Winter Depression — Yet We Are
I think of myself as a creative person in the very literal sense, that I like to create a lot.
I would not even dare to call myself an ‘artist’. In my view, artists are masters of their craft, who inflict awe in their audience. Rather I would simply say, that I have a very vivid, active fantasy. I am, what one would name a daydreamer, though I think it goes slightly beyond this. A day dreamer just lets oneself be guided by their fantasy without clear purpose or direction.
I create worlds.
Winter Depression
I hate winter.
I hate it for so many reasons.
Obviously, there is the cold. I would be a person who could live in a desert without ever complaining. I like hot temperatures. I bloom in summer, doing everything from staying outside entire days to having regular sport schedules, even if the temperatures go in the middle thirties or higher (obviously degrees Celsius, duh).
It simply is what I like.
I find the cold of winter extremely frustrating for that one can never truly escape it.
This cold is directly linked to the second reason, why I hate winter: The lack of colors.
I crave summer for the full, healthy, juicy green of leaves. Trees in their full magnificence, the bluest of all skies, flowers and fruit, the full sun shine. Just everything seems more colorful in summer, whereas winter just offers black, white, and different shades of grey.
For me, the most critical condition in winter is something that goes past other people without ever concerning them as much as me:
Absence of light.
One of my greatest enemies to the current date are short days, short in the sense, that the number of sun hours is heavily limited. Short days mess with me in every way possible.
They destroy my sleep schedule, because I tend to get up and go to bed with the sun rising and setting. They disrupt my diet, because my body tries to compensate the lack of biochemicals produced by the body’s interaction with sunlight. It disrupts my social patterns, because I prefer outdoor activities over indoor, which is comparably difficult at cold, short days.
Basically, winter is unhealthy for me.
The greatest risk that emerges from this is something called winter depression. It is quite literally to be understood as a depression solely arising in winter, though it can last for longer and in worst cases be irreversible. So far, ever since 2013, I was suffering from this at least once per winter with different intensities and durations, but usually it lasts for one to two months.
At this point it is more than appropriate to point out the gravity of this mental sickness. Many people suffer from this seasonal sickness, which can have major consequences.
In 2014, it forced me to quit my studies. In 2015, it absolutely isolated me socially and in 2016, I barely managed to not suffer long term mental damage, even though this was considerably the mildest winter.
What I am trying to describe is the following: I am frankly horrified by winter. I fear and despise it. Every fall anew, I do not know if I will survive to the next spring.
One to live many lives
Admittedly, over the last few years, I got better at adapting to this circumstance, that will most likely follow and torment me every year for the rest of my life.
I found two helping structures – two pillars if you will – to help me sustain the shortest and darkest of days.
The first is rather simple: Humans.
I surround myself with people – many people – be it friends or strangers, each day as many and as much as possible. I love being in crowds, hanging with friends, or sit in cafés for hours and hours, writing, spectating the outside, and listening to the world around me. I find solace in the happiness of others and if I can increase it, I will attempt to do so as often as I can.
The friends, I surround myself with, can be the greatest of help without realizing it. They listen to my tiny problems, which otherwise could accumulate to become key issues, if I cannot get them off. They support me in my decisions and give me important advice. They care for me and gift me the simplest things that will help someone suffering from mental illness: An open ear and an open mind.
There are the very few people who I write for.
It is a habit I have developed over the last two years. I pick out a couple of individuals and write for them, everything from letters and think pieces to short stories or immersive, dream-like, surreal fantasies. It brings me joy, to see these friends, strangers, or new friends being happy just by receiving these comparably tiny gifts.
The second way to sustain myself through winter is somewhat more internal, yet equally important:
Fantasy
I thrive on creation.
In winter, you may ask me at any given time what I am thinking of, and there is an absurdly high chance that my honest answer would include either the words ‘fictional’, ‘abstract’, or ‘daydream’.
When at my lowest, I seem to almost flee into these fictional worlds. Here, I decide what happens. When I immerse here, it ultimately is I who controls fate and the emerging feelings.
To be precise, if you ask me, where I am in my mind at any given moment during winter, about seventy percent of all times, you will have to endure an elongated talk about Sasillion.
Sasillion – The Heart of my Mind
Created roughly two years ago, out of nothing but thin air and the desire to play Dungeons and Dragons, Sasillion has become my everything. It is the world I have created, home to 2.3 billion people, each and everyone with their own stories to tell about.
Sasillion is the most complex and intriguing thought I ever had. It is a fictional world in a fictional universe hidden deep inside my brain. If I were to be gone in an instant from one second to another, so would this world be gone with only the few pieces remaining that I had written down or shared with my D&D players.
Yet, as long as I am, so is it. Here, on my planet – with billions of years of its very own history – I am fate, god, but also the everyday man, woman, or child. Here no rules apply but my own. Here I can be whatever I crave.
But it is so much more than this.
The more I get invested into it, the more I feel the life that is slowly evolving in Sasillion. With each hour I spent there, building cities, societies, and landscapes, the complexity of this construct surprises me more and more, seemingly even getting out of my own hands; The hands that created it initially.
The folks I made now follow their own set of rules, admittedly made by me, though now so deeply instantiated, that I would not dare to alter them anymore.
I cannot alter them anymore.
Through months of daydreaming, the planet has grown a deep and complex history, based on its very own internal logic, to the point where I feel like I am merely reading from an already written book while I am the very author writing it.
I love Sasillion.
It is colorful. It is vivid. It is fascinating. It is deep, joyful, sad, harsh, beautiful, and eternally huge.
The lives lived here all are worth watching, like when I am sitting in my cafés spectating the strangers outside.
To stride through these historical, magical cities is like taking a walk through my hometown.
Running through the lush, natural, endless forests, I can feel the joy of life again during the dark hours of depression.
I could go on and on, but I think I can describe it best like this:
Sasillion has no winter.
