It showed me where I’ve been shrinking to keep the peace.
Where I’ve been carrying emotional weight that wasn’t mine.
Where I’ve been pouring into someone who doesn’t pour back.
And it also showed me the places where I haven’t shown up — the commitments I didn’t keep, the promises I made but didn’t honor.

Winter showed me truth without makeup.

Facing the Misalignment

It is painfully hard to keep walking forward when someone you love is standing still.

It makes you feel:

• guilty for growing

• responsible for their stagnation

• resentful of their comfort

• unsteady in your own direction

And winter makes you ask questions you don’t always want to face:

“Why am I still here?”
“Is this love… or is this familiarity?”

Because winter shows you exactly where the cold is coming from.

It reveals:

• the conversations you’ve been avoiding

• the emotional labor you’ve been doing alone

• the loneliness you feel even in partnership

• the truth that you can’t drag someone into a future they will not choose

That realization stings.

But it also frees you.

Choosing Yourself Without Abandoning Others

Choosing yourself does not mean abandoning the people you love.
But it does mean abandoning the versions of yourself that kept everyone else comfortable while breaking you.

For years, I confused self-sacrifice with loyalty.

I believed keeping the peace meant keeping myself small.
I thought loving someone meant carrying what they refused to lift, absorbing what they refused to face, and staying silent so they wouldn’t feel uncomfortable.

And let’s be honest — I am not the silent, meek woman type.
I am absolutely the
“Oh, we can argue”
type.

My tongue has drawn blood before.

But here’s what shifted:

I didn’t expect my choice to work on my physical health would lead me into a wider self-healing journey.

Coming out of depression…
Dealing with a health scare…
Walking around in a fog…
Feeling bone-tired and spirit-tired…

I finally chose my health — truly chose it — and that choice began clearing the clutter.

My weight held the anger, the betrayal, the hurt I’d carried for forty years.
And as I began releasing the weight, the truth underneath started rising.

We live under this false perception that we gain weight because we’re greedy, lazy, or “don’t know how to say no to food.”
But that’s not the truth.

The truth is:

• our hormones shift,

• our cortisol spikes from chronic stress,

• food becomes an addictive comfort when nothing else feels safe,

• and sometimes we use food as a coping mechanism because we don’t have a support system…

• or because we’re too embarrassed to tell the people we love what we’re really going through.

Weight is rarely just about food.
It is about survival.
It is about unspoken stories.
It is about carrying more than the body was ever meant to hold.

I waited for others to validate me.
To treat me right.
To love me in ways I couldn’t love myself.

But the real lesson?

Love starts at home.

I had to love myself enough — at 292 pounds — to say,
“I am not okay. Something has to change.”

Choosing myself was never betrayal.
It was alignment.

When Alignment Feels Lonely

No one talks about this part.

Everyone celebrates the glow-up, the new routine, the healing era…
But they don’t tell you that alignment will isolate you before it elevates you.
And that isolation isn’t just because you’re growing —
it’s also because you can’t explain what you’re going through when you don’t yet understand it yourself.

Healing quiets your world.
It shifts your relationships.
It exposes what’s real.

You can be cooking beside someone, laughing with them, sleeping next to them —
and still feel miles ahead on a path they have no interest in walking.

That loneliness?
It’s not the loneliness of being alone.
It’s the loneliness of being unmatched.

You start noticing:

• conversations with no depth

• lack of accountability

• emotional labor you’ve carried alone

• dreams that make them uncomfortable

• their silence when you need support

• their resentment when you grow

• their patterns looping because comfort > evolution

And winter forces you to sit with the truth:

You outgrow people you once survived with.

Growth without a partner beside you feels heavy — not impossible, just heavy.

But alignment demands honesty.
Not cruelty — honesty.

What It Means to Walk Forward

Walking forward sounds poetic on social media.
In real life? It’s work.

Hard.
Messy.
Courageous.

Walking forward means:

• holding love in one hand and boundaries in the other

• choosing actions over promises

• knowing your healing will trigger someone else’s comfort zone

• using distance as medicine, not punishment

• trusting Spirit even when everything feels uncertain

• letting grief walk beside you instead of stopping you

And most of all:

Walking forward means choosing the woman you are becoming over the woman you used to be.

It is choosing alignment over attachment.
Truth over fear.
Destiny over familiarity.

The Courage to Stay Open While You’re Changing

This part is hard.

Because growth makes you vulnerable, and vulnerability feels like exposure when you’ve spent years dimming yourself.

Staying open means:

• sitting with emotions instead of swallowing them
• speaking your truth even when your voice shakes
• listening to Spirit even when you don’t like the answer
• letting yourself be held by prayer, ancestors, and sisterhood
• being open to love — but unwilling to negotiate your peace
• Staying open isn’t about staying available to anyone.

It’s about staying available to your becoming.

To new boundaries.
To new versions of yourself.
To new ways of being loved — including self-love.

Because when you walk forward, life will place new doors in front of you.

You must be open enough to walk through them.

Willingly.
Softly.
With Spirit-led clarity.

Closing: The Winter of Truth

And as hard as this season is, I can honestly say:

As the leaves fall, I am also shedding.

I am not losing anyone this winter.
I am simply learning who can walk with me…
and who can only meet me where they are.

Both truths can exist without me abandoning myself.

I am choosing alignment.
I am choosing evolution.
I am choosing me — gently, consistently, without apology.

This is my truth.