Life in the Northeast bends to a kind of evergreen depression.
You feel it in the ennui of summer’s haze knowing the good times won’t last. The strap of that sundress slipping off your shoulder, those sandals pooled with welcome moisture from a night of clicking down cobblestone. Bitter winters underscore the impermanence of everything warm and sweet. The sun crashes at 4:30 like a grating alarm to remind us, “it only gets worse from here.”
People have long theorized that residents of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston are rougher around the edges because they’ve been abused by the weather. An endemic vitamin D deficiency that makes it harder to work a smile out of locals.
I think we’re just in a constant state of preparing for war.
I have PTSD from this time last year. Things started looking grim pretty quickly. I’d find any excuse to skip a workout, order pizza, and hit the bottle until I was numb to my mental decline. It’s worth stressing that this wasn’t like, quality pizza either; there’s this spot in my neighborhood that essentially serves giant mounds of butter and cheese and calls it pizza and that’s how I ate my way into a year of distorted self-image and men’s sweatpants. January was bad. February was worse. So when we turned the clocks backward or forward or sideways or whatever I was triggered. I immediately texted my girlfriend, “We’ve got to get in front of seasonal depression before it swallows us whole.”
I thought I’d make a nice, clean list of ways to keep SAD at bay, but that felt misguided. There’s no time for coherence when the darkness falls. You must breathlessly elucidate exactly what *might* make you feel better on a whim. Things get dire quickly around here, capisci? So let me just tell you what you need to do.