Blue sky.
What a difference it makes – to everything.
I must suffer from S.A.D.S or whatever acronym describes those of us whose mood droops when everything up there is gray.
Seattle’s a good city but it needs to move. Is that possible? Like moving a house?
It’s not the rain, not even the drizzle. Real weather of any kind doesn’t impart the same sense of nothingness. It’s the constant sense of BLAH when the sky’s the color of cardboard that draws the life out of you.
Escape is short-lived. Bright lively coffee shops and bars provide a temporary uplift, but the effort required to get enthusiastic about anything doubles, triples and quadruples. You stay in bed more, sleep more, make more excuses and do less. Life moves slower; sometimes it grinds to a halt.
It feels like your legs are bungeed together, like those dreams where you’re running but don’t get anywhere. Apathy is so overwhelming you’re even subconsciously hoping for rain, so you have an excuse for not putting out the monumental amount of effort it would take to arrange something.
There’s an overriding desire for company and you depend so much more on relationships and the presence of friends, but meeting people in the first place is hard. Anyone who rejects the notion of the Seattle freeze is either a native or living in denial. Or both.
You try everything – vitamin D tablets, fake sun lamps, trips away. Eventually, you get used to the yearly routine of minimal summers and make excuses for how shitty the rest of the year is but then you’re wishing your life away in the process.
The effect is cumulative. In the beginning it’s only an irritation like an itchy rash you can ignore or scratch, but then it starts to affect your mood and, before long, every day is spent in a semi-depressed state from which the only reprieve comes in a glass. That’s when it’s time to go.
But now I’m in the land of blue skies and sunsets, traveling down the Oregon coast towards the promise of perpetual sun in California.
In another week of this I might be a real person again…
It’s all a bit SAD.
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