The house is clean. The cats are fed. And I'm lonely this morning. Normally by this time, I'm in class or the boyfriend's home. Today neither of those things are true. I eat my leftover burger from dinner last night. I chase off the cats who are trying to lick my plate. I step outside for a cigarette and blink in the unrelenting sunlight.
The heat has been unpleasant but with every late sunrise that I witness, my anxiety about the oncoming winter climbs. I joke that being from Arizona, I've just never adjusted to the cold. That is partially true. But the largest part of fear is knowing that when the first 20 degree day hits, I'll die.
Alright, so I won't really *die*, but I'll be as close to death while living as I ever have been. Climbing out of bed is not difficult - it is an effort of Olympian will. Showering, something taken for granted for most of the year, doesn't even register as something I need to do. Eating, too, falls away. I languish under dirty and itchy sheets. I don't leave the house except for school or work for weeks at a time.
I don't breathe during the winter....I just slip underwater and swallow it down.
Lots of people get blue in the winter. This is different. This is not simple depression. This is a complete erasure of a human being. Suicide isn't even a thought during those months, because suicide requires the acknowledgement of having a self to kill.
I have no sense of self in the cold. There is no sense of sadness or disinterest or apathy because you have to be a person to feel those things. It's difficult to explain, but I know when the cold hits, I stop existing. I will not become real again until late March, early April. Nothing is quite real in the winter. Certainly, I am not.
If anything is real during those times, it is the strangely vivid dreaming that visits me in the winter. Maybe it's my mind trying to compensate for the flattening of life. Giving me something to feel connected to. A world in which I'm a part of, if only when I'm asleep.
It was worse before medication, before the magic words "Bi-Polar" were breathed in my direction. Before that, I could not shower. Could not eat. Could not go to work or school or be a lover. Now, while the effort is herculean and the activities done infrequent, I am able to do those things.
I call them "small victories." When I wake up and write in my journal that my goal for the day is to shower and scoop out the litterbox. And in the winter mornings, those tasks sound absolutely immense. Sometimes I only get the litterbox scooped out. Sometimes I wind up going yet *another* day without a shower. But for me, anything, anything at all that speaks of a human being living their life, is a victory. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless.
By spring, the mood changes. By June, I'm usually half-way around the bend with hypomania. The year turns, as Marya Hornbacher put it in her book "Wasted", psychedelic, and I know I am human again. Summer presents its own problems with mania - which for me, is far more the dangerous state. Depression leaves me with too little will to destroy anything. Mania makes for a wonderful, reckless sort of energy to raze entire buildings. It is those months that require the most work and attention.
But it is those months that I am most grateful for. Because even if I have to be careful, I know that I'm alive enough to HAVE to be careful.
There's really nothing to be done about winter. I am on medication. I attend therapy. I apply CBT behavioral and thinking strategies. I have wonderful people around me who do everything they can to pry me out of the bed. This helps, in as much as I can accomplish my small victories. But it is still terrible to go through.
The high today is the 90's. The first twenty degree day is months away. But the trees are turning crimson and losing their coats of green. Winter is coming. I shouldn't worry about it. It's not as if I don't know what is coming, there is no surprise to be caught by. And there's time yet anyways.
There really is time. But I see it shouldering its way past the sunlight.
It's coming.
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