On the coming darkness

The recent darkness here, or more appropriately my recent silence, was due to computer issues. My aging iMac was giving me the spinning pinwheel of death much too often, and my backup (an even older Mac Mini) had a hard drive too small for my current needs. So after days of trying to install the OS again on the iMac, and then trying to erase the hard drive for a clean install, I finally just bought new hard drives for each. All a pain in the ass. But now my iMac is fresh, with lots of new space. And my backup mini has everything I might need on it. A small bit of light!

But as to the coming darkness: there is the literal darkness of winter, and, especially of this weekend's time change, and then there is the metaphoric darkness of the inevitable affective decline that sets in as the days get shorter and first the evenings and then the afternoons get shorter and darker. After the change it is usually just a few weeks before I'm kicked to the ground by Seasonal Affective Disorder.Yes, in addition to the dysthymia, and the increased chance of major depressive episodes, I am subject to SAD.


I remember what I think is my  first bout with SAD; I was at college, living in a  leaky old house in the midwest, in full winter, when there is nary a tree to slow down the winds from the north, when the sun refuses to rise fully in the sky and then disappears by late afternoon. I had my room filled with houseplants and several aquariums (yeah, I know: it is Latin and the official plural could be aquaria; but the Romans did not have this word, and it was coined by people for whom Latin was a dead language). The humidity froze onto the inside of the glass windows, making the panes look antique, and I would notice the ice inside my room and I would start to think about warmer places. What I mostly remember of that winter is wanting desperately to be somewhere else. I sent away for brochures from the universities of Washington and Oregon, though I knew full well that my family could not afford to send me out of state. It could barely afford to send me in-state. But what stands out now is the desire to go elsewhere:  I can look back now and see the beginning of the trend that would ruin my life: severe, existential discontent and the thought, supported by no real evidence, that maybe I might be  happy under different circumstances. Winter, I seemed to realize even then,  though certainly not cognitively, is not to be endured; it is to be fled.

Last year by late November, within a few weeks of the time change,  I was in the middle of a full crisis (suicidal thoughts, despair, sense of hopelessness.... You know,  the USUAL), and one afternoon I was finally forced to do the one thing I most hate to do: ask for help. I sent up the Bat Signal, in this case a brief and clear email to my friend David.

"David," I wrote, "I don't think I'm going to make it."

Thinking of that now, on the one hand I can look back on it from a slightly better frame of mind, better enough that at moments it is hard to imagine that that was really me writing those words and waiting to talk with him, needing to talk with someone because I was not sure if I had the endurance to face life through another night. On the other hand, I always know full damn well it was me, that I was and am broken beyond belief and the mere thought of those words makes me want to roll into a fetal position and cry. How, I wonder, did this ever happen to me? Yes, that was me, and what's worse, I can all too readily imagine it happening again, perhaps a few short weeks from now after the literal and metaphoric darkness has taken its toll.

Which is why when I first saw the reminders to  turn back clocks this weekend, my only response was to wonder if I can survive this, and for how long.