Seasonal Depression

The only way around it is through it.

Complex #1

I always struggle in the spring time. I find a lot of people tell me that November is their least happy month. It makes sense, daylight savings hits, and you’re suddenly just staring at December with a whole winter to get through. Christmas decorations usually carry me through the first snows, but this year I had 3 colds and a dog bite.

I remembered one time I had this deadline in my first year of architecture school, and the due date was pushed back by like 6hrs due to printing complications. I almost didn't make it. I had mentally prepared myself an energy budget for the initial deadline, and once that came and went I completely crashed.

I think its the same thing with spring. I mentally prepare a depression-resilience budget of like 4 months. And on the first cloudy or raining day in April, I crash. I had prepared for the hardship of winter but forget the wet, windy, grey, thaw of East coast spring. It hits me when I’m already down.

Complex #2

I love the view from the bottom. When things seem bad is when I experience the most intense gratitude. I’ve often felt this disposition is actually a pretty sick pathology. It would be much better to just enjoy things in real time. Whether it’s from the vantage of a loss in the family, like last year, or just routine seasonal depression, I feel poised in these times to see how far I have come since the last low. Sure, I may feel like shit but in these moments I’m sort of at a loss to do anything but look up.

Fantasms

During this round of seasonal depression, I am listening to Leif Vollebekk, remembering nights in my twenties. Rizz-feuled frolicking across the fields of Wolf Island, meeting the boys in the band, swing dancing like I knew how. Why do certain memories feel so varnished? I was happy, it’s feasible, if just for a weekend. Back in time, when a lover was only a friend, no attachments, addictions, gripes, just a friend but happily so. I think the common sentiment goes, “They were simpler times.”

In looking back, I wonder: How could that future not have loomed with the weight of a mountain, slowly nearing on a night drive? Invisibly but forcefully felt? But it wasn’t. I felt nothing coming because the future simply didn’t exist and because joy is more real than what I feel now. Evidenced in that it’s the joy of that time which impresses upon me now; not the other way around.

Creeping topographies of good times roll down into hard times, marshlands, with their dark earthly odours, yet ringing with the song of crickets and frogs: they love me best when I find them on my own. Find out on my own that every moment is pregnant with gold. It makes our sweetest memories shine decades later. I can only let it bleed from whichever moments will be tapped, but all roads can lead to some grateful end.