the winter blues

a meditation on sadness

I’m having a bad month. It’s January, so I could also say: I’m having a bad year.

I started having a bad month in December, just a few days after Christmas, for no real reason beyond the fact that I live in my own head, and I’m always making things difficult for myself in there. As part of the “what energy are you carrying into 2025” trend on social media, I posted a snippet from Anne Carson’s translation of Euripides’ The Bakkhai: Dionysos telling his maenads, “Okay ladies, up we get, no more crouching, no more sobbing.” I spent the last few days of December doing both of those things—but it’s better to get it out now, I thought, so I can begin the new year with a clean slate.

Midway through January, I am still crouching and sobbing.

The Bakkhai, Euripides, tl. Anne Carson

I’ve always struggled with seasonal depression, but this year it’s hitting harder—and earlier—than before. It’s the state of the world at large combined with the state of my smaller, more selfish world: my mom’s looming CAR-T cell therapy treatment and the uncertainty of her cancer prognosis and, somewhat embarrassingly, the rush of year-end round-up posts on social media reminding me that everyone seems to have done something fun or accomplished something worthwhile in 2024 while I didn’t go anywhere or accomplish anything. I’m entering my fourth year of a life divided down the middle between my job and caregiving. I’m struggling to focus, struggling to get out of bed in the morning, struggling to find enjoyment even in the hobbies that once brought joy to me. I’ve lost my appetite and have begun to slowly sink back into the restrictive behaviors of my eating disorder because it feels comforting and familiar; I started a crying log for the month and there are more days with checks next to them than days without. I can’t shake the feeling—the complete certainty—that circumstances will never again work in my favor, that I’ve already missed every window of opportunity for happiness or growth that has come my way, and that ahead there is only disappointment and grief.

With David Lynch’s passing, I’ve been thinking about a passage from his autobiography Catching the Big Fish: “In work and in life, we’re all supposed to get along. We’re supposed to have so much fun, like puppy dogs with our tails wagging. It’s supposed to be great living; it’s supposed to be fantastic.”

I’m not having fun, not at all. I’m afraid that I’ll never have fun again. I keep finding myself childishly wishing to be someone else, somewhere else, living a life that isn’t mine. I think, if I only— and I think, if I had just— and it doesn’t change anything. I can’t fall asleep at night and I can’t wake up in the morning and when I do, I’m still me, in my own bed, in my own life.

I thought social media might be making things more difficult for me. I tried to cut it out for a week. I didn’t feel any better, and in fact felt worse: lonelier, more isolated, and not able to stop mentally comparing myself to others despite the distance.

I had two weeks off from my job for the holidays but I spent most of it at home, frozen and numb and unable to convince myself to go outside and do something. I was unusually exhausted. I alternated between regretting actions I had taken almost a year earlier and worrying about events still years in the future. On January 1, I made a feeble resolution to try romanticizing my own life instead of envying the experiences of others; on January 3, I took myself to a museum, had a mediocre time, and woke up sick the following morning.

In early December I went back to therapy after five years without it, trying out a new therapist I’d been matched with on the basis of a checklist: anxiety, depression, grief, an eating disorder. I’ve spent the last month and half sitting in a chair and telling her that I feel hopeless, that I don’t know what I’m alive for if the only emotion I experience is sadness. She nods sympathetically and says, “I can see how it’s easy to feel hopeless when so many things are out of your control.” She doesn’t say anything else. I am reminded why I didn’t want to go back to therapy.

I can’t stop thinking about timelines. I try to predict future events and plan my responses to them. I think, I have at least five years until this happens and it should be fine if this happens in two years but what if it happens in three, or what if those two things happen at the same time. I give myself a migraine, a stomachache, another sleepless night. I ignore messages from friends because I am too busy being sad, and catastophizing, and wasting my life even as my life is happening to me. I still feel so tired. My subpar therapist has suggested going outside and breathing in the winter air when I feel myself spiraling, like the change in temperature can shock my nervous system into behaving differently. I stand on my porch: my brain doesn’t quiet down. I just feel cold.

I recently started listening to Louise Burns again, an artist I loved during grad school but an artist who, for some reason, fell off my radar in the years since. I’ve been especially obsessed with her 2017 album Young Mopes and its titular song:

Now I’m feeling sentimental
I can feel the weight of the moon
Now I’m feeling existential
Feel my heartbeat, hollow and dry

I’ve been looping it, over and over, like you do with one of those songs that seems to reach inside your ribcage and touch your sadness there—as if by listening to it, over and over, I might be able to reverse the effect: my heartbeat, light and joyful.

But I’ve been thinking, too, about this stanza from “Go to the Limits of Your Longing” by Rainer Maria Rilke:

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

And this excerpt from a letter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in August 1879:

Sometimes in winter it’s so bitterly cold that one says, it’s simply too cold, what do I care whether summer comes, the bad outweighs the good. But whether we like it or not, an end finally comes to the hard frost, and one fine morning the wind has turned and we have a thaw. Comparing the natural state of the weather with our state of mind and our circumstances, subject to variableness and change, I still have some hope that it can improve.

I don’t know what I hope I have. Maybe it’s still under there, buried beneath the frost, waiting to come back to me with the thaw. I’d like to improve in some way, a little less sadness and a little more peace. Maybe that’s the hope: I hope that I will.

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