📻 We, Unshaken

Permission to Be

Jasmine Monta

Dec 26, 2025

The body does not know time. It renews itself relentlessly, while the mind keeps believing it is aging.

Reading suggestion: now.

🎧 Listen also in Jasmine Monta’s northern Latvian voice ↓

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-4:00

There is still a dairy shop in my childhood town. You can buy sweet and sour cream by weight, cottage cheese by weight, cheese by weight, even a homemade cake by weight.

On a cold winter morning, my husband, my father, and I stop by the dairy shop and gather all of the above. That is my big event of the day.

The dairy shop is woven into the memory of my body since childhood, when I was sent there with a freshly washed half‑liter jar to get cream. I was a child and I worried.

As an adult, I express myself fully in the shop — chatting with the saleswoman (she’s a talkative one), examining the ingredients of the local gingerbread dough and allowing myself not to buy it, because I simply cannot understand how people in my childhood town can make dough with imported margarine when the dairy shop next door sells excellent butter.

My father and my husband stand behind me like a wall. I feel pleased with myself, and I feel I’ve earned this feeling, this posture, this invisible throne.

My childhood town is in the north. Rare snowflakes fall — almost imperceptibly, and yet.

I no longer have any illusions that a person with whom I don’t feel at home in my own skin could ever be my friend or ally. Full stop.

My winter holidays are more special than ever. Last year, my husband and I also traveled from the south to the north for the holidays — to my childhood land, which felt both close and frightening. This winter, my childhood land no longer demands endless adaptation to everything. This winter, it seems to meet me halfway simply by being — by existing, by standing.

It’s hard to say what exactly I’m doing here, in my childhood land. Something, anything, nothing. I go for walks, I go shopping, I meet friends, I visit a few relatives, but most importantly — I am not hiding.

I don’t feel like disappearing. I feel like being. Maybe that’s why my childhood land and I finally fit together.

It’s afternoon, light snow is falling, and darkness arrives early, as it does in the northern winter.

I put on a knitted cardigan, light a candle, and sweep my father’s kitchen floor. In the evening, we will all eat the cake we bought at the dairy shop, none of us will even think of turning on the TV, and the world will have changed forever simply because we did not allow anyone to crush our happiness.