Tis the Season
the year's end comes so quickly these days
We’re in mid-October and Halloween is just around the corner so it’s time for stores to start crowding out the candy and spooky decorations with Thanksgiving stuff. In two weeks time, the aisles of Target and Walgreens will be blazing with red and green Christmas decor. We move at warp speed now, and it makes me feel so anxious.
My mother has already asked for our Christmas lists. We started planning Christmas Day logistics with my sister who lives in Rhode Island. We spoke of New Year’s Eve already. The holiday season is upon us and that makes the end of the year feel like it is coming at us at a breakneck speed. I love the holidays, I really do, but I don’t like the winter and everything that comes after the holidays. The long stretch of nothingness, of cold and snow, of bleak skies and early sunsets serves to make my anxiety and depression feel heightened.
I want this year to end, though. It’s been a terrible, long, depressing, joyless year. I’m a big fan of marking the passage of time and even though I know in my heart that January 1st is just a date and doesn’t change anything, it feels like a new slate to me, a chance to start again, to right wrongs, to turn 2021 on its head. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, I haven’t yet come up with a plan of attack, I just know that I want to tackle the new year in a positive way.
But first, the fall and winter. I must contend with the darkness and fight the cold and bring light to the dreariness. Every year I vow that I will do my best to combat the winter doldrums, whether by using a SAD lamp and weighted blanket, or listening to happy music, or just thinking positive thoughts. And each year the winter defeats me. I give in at some point and put on my “here comes the gloom” playlist and crawl under a blanket on the couch and think about things like death and despair. It’s going to be even harder this year now that I’m alone and there will be no one to keep me company on the cold nights, no shared laughter, no pleasant evening meals by candlelight, no companionship. All those things made the winter easier to get through. Tackling my seasonal depression alone is going to be hard, because the emphasis is going to be on alone, each night a reminder that my husband left me stranded, abandoned me, broke my heart. I don’t know what to do to keep this from happening.
October, November, December. They will all pass without me breaking down because those months are filled with things to do and people to see and family meals and celebrations. There are birthdays and anniversaries within in addition to Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Having reasons to celebrate, things to look forward to make it easier to deal with the long, cold nights. Once that new year hits, it’s over. The bleak days are upon us.
I don’t want to rush to that point, but at the same time I want the year to be over. It’s a conundrum. I hate this year with every fiber of my being and I’ll be happy to usher it out, yet I feel a trembling in my soul when I think about how fast time seems to be moving.
Life has to move on, I know that. With the passing of days, weeks, months, I put distance between myself and the thing that changed my life. I’ve had a chance to settle into my new world and while I may not like it very much right now, I will grow into it, I know this. It takes time. And time is all I have when winter strikes.
Winter is hard for so many of us. We tend to retreat into ourselves and our homes, waiting for spring to make its appearance before we unfurl from our blankets once again. We’ll do what we can to make the season bearable, but the bleakness is really inescapable. We walk the aisles of Walmart and Target and notice how the holidays are overlapping now, how everything is rushed and hurried and how we frantically sweep in the year’s end now. I want to savor October and November and December, I want those months to do a slow burn before the real crux of winter hits.
But man, do I want this year to end.