The sun is starting to come out a little more and more these days. It is spring afterall. And that makes me glad, which is very good after dealing with s.a.d. for the last few months.
I’m not talking about the regular, every once in a while ‘sad’, but rather about Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.), the more serious winter-time depression that, for me, sets in with the clouds around the beginning of November and finally lets up with the first warm rays of sun in March/April.
I grew up in the Southwestern United States, with LOTS of sunshine and blue skies. 360 days of sunshine, a cummulative 48 hours of good hard rain, and 3 sorta cloudy days in a year was pretty normal for me. I’m a desert flower if there ever was one. That is not to be confused with a sun worshipper – with fair skin I have to be careful in the sun, but I LOVE bright sunny days and blue skies and the feel of the heat soaking in to my bones.
We had once heard a news story about a large percentage of people in Seattle who got S.A.D. in the winter. How silly, we thought. It’s just winter.
Then we moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. WOW, was that ever a flip for me! 360 days of clouds and misty rain, 48 hours of good hard rain and 3 mostly sunny days in a year was definitely NOT normal for me!
I noticed very quickly that this desert flower was starting to wilt – my energy levels dropped significantly in late October, my desire to ‘do’ things waned, and my personality got generally crabbier. I didn’t seem to be able to cope as well with normal everyday life stuff – I definitely had a limited capacity for noise and busy-ness. But I wasn’t quite sure why.
Maybe it was because we were experiencing a totally new way of life in a major metropolitan city where the population in that one city was larger than the entire population of our home state…
Maybe it was because we were 2 LONG days drive from the nearest family and 4 LONG days drive away from ‘home’ and we were a bit lonely…
Maybe it was because a 15 minute stop at the grocery store took 45 minutes because we couldn’t read the French labels on the products and always had to stop and turn the labels to the English side…
Maybe it was just plain culture shock…
I didn’t actually figure out what was causing such a change in my personality and general energy levels for nearly 2 years of living in Vancouver. Summers are so totally awesome in Vancouver that I’d forget all about being ‘blue’ around the middle of July. Sad? Who me? No way. By the end of our 2nd winter there, I was finally getting a clue.
One day I was talking to another young mom, and describing how I felt. “Well, the sky is grey, and lots of the houses are grey, and the water is grey and the sidewalks are grey, and with no leaves on them the trees are all grey, and the roads are even grey and the squirrels are grey and the mountains are grey…” There was definitely a theme emerging.
“Does the grey bother you?” this mom asked. The grey did, in fact, bother me. “Do you notice how green the grass stays and all the pine forest around us all through winter?” Yes, I had noticed those things, but they didn’t seem to have a big impact on me. I didn’t know why.
What I DID know is that the LONG rainy seasons are what make BC so beautiful – lush coastal temperate rain forests, green everything all the time, flowers year round, etc. What I was discovering was that the LONG (grey) rainy seasons were also what were making me so blue. Those folks we had heard about in Seattle didn’t seem nearly so silly now.
Fall had nearly always been my favorite time of year – my birthday is in the fall, school would start in the fall (and that meant new clothes and gadgets and notebooks and new friends and classes…), the mornings were crisp and cold and clear and the days were still warm enough to enjoy lots of outdoor activities. I loved crunching leaves – crunch crunch crunch.
But I was finding fall harder and harder to enjoy. Yes, my birthday was still there, and my kiddos were starting school, etc. But the mornings were soggy and damp and grey and the days offered very little variety. I hated being WET all the time. And the leaves didn’t crunch – they went more like squish squash splosh.
I always felt tired. I had a terrible time staying warm. I was more emotional (and that’s saying something!), more anxious, less patient, less fun.
This year fall was particularly difficult. October was goregous, much sunnier than average. Then we had the time change at the same time a series of storms hit us in early November. It went from at least partly sunny to super overcast with 3 layers deep clouds for 2 weeks straight, and the mornings were darker anyway because of the time difference. UGH!
I was/am determined not to let the rain get to me. It’s just winter, right (except that it rains from October through June – that’s most of the year!). I LOVE living in BC, and I LOVE all the reasons we are here, and I LOVE that the Lord brought us here. I would have to learn to live with S.A.D. and not be so sad with it.
We did invest in a “light machine” – a wonderful indoor sunshine that gives me a much needed 10,000lux boost in the mornings… when I use it. With mine, it’s best to get up and within the first hour of the day to sit for 30 minutes in front of the light, very close to the light. I would usually have my devotion then or just spend quiet time praying and listening to the Lord. BUT, 30 minutes is a long time to sit still with morning family activities to attend to. So, it doesn’t always happen. And I can tell when it doesn’t!!
My attitude and outlook on life correlate directly with the intensity and brightness of the sunshine. I am much better able to deal with life on those “Zip-a-dee-doo-da” days. I’m happier, more creative and fun, more spontaneous, more settled and patient and free to be me. I know the stillness of my morning time in the sun and the SON help me a lot along those lines, too.
My youngest son also seemed to become a little more surly last year as fall set in. He’s a happy-go-lucky, busy Tiggr kind of kiddo and when it started raining we had a little Eeyore dragging around our house instead. He would whine about the slightest thing and fuss with me over nearly everything. He just wasn’t himself.
A few times he woud climb up in my lap while I was basking in my ‘sunshine’ in the mornings, and stay for 5 or 10 minutes. I noticed that on those days he was a bit more of his bouncy self. AHA! It was a sunshine thing!!!
That’s why we love spring so much, and summer is even better! When the sun woke us up last week (rather than us waking up and hoping the sun would come out sometime during the day) my little cutie ran into my room, “Mummy, the sunshine is out. It’s a lovely sunny day!”
Lovely indeed. The world was a bit brighter as were our general dispositions. It was a sunny day! And not a S.A.D. day for any of us.
