The Slogs

All fall I've been feeling around with the toes of one foot for the bar of cosmic soap I dropped a couple of months ago. I'd been standing in a metaphorical shower, in the dark, and I was doing okay until I dropped the soap. Well, yesterday I found it and in a nanosecond I slipped on it and landed on my can. Head over heels. Tin can over teakettle. And here I sit, somehow unable to get myself upright again. I'm unbelievably tired -- exhausted really; I'm if not depressed then I'm damned pessimistic about pretty much everything. I feel as if I'd mysteriously gained about 50 pounds, all in my feet and lower legs. I can't get my bearings, I can barely cross the room without bumping into furniture or scraping along the walls. (That last is pretty hazardous because the bozo that built this house surfaced all the interior walls with stucco; seems to me there was a really funny commercial not too long ago about a crazed housewife refinishing the walls with a stucco surface like unsheathed knives. It was funny at the time anyway; in this house it's a cruel joke.)

In desperation I looked up my biorhythms (remember that?) and found that sure enough, I'm below par emotionally, physically and intellectually. Hell I'm lucky to be able to type right now. Furthermore, I will just damned well be staying this way until December 22, another week, and (God is laughing here) the day of the Winter Solstice. Now, see, the Winter Solstice means a lot of things to a lot of people (they practically mount the Ringling Brothers Circus at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan in celebration of it), but what it means to me personally is the end of my inexorable slide into the miasma of depression. When the sun starts heading north again, and the days get incrementally longer, I am suddenly fine again. It doesn't seem to matter that I'm getting no more full-spectrum light on December 23 than I was on December 21, so it must be the PRINCIPLE of the thing.

So, while I wait for rescue, I contemplate the process. The autumn slide isn't so bad in itself, it's just that it is frightening, rather like catching the first aura of a migraine and knowing that it's just a matter of time before all hell breaks loose. You try not to look for the other signs, try not to surrender to it, try to stay in your body, try to relax (HA! -- that's the first thing they tell you to do in a migraine: relax, tensing your muscles only make it worse, as if you could, and as if it would matter), maybe even try to outrun the inevitable, try to rationalize the fear away. None of it makes a difference. This year I think I've reduced the crash-and-burn -- the place where I am today -- to the duration of about a week, which is progress; sometimes I've slogged through the darkest of swamps for months on end. I bet I'm fun at a party, if I went to any where there might be strangers while I'm in that condition. Imagine trying to have a diverting conversation with Eeyore.

So here I am -- trying some new tricks to dispell this not-quite-depression: I'm blogging, so I don't feel so isolated and can try to keep my thoughts and dreads going in the same direction; I have music going all the time while I'm awake, and singing along with it; and I'm going to try to get and sustain a little bit of a buzz on for the duration, with the practical aid of bourbon balls, Swedish glüg and my daddy's favorite egg nog recipe (the instructions are mostly to add more booze). The bourbon balls I can have one at a time (beginning with morning coffee), and the rest is easy after that. For instance, in making the glüg, I had two perfectly good oranges that I had zested, so I squoze them and added about a teaspoon of gin and drank it right down like a good girl. Gotta say I feel better already. Why didn't anybody tell me this before?

Thanks to all of you for reading this far -- you're true friends, and I imagine that most of you have walked at least one of these seasons with me, so this is not news. That makes your loyalty and patience all the more valuable to me.