Missing the sun

Post-Grad Community Ambassador Sofia reflects on wintering in London, and ways she's best found coping, in response to University Mental Health Day 2026.

I’ve never talked so much about the weather as I have in London. And nothing about it feels like small talk to me, it is the other way around, the weather is the most urgent topic for me to start a conversation, I need to validate if the rest are going through the same as me. Everything feels touched by the weather. I exercise, but the weather. I do my hair, but the weather. I commute, but the weather. I dream, but the weather. And within these small-but-heavy talks that I have with other Londoners I usually get two main answers: it is your first winter, you’ll get used to it, and the summer will compensate it all. For both responses, I internally lament having to negotiate with the weather, to adopt a business jargon with the climate. To let go of the first season as a learning curve; to have days of sun or warmer days but never both; to take my vitamin D every morning as a survival imperative. The weather is no small talk.

I’m from Mexico, a sunny place for people of all kinds. See, as Mexico is close to the equator, sun equals warm and there’s never an intermediate climate process where the lack of clouds will let the warm of the soil disperse. We also call the sun “el guero”, or “the blond”, and we humanise it as if it where that friend that wakes the earliest and is up for anything. I miss el guero and I miss the version of me that I was around my fellow friend. I can’t quite name what has changed, but I know that I have given up something important to be here studying my mostly desired masters program. My ultimate negotiation with the weather. I wonder what other negotiations other students have made: the food, the language or even the version of themselves before the postgraduate program, as I’m certain these studies come to transform us all.

What have I learned out of this business with the weather? The culture of wintering well. I’d say “wisdom of”, but I’m not there yet. To-winter as a verb means to connect with the season, to slow down, to rest and to explore the inside. The winter is not to be resisted, but embraced. Wellness has been recently more present as an aesthetic than as a process, more tied to the individual than to the collective and the environmental. An excess of the self can easily cause anxiety, and it is said that anxiety comes from ideas that can’t find a way to flow out. In a winter where the way out isn’t the body, writing has made me feel lighter. It has certainly been a bodily experience, to see how a ball of ideas melt into paper and free space on my mind for new ideas. I’ve also meditated and I’ve also cried, and it all has been a way of organising all that is inside my head, tied to my muscles and locked in my back. All that is only my first attempt to wintering well.

All of this was certainly more cathartic during the winter break, with more exposition but also more growth. Coming back to class, on the contrary, hasn’t been that poetic. Some days I’ve found myself with a blurry mind and a sense that my winter learnings were lost somewhere in my commute. Thinking of home in the middle of a lecture but also thinking of a lecture in the middle of a long-distance conversation with home. All this leaves me with no more than the conclusion that we’re not only one character but many, with many stories intertwined and that we can’t and shouldn’t expect our multiple layers to isolate depending on the stage. Acceptance on our substance, to be kind and to be gentle to the inside when the outside is cold and dark. Not trying to make sense of everything, at least not at the same time.

Of course, this is a work in progress. Again, business jargon that I‘ve learned to use with the weather. It’s almost the end of February and I’m still trying to take it slowly. For me and of course, to have a story to tell to el guero when we meet again.

University Mental Health Day 2026 takes place on Thursday 12 March. Explore UAL's resources, activities and events taking place across the week.