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Three Essays I Re-Read Every Winter
When the world outside looks bleak, these nonfiction works help keep me warm.
Essays are truly one my favorite art form. A good essay is capacious, bursting with ideas that linger inside your brain long after you’re done reading. There are some essays that dazzle me every single time I revisit them, because they’re so effective in probing a feeling or laying the writer’s perspective bare. Each time I reread these works, they pull me into a private world and change me in some way, then send me back out into the everyday world, ready to become a better writer myself.
I always find myself returning to these essays in the winter. Part of that has to do with their subject matter: they explore the subjects of seasonal affective disorder, grief, and the lonely resignation of deciding to stay in the closet, all very wintry subjects my mind gravitates to when the world is grey. January is always a period of solitude and low-key, functional depression for me, and curling up with good writing from people who have also known bleak times brings me a lot of comfort. These works also help remind me that even when I feel depressed and disconnected, I have the potential to reach and comfort other people, and to be reached and comforted.
