Seasonal Affective Disorder kicks my butt every winter. It usually starts in mid-November and carries through till the first of February. Or later. It's one of those gifts that keeps on giving. That's a big reason I'm just not a fan of Christmas, and I don't like being around crowds. I tend to pick up on social energy, so the tension and frustration that eats into shoppers hits hard.
Every year, I try to avoid dealing with SAD, but I've recently realized part of the problem is the sudden lack of a schedule caused by the end of a semester. Truly, by the time I reach the end of the fall semester or spring semester of teaching, I am done in. Dealing with students, various crises, and deadlines (mostly missed students' missed deadlines and last-minute Let's-Make-A-Deal moments) wears me out. I stumble into the winter or summer break running on fumes.
For a week or two, I recover--only to discover I'm in the doldrums of SAD. Depression is a willing dance partner at those times and just stands waiting in the wings.
I read and I write to struggle through it all. And this year I started work on the flowerbeds to get them ready for spring, which is amazingly right around the corner. Sherry discovered a new YouTube channel I've been watching over gardening. I heartily recommend ANNE OF ALL TRADES. Anne is knowledgeable, fun to watch, and she struggles to balance everything in her life just like so many of us do.
Last night, it was just Sherry, our son Chandler, and me here at the house to celebrate the new year. It's usually that way these days. All the other kids are grown and gone. Sherry and I watched a few episodes of DCI BANKS and enjoyed those. Then, after she went to bed to be woken shortly before midnight so she could bring in the new year with Chandler and me, I settled in with a novel I read at least forty years ago.
Ralph Dennis was a hardworking author back in the 1970s. He wrote a series called Hardman that was billed as "a great new private eye for the shockproof seventies." The books were exactly that. I read my first one at sixteen and didn't like the mean edges he portrayed. Later, after I got a little more jaded, I realized Dennis was writing life as he knew it.
Unable to get back into the book I was currently reading, I went back to the Hardman series and picked up DOWN AMONG THE JOCKS, the fifth book in the series. Although the times and language were different, and nobody carried a cell phone or accessed a computer, the writing was smooth, pacy, and fun. During that re-read, I remembered and rekindled (I read an ecopy--see what I did there!) my love of storytelling.
I breezed through most of the book before midnight, then finished it up shortly afterward. I've got writing to do today, and I was grateful for the book because it recharged my creative batteries. Now I'm back at my own writing today.
Sure, the new years keep coming, but sometimes it's reaching back and remembering the old ones that keep you going.
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