It’s six days now until the shortest day, or the Winter Solstice which sounds so much better than the shortest day. As I have said ad nauseum on this blog, I do not know if I have SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), but I am not sure I could feel any more flat today. The sky is uniformly a grim slate grey colour, there’s a slight breeze, which is less biting than yesterday’s was, and I know that, at the time of writing, it will be darkening within four hours. On days like this, I feel as if I would rather be anywhere else but here right now. Is it just me that feels like this?
Each day passes just like the one before. In a strange, perhaps self-pitying way, it feels like a struggle just to get through them. Vast sections of time have faded from my mind. What was I doing a couple of days ago? I took a train yesterday and the return journey happened on autopilot. I barely remember a thing about it. This happens every single year and I don’t know how to deal with it.
When I say “this happens every year”, I mean every year. Every year since I was a young kid. My mum helped me through the long dark winters, then no one did for a few years as I bumped along the bottom and for the last 35 years my partner has brought light through the darkness. Without her, I am sure I would never have made it.
I feel that I am staggering towards the shortest day and willing the first day of spring, 1st March, to come along as soon as possible. Pathetically, I fear, I am wishing a section of my life away for brighter days.
It’s the cold, too. These days, I live in a warm, snuggly house, but as a child, and indeed as a young adult, I was permanently scared of the cold. I feared the pipes freezing, the roof leaking, of the electricity packing up. The pipes only froze once, back in January 1982, and I felt my heart would jump out of my chest, such were my levels of anxiety. My partner allays those fears, with a Zen-like calm that is well beyond me. Her motto runs along the lines of, “If something breaks, we fix it.” I can’t get passed “If something breaks …:” It’s a heady mix of my depression and that less regular visitor, anxiety.
Family and friends keep me going at during the shortest days. It’s when I slip off alone, I start thinking too much and the winter blues wash all over me. And I’m tired. Sleep is hopelessly ragged with wild anxiety dreams, always bad in winter and I wake and get up feeling more tired than I was when I went to bed in the first place.
“Go to the doctor. Get it seen to.” Been there, done that. My last mental health engagement with a GP ended with the suggestion that I just get on with life because there is nothing else than can be done. So the dread of winter, in this instance, grows every year, peaking, I hope, with the abject misery of the shortest day.
I’ll be all right, I’ll get there. I’m lucky compared to many of you, I feel guilty that I am whingeing despite being in a better place than many of you and I should just pull myself together and get on with it. I’ll do that, of a fashion, but today the winter blues are at their absolute worst.
SAD or just sad, I don’t know. Either way it feels like shit, like it has done every single year that I can remember. Hope, beyond the Winter Solstice, is on the way. I can’t wait, even though I have to.
