Is This the First SAD Year?
Depression is a constant, but I’ve never before seen my disorder be “seasonal-affective”
I grew up in a northerly place. Summers spun out like a golden thread in the subarctic, the smell and hush of cool twilight at 1 AM and the sun rising only a few hours later, only to swing heavily on the earth’s tilted axis and plunge us into the deep, frigid darkness of midwinter.
Long dark. You rise in darkness, go to work or school long before the sun rises. It comes up and goes down again in a handful of hours, stretching lunar-blue on either end and never reaching very far above the horizon. You return home under the same lit streetlights.
Growing up, I knew many people — peers and their parents — who struggled with that lack of light. Some moved south when I was still a kid, others held on just long enough for their children to finish school in one place before fleeing in search of healing sunlight.
I hate the term “winter blues” unless you’re expressly describing a color palette. Eyeshadow, maybe, ranging from the barest twinkly frost to “sunlit glacier” to the special kind of twilight that sets in at 3:30 PM when the sun dips down toward the edge of the earth, already.
