Your phone gets quiet.
If you’ve ever gone through one of the darkest seasons of your life, you may have noticed something strange often happens. Your phone gets quiet. The people who were normally there suddenly seem busier, and conversations dry up. It’s confusing, because some of these people have shown up for you before. So why now, when you’re struggling the most, do you suddenly feel so alone?
I have a theory.
I think certain seasons, especially a dark night of the soul, are meant to bring a kind of isolation. Some transformations can only happen when the distractions are removed.
There comes a moment where you have to sit with yourself honestly and ask:
How did I contribute to where I am?
What patterns have I ignored?
What wounds have I refused to heal?
Where am I still blaming everyone else instead of confronting myself?
Not every painful situation is your fault. Some things happen to good people and some losses were truly unfair. But there are also moments where life forces us to stop running.
And secondly, part of this isolation is spiritual. Sometimes the only way we truly meet God is when everything else falls away. When nobody answers the phone and nobody is there to rescue us. Because eventually you realize: people cannot be your savior.
And if we’re being honest, sometimes we keep repeating the same cycles while asking different people to comfort us through the same lesson. At some point the lesson stops being who will save me? and becomes who do I become now?
That’s the winter season. The season where your life gets quiet enough to finally hear your personal elephant in the room. Where you stop outsourcing your healing, build faith, and realize God just might be there in the silence with you.
Another thought that came to me about all this.. What if we taught children about dark nights of the soul?
We teach people how to chase happiness, achievement, productivity, success. But very few people are taught how to survive despair. So when a true winter season arrives, many interpret it as: my life is over. Something is wrong with me. This feeling is permanent and maybe there is no way out.
But human life has always moved in seasons. Nature itself teaches this. There’s blooming, harvest, death, dormancy, waiting, rebuilding. Yet we expect ourselves to remain emotionally summer-like all the time. That’s impossible.
If we were taught that you will have seasons where you feel lost, moments where life breaks your heart, periods where you cannot see meaning and may not even want to keep going… those experiences might feel less like personal failure and more like part of being human.
Finding meaning in suffering is not the same thing as saying the suffering was good. Some losses are horrifying and some grief permanently alters the person. So the beauty is not I’m glad this happened. The beauty is:
Something in me still chose to live.
Something in me still found God.
Something in me became deeper, softer, wiser, more compassionate, more awake.
Suffering gifts you by stripping illusion. It reveals what is most important. It humbles the ego and opens compassion. Many people become more human through pain than they ever became through comfort. But the process can feel unbearable while you’re inside it.
But, while you’re in it, use the suffering. Go within. Get curious about it. There are lessons and experiences that cannot be found anywhere else but in the dark. That is the light.
This is a winter season, not the end. I promise you, spring arrives again.
As a side, if you are deeply suffering please do not hesitate to reach out to someone and seek help. What I am speaking about in this post is the ‘doable’ suffering and pain. There are moments for some people that they need to reach out and gain perspective and support. That is the strongest and most important thing to do in those moments.
