Joke’s on me. My beloved’s depression sparked my own, which I don’t have very often. I had an episode last year this time that took about a month to resolve. Mostly my depression is of the generalized irritability variety, not the heavy, flat variety, but here it was, heavy, flat, vaguely sad but not about anything.
I’ve lived long enough to regard moods as akin to weather. We can sometimes see it coming, but sometimes the forecasts are wrong. Sometimes weather happens out of season. Sometimes a winter is especially rainy.
Even though we can’t control the weather, we can take care of ourselves around the weather: wear the right clothes, have heat or air conditioning, wear sunscreen and sunglasses, carry an umbrella, stay the hell inside when necessary.
So even though I knew I wasn’t in charge of this mood, that I couldn’t control it, I could take care of myself around it. I pulled out the SAD lamp and stared at it every morning for a little while. I made sure I had all of my meds and supplements, even the ones that aren’t necessarily necessary, just helpful. I made sure to eat regularly, and sleep, and drink salty water to keep my blood volume up. I put psychic Comet (aka Floracita) on my head, in case some of what I was feeling wasn’t mine at all, but the collective dismay at the political situation. I did some energetic boundary work.
I’m a big believer in working on multiple levels simultaneously. Doing energy work without tending to my lived body isn’t going to help, but tending to my lived body without acknowledging that it’s affected by what’s happening outside me also doesn’t get me very far.
I also thought about something I’ve noticed before and that Martha Beck has talked about a lot. Sometimes fatigue, depression, and the like are soul-level responses to not doing the things that bring us deep joy. It’s a bone-deep NO that shows up as a form of emergency brake to keep us from going too far off the rails.
So I sat with my wild and I thought about what my wild wants to do. What it has been asking for is writing. And writing that doesn’t get caught up in shoulds or self-censorship because what if this is too much, what if people think things about me.
I opened a new file and I started writing. And it’s definitely drafty and I don’t know where it’s going and I don’t know how it will develop, but it’s there and it’s begun, and I felt demonstrably happier after I’d done it.
A community I’m part of has a mantra for this particular moment in history: Spite & Joy. We do something every day to spite this administration, whether it’s donating money to a food bank or calling our Congresscritters. And we do something every day for joy, because joy is revolution in this moment. They want us scared and confused and depressed and hopeless, and we will not go there.
Spite & joy, y’all. Spite & joy.