Throwing the Switch: Seasonal Affective Disorder

Every winter, like clockwork, I. get. sad.

Like really sad.

It’s most difficult at night or on overcast days. Last winter, it was so bad, I started attending counseling. And I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t understand why it was impossible to feel motivated, why I felt like curling up in a ball and crying in the evening hours, why all I wanted to do was eat or sleep, why I gained weight so quickly. I didn’t understand it, at all.

Until one day last February, when I woke up to the sun shining and the birds tweeting and an unseasonably warm winter day and I had the best day I’d had in months. I was singing in the shower. I was smiling at strangers. I felt like I had energy zinging from my fingertips and the ends of my hair.
It was like someone had flipped a light switch.

And when other people comment on the change in me, I knew there was a connection.
I feel a little like a mad scientist somewhere is screaming, THROW THE SWITCH, IGOR! THROW THE SWITCH!

Photo credit

Like any other kind of depression, seasonal affective disorder stems mainly from things outside of my control. I can’t send the heavy Ohio clouds away or keep the sun from going down by 5 pm all winter. Sometimes it feels like I’m stuck in a fog or weighed down by a heavy load of bricks. For someone like me who is constantly moving and doing, this lack of motivation is confusing and frustrating and disempowering.

This year, I’m trying to be more proactive about my SAD. I may not have control over the weather or the sun. But I do have some measure of control and I am determined to find it. More on that, next post.

Source: tumblr.com via Elizabeth on Pinterest

Anyone else suffer from seasonal depression? How do you take care of yourself?

love, elizabeth

The Fitzgeralds: Weathering the Storm

I think most of us have an historical period that particularly resonates for us. For me, that decade is the 1920's. I am kind of fascinated by all of it - flappers, prohibition, censorship, women's rights, jazz, art deco, modernism, Freud, the Charleston, the speakeasy, talkies...I'm hoping that at least part of my dissertation will be focused on burlesque and circus in the 20's. There is something about this era of photography and music that totally gives me goosebumps. It's ghostly and almost frightening in its intensity. There is a kind of wild forgotten-ness about the period that I really like.

And my favorite couple of the decade...F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Though F. S. is the famous one for his many novels (esp. The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise), Zelda was also an artist and a novelist. F and Z were definitely the "it" couple at the time and their passionate but tumultuous relationship was well-documented. And even though I'm pretty sure Kyle and I have a healthier relationship than the Fitzgeralds, I sort of relate to them as two people who were very much in love and yet faced a great deal of sorrow and pain and fear. I guess it's not the storm but how you weather it.

"I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder." - Zelda Fitzgerald

"I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

F and Z were buried together and the epitaph on their grave is from The Great Gatsby:

"So we beat on. Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Stay tuned everyone! Tomorrow I will be announcing my VERY FIRST GIVEAWAY!!!