Blame the Weather

I am depressed.

I’ve been having more good days than bad ones lately. This is indicative of almost nothing. If I were writing this past February, I would have been doom and gloom and full of rageful brooding. (Oh, nothing personal, that is my modus operandi when very depressed.) So, what was different about February? It was winter. Where I live that means slate grey skies for weeks on end; low, concrete clouds. A late sunrise followed by an early sunset. Everything is grey and faded and dead. Now it is summer. It is hot, unbearably sunny, full of blue skies and puffy white clouds. The grass is green and long. The leaves are green and rustling. The birds sing and the bunnies hop. So I am happier and more buoyant than I was in February.

I am a victim of the weather. I hate that atmospheric conditions can fuck with my mood. I wish I knew why that was, not that it would make anything better, just I like knowing the reasons why. My guess is that there is some sort of evolutionary reason why human brains are geared to respond to weather conditions. Probably something to do with productivity or hunting or something that doesn’t mean much in a modern world in which we insist on trying to ignore any connection we as humans might have to the environment. But it isn’t just me. It is well documented that people in general feel blue during the winter, and it isn’t just because school lets out in summer that we enjoy it so much.

I should probably clue you into something: I am writing from dark depression today. You see, the past four times I wrote, I was feeling fairly good. I was writing from light depression. But right now, I am tired, angry, sad, and in a very dark place. Oh, don’t be alarmed, it happens. Today’s dark place is brought to you by the cast and crew of the West Wing and my own jumbled thoughts. I’ve been watching the West Wing lately, a brilliant American TV show about the staff of the White House. The episode I watched tonight the was finale of season three. The President had to decide to assassinate a terrorist, and a Secret Service agent was tragically killed while buying flowers for the woman he was starting to love. The episode was beautifully written, masterfully performed, and was the best so far. It was an orchestrated ballet of life, story, and emotion. It nearly brought me to tears, which for me, means I was feeling quite a bit of emotion. That, coupled with a bunch of stuff rattling around in my brain has spiraled me downwards. The intellectual, English major part of me loved the mastery with which the episode was written and acted, but the depressive, tortured part of me got a kick in the gut. Since the latter has way more of a grip on my psyche than the former, well, you know now why I am writing from a dark place.

I am feeling poetical. This is not unusual. I am a poet, a writer, and a teller of stories, and the more I get depressed, the more I can write poetry. Try this on for size:

Flash. Bang. Four smooth jacket jackhammers
shatter the rose, peddling death
smash the heart, beating love
stealing away the happiness
you were planning to snatch
from the jaws of life lived dangerously.
The devil was in the details of your protection’s
killer apprehended not twenty minutes earlier
on the back road of the victory
for which your love labored.
Now you lie bleeding and dead.
Now she sobs, alive.

So, not very good, full of cliche and probably a bit awkward (I just wrote that and won’t edit it) but I wouldn’t have been able to write that were I in a happier mood. I wouldn’t have even considered it. It is an ironic fact that most of the best poets were depressed, drug addicted, dark sons of bitches. Something about seeing into the heart of emotion and the human condition requires a less than well adjusted, happy personality. Sure, not all poetry is written from a Sylvia Plath level of despair, but some of the most real assessments of humanity were given birth by humanity’s most tragic sons and daughters.

My point was that I am depressed. I’ve analogized depression like alcoholism and that is a very good comparison. People are born with a predilection towards being a drunk which they cannot help. I was born with a predilection towards depression. I am a poet. This is a part of who I am, which I cannot help or, to a certain degree, control. My depressive tendencies make me able to tap into my poet’s soul. Unfortunately, my depression usually overwhelms my poetical nature. Life’s a bitch, eh?

By the way, I am swearing more than I usually do. I grew up around religious people and still count my closest friends and family among the devout, so I am more attuned to how some people respond to profanity. Another symptom of dark depression is a loss of inhibition. Profanity is a vital and necessary part of all human language which seeks to express immediate, unarticulatable emotion, or sometimes degree of emotion, so as I am feeling a lot of deep emotion and am simultaneously uninhibited I swear more. I hope it doesn’t offend you, but it happens, it is human, and well, you should move on if you can’t stand it.

Well, this is degenerating quickly.

I do not censor myself here because I want anyone who reads this to understand what depression is like. I want to be honest about what I feel, and how that effects me. Tt isn’t always pretty or organized. It isn’t simple or comfortable. It is a condition that never lets up for a second, even if I start a day feeling great and sunny, I may not end the day like that. I usually crash, and burn hard. What goes up…and, well, you know the rest.

After having read through all that, I remembered my main point (yes, I had one): “and some days it doesn’t matter what I do, I end up happy or sad or both, so I blame the weather.”

I’m Phil, and I am depressed.

Read about a good day here. Check out my previous discussions of depression, what it looks like, and why I might be depressed.