Photo via Wikimedia Commons
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, and my beloved winter holidays were sacrificed to my brain and its chemical failures.
After years of questioning whether Seasonal Affective Disorder was a real condition, I realized that it was indifferent to my skepticism. SAD doesn’t need you to believe it exists, it makes itself known. Still, I was no stranger to the psychiatrist’s office, which somehow made me even more reluctant to say “I’m depressed.” I thought of the poem “Not waving but drowning” and felt it keenly, but still wanted to choose something less dramatic than “drowning.” So I chose “struggling,” and I certainly was.
In my wisest years (or in years that my boyfriend figured out that my persistent black mood was biological), I would be able to deal with it medically or behaviorally. An uptick in anti-depressants, or a dreaded increase in intake of sunlight in a part of the country that became bitterly cold when the days shortened, would work. However, some years there were other contributing factors that I thought might explain the emptiness. I wasn’t self-aware enough to figure out why I wanted to lay down on the ground, cheek melding to the cold pavement, rather than continue to walk the extra 50 feet to my dorm room. Some years I would try to exercise more, as if I could outrun the change of the year. For the length of a 5k I was happy again, but the endorphins would be blunted shortly after; I was the fittest, most depressed version of myself that I could remember.
In addition to the benefits of exercise, credentialed medical professionals say, as if it’s obvious, that a natural light lamp is the key to feeling better. That it’s just 20 minutes right away in the morning, and then you’ll be fine. I dream of inventions that would make this possible — sun lamps in the vanity mirror of my tiny Hyundai, or an old fashioned-looking desk lamp that would blend into my very visible circulation desk. Maybe a UV light that attached to a hairbrush? My mornings are a flurry of activity, as long as I can pry myself out of bed. I wonder who has a life of leisure that accommodates luxuriating near one of these hulking lights every morning. I already wake up at 5:45 for work, and I have a strong feeling that rolling it back to 5:25 would only devastate my sleep-craving brain further.
When students at my job asked about my bloodshot eyes, I assured them it was allergies. Allergies are convenient. Allergies are impersonal. Allergies are something that you can discuss with every person on the planet, without fear of discomfort or judgment.
Allergies are treatable. And, at least in my case, so is seasonal affective disorder. I remain conflicted on the usefulness of the sun lamp, even as its $150 worth of harsh light shines directly into my eyes. On days where the long dark tea-time of the soul seems to start with my morning coffee, I plug it in and place it on the floor next to where I sit. I worry that I will be judged, or that some students at my school will see it, know what it is, and whisper about my shortcomings. However, teenagers can be oblivious, as a rule, and I am strange enough that they don’t think much of a lamp on the ground.
Beyond the light cure, after a particularly sob-filled winter two years ago, Wellbutrin once sucked all the cobwebs out of my brain. A few days after I started taking it I woke up feeling like the concrete that had shot through my veins was breaking up and releasing me to accomplish goals beyond brushing my teeth and feeding my dog. A couple of weeks into the regimen, my fiance and I went to Disney World; I felt my eyeballs suck all the Orlando Vitamin D in greedily. I was changed, and while I know it was all in the timing and the bupropion concentration, I will forever link hugging Pluto with a resurgence in my desire to be alive.
Still, there are no guarantees. In mid-November I heard a song I’d listened to on repeat all summer and was shocked to discover, for the first time, the desperation and sadness in it, notes like knives hidden in the chorus. It was enjoyable while the sun shone, but almost unbearable in the dark at 5pm.
“It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas” has become a warning sign for me, and not a carol. My life is not the same in my formerly favorite time of year. It’s important to have those realizations, to acknowledge that weeping in a Dunkin Donuts or sleeping immediately after returning home from work, only to go back to bed at 9pm, may not be healthy. It can be equally crucial to love and be loved by a person who texts you and asks you to report on your “glooms,” concerned that you’re slipping into darker territory. “Struggling” and the “glooms” are code words that we use to gauge how I feel; their deployment is as obvious as buying pet-friendly snow melt and conditioning our skis. When the sun and the warm weather return, we pack them away like mittens to be used at the next sign of frost.
Tags: depression, e. sparling, health, seasonal affective disorder
Related Posts
Adventures in Immigration: Winter Blues and Culture Shock
Tips for Dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder
The Winter of My Discontent: On Seasonal Depression
The Circumference of Despair: On Depression and Language
Old Man Winter Ate My Sense of Adventure
“Snoring Through Midnight”: Nights at the Sleep Clinic
Have you been tested for vitamin D deficiency? Damn near all of my SAD disappeared after I got on the appropriate dose.
My sympathies on having an invisible disorder. Everyone is so slow to understand about them.
This is what I was going to mention.
Backstory — I have IBD and poor nutritional absorption. In June 2013, I had a flare up and my hair started falling out. This has happened before and loading up on zinc sulfate usually stopped it. Several doctors later and no one has figured out why it’s falling out, despite multiple tests for deficiencies and thyroid. In October I started massively loading up on vitamins and mineral, in the hopes that one of them would help. It has helped that problem a little, but an unintended consequence was that my SAD has almost disappeared. January is hell on earth for me, but this year has been fine. No tears, no fetal position, nothing.
TL;DR — I bulked up on vitamins for an unrelated condition and my SAD has mostly disappeared. I’ve been using a Vitamin D spray to avoid the non-absorption problem.
Thank you for this. Although I’ve lived with generalized anxiety disorder and depression off and on for most of my life, this is the first year I’ve really noticed the season affecting my mood so much. I’m just coming out of a month-long bout of anxiety and depression that had all kinds of physical repercussions, including insomnia (still working on that) and gastritis so bad I couldn’t eat much of anything for weeks. I’m still having occasional bad days, but finding a new therapist and changing my meds have worked wonders. And for what it’s worth, I’ve always kept quiet about my depression and anxiety around coworkers and people who aren’t close friends or family, but after it became impossible to hide this time (I had a breakdown at work and had to be taken to the emergency room), I’ve been amazed at the amount of support I’ve gotten, and people who have come up to me privately to talk about their similar struggles with depression and other mental disorders. I’m fortunate to have a job with great benefits and wonderful coworkers, but I really think it would benefit everyone if we’d be just as open about mental and mood disorders as we are about allergies.
“Still, there are no guarantees. In mid-November I heard a song I’d listened to on repeat all summer and was shocked to discover, for the first time, the desperation and sadness in it, notes like knives hidden in the chorus. It was enjoyable while the sun shone, but almost unbearable in the dark at 5pm.”
It’s so interesting how reactions to art can tell us about our moods at different times. I was feeling unsure about if having a sun lamp and using Vitamin D supplements was really improving this winter for me, and then I stumbled upon this poem that I read last winter and felt IMMENSELY COMFORTED by:
The bottom of the town might open up
or influenza. Or everybody on the planet
finds a lump. Some man might plan
even now some foreign words to live
in the future’s memory–as Kristallnacht
takes up space in ours. Saint
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Bubonic
Plague. Consider now the length
of good times we’ve indulged in,
consider the bliss of sullen bus rides,
the paradise of trouble on the job,
the incommensurable dream of sexual
frustration, the joy of being mad and unfulfilled,
the glory of a night alone, lonely,
watching sitcoms; left out of the world.
On the other hand, this may be remembered
as the dawn of the golden age, wherein
after six millennia of disaster followed
on disaster, forever after no disaster comes.
Then this loneliness will never be redeemed.
If we never starve this bread will never seem
in hindsight to have been a feast of pleasure
is part of what I mean. But look at the books.
Consider the odds. We will very likely starve.
It’s still a beautiful poem, but it was a little disturbing to realize that last year, I was comforted by the thought “at least when the world ends I’ll be grateful for all these sad nights I spent alone watching Netflix!”
TL;DR– emotional reactions to art are illuminating, and my sun lamp is working.
Please can you tell me the author of that poem. I find it very beautiful, and, yes, immensely comforting!
Jennifer Michael Hecht. She’s amazing, one of my favorite poets and an amazing author and historian as well. AND I actually know her in real life so I get to brag about that!
Has anyone else’s SAD been worse this year? Where I live, we got socked with a lot more snow last year, but somehow this year is the year I want to hibernate.
Yeah, mine and my mom’s have been awful this year.
Mine has! I had a really dark December, and I could FEEL it every time the sun went down. Dunno why this time.
Mine always takes a bumpy while to settle in, fluctuating in response to whether/how much travel, family and illness happen in November/December. But bright sunlight reflecting off the snow that indicates it’s probably not in the single digits is actually the cheeriest weather for me, around these parts, so your account is unsurprising.
YES to the incredulity that doctors seem to think, “Oh, yeah, no big deal to sit next to a bright lamp in the morning.” I know dozens of doctors and none of them have that kind of time either. But somehow they seem to think it’s going to be advice everyone else can follow.
YES to the incredulity that doctors seem to think, "Oh, yeah, no big deal to sit next to a bright lamp in the morning." I know dozens of doctors and none of them have that kind of time either. But somehow they seem to think it's going to be advice everyone else can follow.
I call it The Doldrums, and its effect “going into my rabbit hole.” Peak is usually end of January. Sometimes I can feel the Doldrums looming during the month of September, and on those years, they don’t tend to wear off until April or May. Two years ago I canceled my own birthday party because it was too overwhelming to find shoes which matched my dress, and if I couldn’t so much as select a pair of shoes there was no way I deserved a fancy, romantic dinner; the year before that I went multiple days without speaking to another person– no small feat when you live in a household of five. The lesson I learned from those years in particular is that snow? Very much Not Good for me.
This year, we have a house with a sun porch and better natural light. I try to go outside every day there is sunshine, even if it’s in the teens. Here it is February, my birthday right around the corner, and as of yet I haven’t sunk all the way back down my rabbit hole. I’m sort of hanging out the top, feet dangling, but shoulders still above ground. The Doldrums seem to be staying more or less at bay. I don’t know how to describe the relief of that, nor the dread that I am in fact stalled in windless seas and just don’t see it.
The Doldrums, what a great way to put it, so much better than SAD. It used to make me feel like a shy kid at the doctors when trying to discuss Seasonal Affective Disorder via it’s acronym. The Doldrums however has a kind of fire and brimstone onomatopoetic quality to it. I’m sure if it was renamed that then more people would come forward and tackle it head on.
The above tips as well by the way are spot on. Used to cut me up from Novemeber right through until around March but a full spectrum lamp, a sturdy daily dosage of Vitamin D and a brisk cycle/jog/walk when I can have/make the opportunity competely changed the winter for me. It might well be my favourite season now come to think of it. It’s beginning to look a lot like….you know the rest 🙂
feeling like the concrete that had shot through my veins was breaking up and releasing me
Perfect and beautifully put.