If It's Darkness We're Having, Let It Be Extravagant

How I stopped white-knuckling through seasonal depression and learned to work with winter instead of against it

I didn’t have a typical experience of the pandemic.
I loved it.

As an introvert, going into the outside world is always a bit anxiety-laden, so I relished the quarantine lock down permission to stay in the quiet of my home. I was happier than usual the whole summer of 2020.

But then the days started getting shorter, and the nights darker.

The dark creeped in so slowly I didn’t really notice it until I was already drowning in it. I started going to bed earlier and earlier. Come morning, getting out of bed felt like climbing a mountain in lead boots. Every. Single. Morning.

Right on cue, like every fall-into-winter season, I felt SAD come out to “play”, knocking on my brain as if telling me it was time to feel more feelz, her knock getting louder each week between Halloween and Christmas. Each year, as my morning walks got darker, and the sun set earlier each night, I learned to be tender with myself, and let myself feel.

2020 wasn’t really any different than other years. But that year, when my annual tradition of trick-or-treating with my nephew wasn’t an option, I decided to do something I hadn’t done since I was a child.

I built a blanket fort!

Yup, just like the kind my brothers and I made with sofa cushions and throw blankets as kids. I crawled inside with my puppy and watched horror films. Stranger Things. The Babadook. Get Out. The Haunting of Hill House. The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Thanks to an exceptional literature teacher in high school who had a particular passion for Edgar Allen Poe, I love analyzing horror movies as allegories of various states of the human psyche. Moreso, I love watching how fiercely and courageously the human spirit fights against distorted fears of big bad monsters.

I watched characters on screen fight their monsters with everything they had. I admired their ferocity, and their sheer will to survive. There was a deeper aliveness that emerged from them each time they were backed into a corner by fear.

I knew that ferocity.

I’d lived it.

Six years earlier, in the winter of 2014, I was one of those characters fighting my own monster.

When “Professionals” Make Things Worse

“I’m putting you on Prozac,” a doctor I’d just met said to me in 2014, as if I didn’t have a choice.

She never looked at me. She didn’t even bother to listen to my lungs or my heart. In the 4.5 minutes she sat with me in the exam room, she never even touched me. She just talked at her computer as she frantically typed instructions.

“I can’t take Prozac,” I said.

“Why not?” she still didn’t look up at me.

“I took it once when I was in my twenties and within an hour of a half-dose my mood spiraled, and I tried to kill myself.”

“Okay, Paxil.” She was a woman of very few words.

“That made me sleep for three days straight and wake up dehydrated.”

“Fine, Zoloft.”

“You aren’t hearing me. I won’t take anti-depressants.”

That’s when she looked up at me, and she rolled her eyes as she pushed her roll-y chair away from the desk.

“I can’t help you. Find a therapist.” She walked out without saying goodbye.

The first therapist put me through three hours of intense psychological testing with multiple-choice questions that didn’t fit my reality at all. He then spent the next two sessions telling me who I was based on those tests. None of it tracked. When I told him I disagreed with his test assessment he said he couldn’t treat me.

The second therapist insisted my depression stemmed from childhood trauma. I kept telling her I had a great childhood. She kept insisting something bad must be buried there, waiting to be unearthed.

I kept thinking I wasn’t really in any condition to be unearthing unknown zombies from my unconscious past right now.

For three sessions in the span of two weeks, I begged her to consider that maybe I’m not depressed, but I’m actually grieving some major losses in my life, and that this dark, bitter cold winter is making it unbearable. I told her I just wanted someone to listen.

She kept asking me about my childhood, and I kept telling her I was grieving.

At the end of the fourth session as I told her of the more abusive moments of my divorce, she fired me and sent me out the door, ugly crying.

I sat in the car for another hour before I could safely drive home.

I made it through that winter, thanks to a lot of tears, Ben & Jerry’s, and hundreds of illegible scribbles in my journals.

When spring came and I was able to take long walks in the woods, my body and psyche sighed a deep exhale of relief. That was the year I started to imagine my SAD demon as a feminine version of Grief, whom I imagined as a a black-hooded scythe carrying monster.

What The Babadook Taught Me About Dread

In my blanket fort watching The Babadook, I realized something profound.

The monsters themselves aren’t scary. Babadook’s top hat and pointy fingers, Freddie Krueger’s razor-blade hands, Pennywise’s clown face when brought out into the daylight are all rather comical. I thought that maybe my SAD demon and black hooded Grief wasn’t so scary either. Bring them out into the light and they look more like paper-dolls.

Because Fear isn’t the monster at all. The real monster is the anticipation of what might be, the unknown of what lurks around the corner, and what we can’t see but can hear in the dark, and the what-ifs and the maybe-that-might-happen-agains.

We aren’t afraid of what is.

We are afraid of what could be and what we don’t understand.

The emotion isn’t even fear, cuz Fear can be faced just by turning on a light.

The real demon emotion is. . . Dread.
And. . . Dread just wants to be fed!

Just like Amelia at the end of The Babadook, I needed to find ways to feed my Feelz a bowl of worms rather than fight him or flee from him.

But I couldn’t just bring a bowl of worms to the basement.
I had to find out what my Dread might want to eat.

The answer came inside the threads of why I watched the horror films in the first place.

Curiosity.

Curiosity became a TinkerBell character who scatters pixie dust of light everywhere she flutters.

I watched the films because I enjoyed the puzzle of analyzing and figuring out the allegory and symbolism of the various creatures and their behaviors. Sure, the movies are scary, but watching them wasn’t about facing my fears or fighting my demons, it was about getting curious about them.

My Curiosity pixie dust brought a whole new kind of joy to watching these psychological thrillers. It brought both humor and fun.

Sometime around Thanksgiving, I emerged from my pandemic blanket fort, thanks to Curiosity, with an even stronger sense of hearing and sight. I also came out less scared of things than before because all that pixie dust gave my brain a healthy distraction from the distortions of dread.

I’m now curious about the unknown, and more comfortable with that which can never be explained.

“I don’t know what I don’t know” is a phrase that often comes out of my mouth as a mantra of comfort that leads me to curiosity.

What if winter isn’t something to get through?
What if winter is an invitation to turn inward?

For the Sensitive Souls Who Dread Winter

If you’re a sensitive soul who feels winter in your bones, who dreads the short days and long nights, who knows that heaviness is coming whether you’re ready or not—

You don’t have to white-knuckle it anymore.

Winter doesn’t have to be the season you survive. It can be the season you hibernate, heal, rejuvenate, and do the deep work that only happens when we’re willing to sit with ourselves in the dark.

So, in the words of Jane Kenyon, “if it’s darkness we’re having, let it be extravagant.” Dark nights are meant to be beautiful. Take my hand, let’s go find the beauty in the dark together! Heck, we can’t see the northern lights when there is too much light. We need a dark sky. The darkness only makes the light more brilliant.

This month, here on HUSH as a community, let’s get curious about the darkness together.

• November 11 - You’re Not Seasonally Depressed; You’re Seasonally Grieving ~ the case-study of a client whose “seasonal depression” was actually an unprocessed anniversary of loss her nervous system remembered every autumn.

• November 18 - A Guest Post with Forest Therapy Guide Sam Messersmith about how doing less, resting more, and giving herself “me days” has become her favorite teddy bear of healing.

• November 25 - Introduction to Candlelit Soulstice - group community chat-space for sensitive souls to get curious about the dark days of winter together. (for paid subscribers)

• November 30 - December 21 - Candlelit Soulstice - a 4wk space to stay rooted in light thru the darkest nights of the year. (registration opens soon)