Not so seasonal

As I lay in the front yard of my college house blaring indie rock, I thought about how I had felt for the past few months. Here I was in the Michigan sun with a cold glass of water, tanning after a run through the Ann Arbor suburbs, but still, I somehow couldn’t escape that ever-nagging feeling of hopelessness and despair. Life seemed to be going well, yet a part of me didn’t want to acknowledge that any facet of it could be good.

Every winter I seem to get depressed, even if I tell myself this year will be different. Seasonal depression has always seemed like a myth to me. How can it be that not seeing the sun for a couple of days makes people’s brain chemistry get all wonky? Yet, time and time again, it happens to millions of people across the world, including me.

Seasonal affective disorder is a form of depression that follows the changes of the seasons and typically happens as the days shorten during the winter months. Millions of Americans suffer from SAD, but it is more common in people already dealing with other mental health conditions, and I am one of those people. When the sun comes out in the springtime, I realize how shitty I felt during winter days spent without sunlight. But, for me, that shitty feeling never fully leaves. I am always depressed, no matter the weather, and I have been for years. 

This past fall and winter, I was tired, but not because I needed sleep – I was in a deep depression, thanks, in part, to SAD. A month into the school year my grandfather passed away. He had been sick for several years and in an intensive care unit at an old folks’ home for months. I had known his death was going to happen for a while, but it was still a shock. As winter arrived, I had more and more difficulty with personal relationships, and slowly but surely they deteriorated. When the new year came, I drowned myself in school work and extracurriculars, desperately trying to do as much as I could to distract myself. I switched from my old pal Prozac to a new cocktail of prescription medicine, hoping to keep my depression from worsening. By the time Spring Break came around, my strained relationships finally snapped apart like a rubber band stretched too thin. These aren’t uncommonly unfortunate events, but stacked on top of each other they only further burdened my struggling mind. The lack of sunlight was draining the already-depleted serotonin, and SAD was making it go from bad to worse. 

The world kept coming at me, and I never had a chance to catch my breath. Thoughts of my own mortality wouldn’t leave my mind, and I found myself more and more alone. Even as I surrounded myself with others in order to avoid the darkness of my thoughts, the difficulty of these interactions seemed to only further distance me from close friends. I wasn’t crying, but I felt like I should. Tears just wouldn’t come as a certain numbness took over my body. It felt like I was like a car in neutral going down a hill, praying I would hit something just so I would finally have a moment to stop and have some control again. I can’t speak for other people because the symptoms of depression can vary wildly from person to person: from anger to sadness to weight gain or loss, even to having trouble remembering things. Depression manifests itself in many different ways, but it almost always makes life more difficult. 

As the Michigan spring emerged, my friends and I watched the flowers blossom. We sneezed hard enough to pop an eardrum and basked in the sun. We watched rain clouds roll into Ann Arbor and the opening of thousands of umbrellas across campus. We saw the Diag and Law Quadrangle filled with hammocks and frisbees on the rare warm day. We sat on blankets in Nichols Arboretum just talking and throwing around a football. They all seemed to be moving forward with the seasons — they had optimism about them and looked happier. But I felt the same as ever. I realized that I can’t blame the sun or the clouds. I’m depressed no matter the weather. 

This is a sobering thought. My feelings of worthlessness and despair don’t come from an outside source like the weather affecting my serotonin production. It is a part of living with depression.

Depression in all forms is on the rise. Both the lifetime and current depression rates in the United States have drastically increased in the past 10 years. Worldwide, around 3.8% of the population experiences depression — that’s around 280 million people. These rates among 18 to 25 year olds specifically in the U.S. are even higher, with 18.6% reporting major depressive episodes in 2021. A report from the 2021-2022 school year found that 44% of college students surveyed reported symptoms of depression. It is not uncommon to be depressed, but it can still feel isolating. 

My depression feels like a sentient being attempting to drain the remnants of my willpower. I don’t experience a lack of motivation, but instead face an insurmountable void of hopelessness. I was able to finish all my assignments and participate in my extracurriculars. But while doing these activities, I felt as if nothing could ever be good again. Even if something positive like getting an A on a midterm happened, I was reminded that this joy was only temporary, and that the crushing sadness would soon return. It is as if I am getting repeatedly kicked down a hill to roll a boulder back up except, unlike Sisyphus, I didn’t violate the rules of hospitality or try to cheat death — at least as far as I know. There never seems to be an escape from constant hopelessness and those brief glimmers of happiness are exactly that: brief.

It’s odd to be depressed in summer because it feels like the very nature of the warm days and late sunsets should extend the brevity of these glimmers. Summer comes with a certain set of expectations; it’s not necessarily that one must always feel pure and unadulterated happiness, but one sure as hell shouldn’t be depressed and mopey. Summertime brings the freshness of opportunity and chance to the world. Essentially, this season represents the antithesis of what my brain wants to do — be alone and mope. 

These expectations feel stifling. The heat and constant activity make me feel like I’m trapped in quicksand, slowly being drowned in the earth and my own feelings. I don’t even feel like I can scream out for help because the intoxication of summer seems to take hold of everyone I know. I feel alone and scared. It’s as though I’m not allowed to feel the way I do, and I’m most certainly not supposed to act on it. 

Yet, that fear can be motivating. As I watch the world unthaw and everyone emerge from the woodwork to start internships, move to new and exciting cities and find new partners, I still feel a push to join them despite every fiber of my being telling me not to. I know I need to make use of that inkling of a desire to participate and stop allowing myself to rot in self-pity and apathy. I need to adapt to the seasons. 

There is so much to see and do in the summer and this can be great for people living with depression. It gives them a chance to break from the monotony of the winter months. A new beginning. I know that for me I’ll have the chance to work and learn from amazing journalists and attorneys. I can spend a summer milling about Ann Arbor, checking out all the things I never had time for during the school year. I’ll spend days on the lake getting sunburnt and splashing around. I’ll get ice cream with friends. And who knows, maybe I’ll even have a summer fling. Probably not, but you never know. By taking advantage of these opportunities, I can make an effort to feel better. I have to ignore the smell of horseshit and see the beauty of the world even as it comes flying at me, and summer is a great opportunity for that. 

Fighting depression is never a linear process, no matter how convenient that might look on a graph. Inch by inch, I will do my best to improve. Life will keep changing, and I will keep changing with it. One day, I’ll be like a tree growing around a sign. This depression will always be a part of me, but I can learn to live with it better. I’ll end up losing all my leaves in the winter, but that just means I’ll have to work on growing them back in the spring.

Statement contributor Miles Anderson can be reached at milesand@umich.edu

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