S.A.D. Girl Autumn
I have confidently touted never having experienced Seasonal Affective Disorder before. I can now tell you with that same confidence, this is not true. What’s more probable is that I’ve never been so in tune with myself to notice just how much S.A.D. impacts me.
Self-attunement is a double-edged sword, a superpower with a heavy cape. I feel things in specific places in my body; I notice my breathing; I experience emotions and feelings and continuously evaluate what’s driving them just below the surface. And honestly, it’s exhausting to be this aware all the time. It’s infinitely exhausting now that the sun shines approximately 3 hours per day, notwithstanding the gray sky that seems to swallow up most of those precious hours. So, this year I am embracing my unwilling but committed participation in S.A.D. Girl Autumn.
My personal sabotage/survival mechanism during this season is a posture of bingeing Rom-Coms and movies from my childhood. I usually shrug off romantic comedies with ease, favoring a psychological thriller or an action/adventure. But not today. Not the last couple of weeks. I’m devouring them voraciously, clinging to the warm blanket of predictability and leaning into the sappiness that somehow combats the S.A.D.s, if ever-so-slightly.
My other small comfort is the fireplace in our cozy, richly hued and cavernous living room, the flames of which I have basically maintained from waking to sleeping, every day for the last 3 weeks. Even on the days when the temperature has broken through the chill of the season, I just fling the doors wide open so I don’t suffocate myself. But I will not extinguish the fire thankyouverymuch.
I am sleepy.
I am restless.
I am bursting with ideas and innovation but I feel like I’m tied to a leash that’s wrapped around a steel post, the whole lot of us unable to move.
I feel stuck.
I get discouraged.
I let the colorful little dreams in my head start to fade a bit.
I am a creature in search of clarity, always clarity. Not certainty, that’s very different and I am wholly unconcerned with concrete. I am only seeking to find more definition, deeper contour, subtle highlight, nuanced gray space… just a little more form to the ever expanding picture. But during S.A.D. Girl Autumn, it feels like the picture takes a long, slow soak in a mud bath and never washes off. Everything is soupy. Nothing is clear.
So I use words like “everything” and “nothing” with far more regularity than my normal cadence would allow. But this is S.A.D. Girl Autumn, so sweeping generalizations and black/white thinking are here whether I want them or not. I try not to shoo them away from the sofa because they likely just want me to understand them. Kind of like me right now, writing this with the small hope that you might understand me just a little bit more in a time that feels so cold and murky and disconnected and unclear and dreary.
Maybe what I really want is for me to understand me and love me in this place, too.
A place where I am not measuring a single thing I do, wear, produce, perform, eat, write, drink, or say.
Maybe sadness is just as important to allow in, with the deep knowing that joy inhabits the same space.
All of it is me, and I am learning to welcome all of myself home.
