SAD and Other Winter Miseries

There’s something about this time of year isn’t there? The season changes and the leaves fall off the trees and everything starts to die. Some people find this beautiful, and, in a way, it kind of is. But there’s also something unbelievably depressing about it – because it signals the onset of winter, in which there will be no warmth, and no light, and probably quite a lot of rain and snow.

I live in the UK – which is depressing enough in itself because it rains for about 89% of the time (specific amount, I know, but I thought 85 was too low and 90 might be pushing it) but it’s also October now – the time of year when it gets really cold and really dark and rains even harder. It’s the time just before Halloween, when the pumpkins appear in the shops alongside all the Christmas stuff that they insist on putting out on the shelves as early as September because, you know, people really want to buy Christmas wrapping paper and cheap mince pies at that time of year. Who wouldn’t, right?

So this is what starts to happen to me around this time of year. I become morose and start to feel like the life is being leeched out of the world. I don’t mean this in the simple way that everyone hates winter; I mean that I genuinely come to believe that the light is seeping, or bleeding out of the world and that it’ll never come back (I must know, somewhere in my head, that it will come back, but when I despair I can never see past the immediate).

Last year, before Christmas, I nearly killed myself because of it. There were other things going on then too, I should say, and these exacerbated the problem (I was failing my PhD, for one thing, which never does much for a person’s self-esteem), but the winter weather and continual darkness did not help either because I was working very hard and never seeing daylight and I felt like my life was very rapidly running away from me without me even having a chance to notice.

It was during that time that I started to feel that the world we now live in is really not conducive to happiness any more. The weather is going to continue to get worse, the darkness is going to continue to close in, but the world itself is gradually becoming more and more squeezed and pinched by circumstance and the truth of it is that, even if you don’t have a tendency towards depression, there is just nothing much left in the world to make people happy.

I am now dreading the end of this year because, despite several changes in my circumstances over the last few months, my life has not become better and I’m hard pressed to decide whether I’m worse off now than I was before. But that’s something else, and will only lead to me detouring into a long rambling moan about how awful my life is right now – so I won’t go there.

To get back to the point, then, the end of the year is depressing to me, not because it’s dark and cold, but because it serves as a physical reminder that there is just nothing pleasant left in the world. When it is light outside, it isn’t white light, it’s grey and drab and filtered through a sheet of driving, drizzling or just plain dirty rain. Everything’s wet and muddy and there’s a smell in the air; damp earth and leaf mulch.
But it’s not the weather that gets to me though – not really. This is only another thing that adds to the miserable atmosphere. It’s the dark that gets to me more than anything, or rather, the absence of proper light.

The only relief I’ve managed to find from this, in the past, is when I’ve gone out to the supermarket.

Ok, this is going to sound weird, but last year before Christmas I was spending a hell of a lot more time in the supermarket than anywhere else. It was like my personal haven – I would go there every single day to stare at the cheese aisles or the magazine racks, going largely unnoticed by everyone else but, all the time, in the pits of despair. I did this, just in case you were wondering, not because the supermarket is a particularly fascinating place, but because the lights in the supermarket are just the right shade of white to simulate proper light (and by “proper” I mean real, happy daylight sort of light.)

This is a marketing ploy – I know – used by supermarkets all over the Western and possibly also the Eastern world. They make the place look as inviting as possible using crafty lighting techniques and displays and it makes you feel like you’re in a happy place so you spend more money because you’re in a good mood. It’s a tactic. I know. But I totally fell for it last year.

Anyway, my point, really – aside from pointing out that supermarket chains cash in on people with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) – was to highlight that I have SAD and that it makes the last part of the year a pain in the arse *British expression* for me. I go through two or three months during which the year winds down and I become progressively more crazy and, by the time I get to Christmas, I usually just want to kill myself. I often spend Christmas Day hiding from other people because I really don’t want to get involved with their celebrations. People call me a scrooge, but it’s not hatred of Christmas that I feel, I actually have fond feelings about it. It’s just that, somehow, the bright blaze of joviality on Christmas Day is worse than all the darkness and crap that leads up to it. Because when it’s over I know I have to go back into the dark and cold and crap for two or three more months until it gets to spring – and I can’t handle that.

Getting used to it once is hard enough, getting a safe haven of light and joy and then going back into it again is quite another thing. For me, Christmas is a bit like Sundays used to be when I knew I had to get up for school the next day – the whole of Sunday was ruined by the thought of that; so the weekend, which should have been a nice time, was made horrible because it was only a short stopgap between horrible stretches of week.

If you know that more hell is coming your way then you can’t really enjoy heaven for a day can you?
So that’s how I deal with my SAD feelings. I avoid light and I get used to the dark, and I go quietly mad. Last year I spent most of Christmas lying on my bed staring up at my ceiling, waiting for it to be over. I think I had the radio on at one point. I couldn’t do much else. I didn’t want to do anything else.

I was so depressed that year and, as I said, I really seriously considered killing myself.

SAD is difficult, and I think that if I look over my life, I have always had it in some form or other. My fear of the dark probably comes from another source though – but that’s probably another topic. The SAD, however, has certainly become a lot worse in the last couple of years. And this is what I really want to talk about because I think that, as a global problem, SAD is spreading and worsening.

So, are you ready? . . . Here goes . . .

The reason we’re all so miserable is because the world is just worse now.

Simple thought, I’ll grant you. But it’s true.

People have far too many other problems to worry about now. The end of the year is no longer a slowing down time. There is no time to hibernate and make a cosy space in the dark. There is too much work to be done – saving the planet, repairing the economy, pandering to the demands of our various governments who want us to work harder and scrounge less. All of these pressures and worries become mixed in with the feeling of misery caused by the cold and dark – because weather and seasonal changes link to mood and because emotions become attached, very easily, to the things that go on around you. This is when suicide starts to look attractive. When it is not just one small thing that’s getting you down and which you can simply dismiss, but when it is everything in your life and in the world around you and there is, seemingly, no hope that it will ever be better. This is when you – or I, in this case – begin to question the point of it all.

My point here is not that SAD is bad – although it is – but that the world is not helping to alleviate it. Maybe because the world doesn’t understand it. It’s not just people moaning about the weather, it’s not just people looking at the world and feeling dissatisfied with it. It’s real despair.

Imagine that the world was ending and you were alone in the dark and shivering. That’s what it feels like. It’s frightening. I have been in floods of tears, screaming and twisting like a crazy person before now, simply because of this feeling. And it needs to be better understood, especially if you’re going to expect any sort of useful contribution from people at a time of year when they just want to crawl into a hole and not wake up again.

People need time to deal with things. And the world is just not an accepting place.