First snow

There was a time about 15 years ago when my mother was obsessed with colors. Not just colors for the sake of themselves, but getting her colors done so she’d know what looked good with her skin tone and hair. She went to Clinique and consulted with one of the counter girls or makeup technicians or whathaveyou, and discovered that she was an autumn, which meant that she didn’t look good in half of the colors she loved. It also meant that she became religious about shopping only for clothes in colors that were flattering, a habit that she persists in to this day. Because I was her daughter and therefore female, she insisted on getting my colors done as well so that we could have a lovely, girly mother-daughter experience, and because she thought that getting me to the Clinique counter might help convince me that makeup was not the eighth greatest earthly sin.

In one of the more ironic twists of my life, I found out that I’m a winter. I have very dark brown hair, dark brown eyes and a pale complexion. A few weeks ago, two friends told me on the same day that I looked 1. Irish and 2. Jewish, so who knows what the hell is going on. But the fact that I have any element of winter in my body is a strange, semi-surprising discovery. I say semi-surprising because I have struggled with depression for my entire life and so I wasn’t completely shocked to learn that my nature tends toward the dark, quiet and austere, even if we’re just talking about color schemes. There are few things in the world that I hate more than being cold. And yes, I know I’m living in the wrong place for that but what can I say—Boston’s home.

Still, winter is not my time. Some people thrive in the snow and cold—I am not one of them. I’ve always known that the months between November and March were dangerous for me, but it took living in a warm place for a year to understand how much strong sunlight and temperatures above 50 degrees can impact my mental equilibrium. It took me 28 years to grasp the term Seasonal Affective Disorder and accept that it encompassed the fatigue, hunger, hibernation tendencies and the deep depression that smack me in the face every year after the autumnal equinox. People who don’t have SAD or don’t deal with depression find it easy to say, “Oh, just buck up. Spring will be here soon.” I wish it were that easy. Until I bumped up my antidepressant dosage a few weeks ago, my brain was in a chemical whirl and all I wanted to do was go to sleep, no matter how rested I was. Winter is a four or five-month long battle against sliding into an abyss that opens up under my feet once the leaves start to fall from the trees.

This year I started plotting my winter survival strategy before summer was even over. It helped that the weather stayed warm enough for me to walk home from yoga in flip flops until just a few days before Thanksgiving. I increased my dosage of happy pills. I’m going to Florida for a few days after Christmas and we’re doing a week somewhere tropical in February. I work out regularly, watch my food intake and force myself to be social even when all I want to do is stay home on the couch. I may even hit the tanning booth to see if a concentrated dose of heat and light will help. Lunchboy’s learned pretty quick how to snap me out of my whiny winter moods, and his company is making all the difference this year. But this morning, as I scraped snow off my car and blasted the defroster for the first time this winter, I realized that spring is 18 weeks away. And I almost put my head in my hands.