Anyone Feeling SAD?
I'm talking capital-letters SAD, which translates as seasonal affective disorder.
It can happen in any season, but it's especially prevalent in the winter, when things are cold and bleak and yucky and slow.
People who have perfectly fine mental health all year can succumb to SAD when they look outside at the frigid tundra and understandably don't want to leave the house or even roll out of bed to step on a cockroach.
For me, having already been through the forced joviality of Christmas and so on -- when everything stops for normal people, but I'm still frantically meeting my deadlines -- the deadeningly dull months of January and February provide an extra one-two punch of horror that makes me have to force myself to wake up.
(But I do! I sparkle, Musty, sparkle!)
The cure for SAD?
Well, I looked it up and apparently there's light therapy, melatonin, ionized air, and, naturally, medications (which are the cure for everything, after all).
Or you can just go somewhere warm.
Lord knows whenever I feel SAD, I channel a Chekhov character -- or an old Staten Island resident -- and moan, "I want to go to Miami!"
Once there, I'm GLAD. A little too GLAD.
And what can you do about that?
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