Imagine the feeling of standing on top of a barren hilltop in the middle of winter, with the darkness of night gathering around you already, even though it’s only 4:30 in the afternoon. You are standing thigh deep in snow, and additional snow is falling quickly around you, and not the soft, fluffy flakes slowly fluttering down out of the sky that are often featured in romanticized images. This snow is made of small, icy particles driven by a harsh wind. It feels like a hundred little knives stabbing at your face, and as you look through this onslaught, you see an entire landscape buried in the stuff, depriving the world around you of all color, and you know it won’t even begin to melt for months to come.
Now imagine this scene as a metaphor for an emotion. That feeling, symbolized by this harsh winter image, is the emotion of wintercearig.
Let’s get one misconception out of the way from the beginning: Wintercearig is not just a fancy word for seasonal affective disorder, the depression that settles upon many people during the prolonged dark and cold of winter. Wintercearig is a special kind of cold despair that makes a person feel something comparable to a bitter winter within themselves, even if the actual weather around them is sunny and warm.
