Outside, the storm has begun.
I’m sitting at my kitchen table, watching through the back patio doors as the first true snow of the season drifts into my yard. The trees have slipped into their winter coats overnight, branches holding the fresh white as if they’ve been waiting all year for this quiet transformation. Behind the house, the pond trembles at its edges — not yet frozen, but no longer fully free. Everything seems to hover in that delicate space between what it once was and whatever it is becoming next.
My feathered friends gather in the fading light, hopping and fluttering with purpose as they fill themselves before the night settles in. They sense the change long before I do. Nature never negotiates with the seasons; it simply adjusts and carries on. And as I watch the storm gather itself over the yard, I feel a similar stillness settling inside me — a quiet pause, a moment of reflection as the countdown to my fiftieth birthday begins.
Seven days until fifty.
Half a century.
A milestone I was never entirely certain I would reach.
It feels fitting that this reflection comes now, in the hush of early winter, when the nights are long, and memory rises gently to the surface. This season seems designed for looking back — not with regret or longing, but with a kind of knowing. The air itself feels wiser.
When I look back at the beginning of my life, what I remember first is wonder. I was born on St. Nicholas Day, December 6th — a day wrapped in old European traditions where children left their shoes by the door overnight, hoping to wake to sweets instead of coal. My mom always said this was the origin of Christmas stockings. Whether she was right or not never mattered to me; I loved the symbolism. Shoes waiting in the dark. Magic or mischief. Blessing or warning. A tiny ritual that mirrors the unpredictability of a whole lifetime.
And in those early years, my life did feel charmed. Two creative parents, siblings who loved me in their own unique ways, and a home filled with imagination, laughter, and the feeling of being held safely in the centre of something warm. My first five years were golden — soft-edged, storybook-bright, lit from within.
Then came that night on the farmhouse road—the moment that marked the fracture line in my life.
The before… and the after—the very moment where everything warped into something new.
Not because of the darkness itself, but because of what waited inside it.
That pivotal night, my mom and I found a hitchhiker left for dead on the frigid, snow-covered shoulder of our gravel farmhouse road. I knew her name once. Now that my mom is gone, that truth may remain lost forever. But this woman, she became the seed for the fictional Margaret Benson in my book — a character shaped from the shadow of a real woman’s suffering, whose presence imprinted itself on my childhood in ways I’m still trying to understand. That night was my first encounter with the darker side of the world, the side that doesn’t always hand you sweetness. Sometimes it hands you coal, sharp and unyielding, and expects you to figure out how to carry it.
From that point on, life unfolded in ways no child should have to navigate: abandonment, trauma, violence, alcohol abuse, and the silent ache of growing up too quickly. Those experiences arrived faster than I could process them, bewildering and heavy, shaping my beliefs about myself and about the world before I even had the language to explain them.
But as I sit here now — fifty shimmering on the horizon — I find that I can look back with a kind of gentleness I never imagined possible. I can trace the shape of my life without flinching. Every experience, both grace-filled and gutting, formed some part of who I became. And if you want to call it luck, or divine protection, or sheer stubborn spirit — something carried me when I couldn’t carry myself. Something whispered, Not yet. You still have chapters left to live.
It was difficult growing up with a mother who struggled with deep depression and anxiety. I learned very early that life was fragile. And out of that belief, I believed I would never grow old. I didn’t imagine myself ever reaching this age. Longevity felt like something meant for other people — people who hadn’t lived the sort of life I had.
But this past year changed everything.
After surviving decades of trauma, biking 600 kilometres on a broken hip, recovering from yet another major surgery, healing myself inside and out, writing a debut novel and beginning the second— I finally realised the story I’d carried about myself was outdated.
I wasn’t weak.
I wasn’t fragile.
I was resilient in ways I had never been allowed—or allowed myself—to recognise.
My life didn’t break me.
It carved me into someone intuitive, creative, perceptive, and impossibly determined to keep going. Someone who now understands that surviving is its own kind of brilliance.
As I plan the final details of my birthday celebration, I’m struck by how different I feel from the girl who once assumed she wouldn’t live long. I am healthier, happier, and more grounded than I have ever been — not just in my body, but in my mind and spirit. It feels as though I have stepped out of an old identity and into a new one, filled with clarity and steadiness.
And perhaps that is why winter feels so symbolic to me now.
St. Nicholas Day doesn’t just welcome gifts; it welcomes the season of stillness — the quiet weeks when the world settles and prepares for transformation. Winter is often mistaken for an ending, but I’ve come to see it as a beginning. A necessary pause. A deep breath before life blooms again.
Maybe it’s no coincidence that I was born in a season that asks us to slow down and listen closely.
My life has been a mixture of winter and wonder, coal and chocolate, shadow and spark. I’ve known the cold, but I’ve learned to kindle my own warmth — not the warmth borrowed from circumstance, but the kind built through resilience, introspection, and courage.
So as I step into my fiftieth year, I feel like a winter child preparing for spring — a woman who has weathered storms and come out luminous on the other side, finally aware of her own light.
And as I dance my way into my 51st year, I carry a deep gratitude for every person who has walked beside me, supported me, challenged me, loved me, or simply stayed when life became difficult. And for all those I have yet to meet — the ones who will step into the next chapters with me — I welcome you with an open heart.
Life has handed me both chocolate and coal.
Somehow, I learned to turn them into something beautiful.
Even in winter,
I rise warm. <3