Previously in this series. Before there was #thestruggle, there was The Struggle, or more accurately “I’m struggling.” #thestruggle was sleeping through an alarm, a bathroom with every stall taken when you had a narrow sliver of time to use it. “I’m struggling” was crying every time I heard my alarm, or in that bathroom stall typing that message, or in my car as Christmas music played through my speakers. My favorite season, my birthday,…

Previously in this series. I don’t usually write about depression. I write. I write a lot. I write a lot about pop culture. I never write about me. I used to be on anti-depressants. I started them around the end of my first marriage. I was prescribed Prozac, the standard generic pill of the time. The problem was, I didn’t have health insurance. Yet I found a way to prove to the City of…

Previously in this series: Old Man Winter Ate My Sense of Adventure and Tips for Dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I don’t remember exactly when I realized that something was indeed wrong, but it must have been sometime just after my thirteenth birthday. A few months prior, my father and I had arrived in Toronto from our small university town in India. I had little idea as to what awaited me, although I had visited Canada…

Previously in this series. I’m a sufferer of Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’ve had depression off and on my entire life, and as I age, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) has become a reoccurring problem. Over the years I’ve developed a number of strategies to deal with it. While last year was one of my worst years for SAD, this year has been good so far -- mostly because I’ve implemented the strategies that follow. First, know…

I’ve always been a fan of adventures. As a girl growing up on the Great Plains, my earliest playtime memories are a sort of Little House in the Big Woods-meets-Xena mishmash. I was going to go on incredible adventures and consume the world with the kind of relentless tenacity that only prairie life can cultivate. As I grew, my fondness for adventures did, too. I devoured books. I played Dungeons and Dragons. I got engaged…

After an exhaustive and comprehensive study, doctors have finally been able to pin down the vague but persistent set of symptoms plaguing everyone and come to the surprising conclusion that every single American human suffers from seasonal depression. "It's true," Dr. Kim Bass, the lead scientist in the study announced dully from a podium, "not that it does anyone much good to know it. But now you know it. Everyone has it. That sinking feeling…