do I have SAD or am I just sad?
an ongoing inquiry
I’ve spent the past week in a little beach town that is, by any rational interpretation, a uniquely happy place. I love the town’s vibe. I love the waves and the people and the bars and the bookstores and the pier and the theaters. On the first day we were here, we sat on the beach and drank wine as the sun moved across the blue sky until it shattered into the ocean in a brilliant orange-red-and-yellow sunset.
But after that first day, a fog moved in from the sea and it hasn’t left. It’t not quite cloudy, you wouldn’t call it cloudy. You would say it’s so foggy that I can’t see the end of my nose.
And anyway, I’m a bit unhappy with this whole thick-fog thing — or no, I’m not unhappy — but the fog is keeping me from the happiness I expected here. The happiness that I get only from sunshine and everything beneath it. Because, though I’ve never been diagnosed, I suspect that I may be one of those unlucky humans affected by what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders calls ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder.’ And yeah, I agree, it sounds slightly made-up but here’s how SAD is framed by the American Psychiatric Association:
SAD is more than just ‘winter blues.’ The symptoms can be distressing and overwhelming and can interfere with daily functioning … About 5 percent of adults in the U.S. experience SAD and it typically lasts about 40 percent of the year. It is more common among women than men.
Now I don’t check all those boxes. I’m not having problems with “daily functioning.” But that’s partially out of stubbornness. Because yes, when I haven’t seen the sun for a few days, it begins to feel like there’s an albatross around my neck. But this albatross has come around regularly for the past two decades and I’ve always coped by ridiculing it — by calling it fake, even though I know it’s real. I can easily imagine (and have sometimes lived in) a world where I don’t get out of bed until 2pm because it’s too gloomy out. But then again, what a ridiculous first-world problem to have — and certainly a first-world problem to acknowledge and write a whole 1,000-word-blog about. I do not blame you if you’ve already quit reading. I do not blame you if you roll your eyes and unsubscribe.
There’s the problem with Seasonal Affective Disorder: on its face, it seems like bullshit. It seems like something that affects all of us and maybe some of us are just being overly melancholy about it. Nobody likes the clouds. Nobody is happy after a week of gloomy skies. That’s probably why Amazon became evil. It’s certainly why Nirvana sounds so glum. Because they’re from Seattle — and Seattle only gets something like 152 days of sunshine per year.
In that sense, Seasonal Affective Disorder is not like depression. I have no problem telling a stranger on the street that I have depression or that depression is a real thing and that SSRIs make my depression a sufferable disease. The stigma is still there, of course and my eventual goal is to get off the meds. But feeling ashamed of having a disease never helped cure it, so I’ve discarded the stigma as useless.
But when it comes to SAD, I still can’t ditch the stigma about it. Because it can’t actually be real, right? I can’t go into a shrink’s office and say ‘listen doc, I am biologically predisposed to experience happiness during long periods of sunshine and equally biologically predisposed to experience sadness during long periods of heavy cloud-cover.’ I mean, I can’t do that. Just like I can’t go in there and say ‘hey, listen here, doctor, I feel something like happiness when I stare at The Jetty at Cassius and I feel something like unhappiness when I stare at Storm on the Sea of Galilee.’
And furthermore, I pride myself at having hammered out a personal philosophy that will stand up to whatever life throws at me. I’ve been reading and evaluating and fine-tuning this thing for a long time. But what kind of durable philosophy have I developed if I get gloomy every time the sky clouds over? (again, why have you not rolled your eyes and unsubscribed? I don’t even have snake oil to sell you.)
Whenever I do feel frustrated by my personal philosophy’s inability to stand up to rotten weather, I think of that wonderful short story by Anton Chekov. You know it, of course, it’s called ‘Ward No. 6’. It’s about this doctor who works in an insane asylum up in the nowhere of Russia and he’s sad because nobody in town is as intellectually-engaging as him or whatever. So then he meets this well-educated inmate who can finally jest with him over philosophy.
Their conversation goes like this:
Doctor: You are a reflecting and a thoughtful man. In any surroundings you can find tranquillity in yourself … and you can possess happiness even though you live behind bars. Diogenes lived in a tub, yet he was happier than all the kings of the earth.
Patient: Your Diogenes was a blockhead.
… two days later …
Doctor: The ordinary man looks for good and evil in external things — in carriages or fancy things — but a thinking man looks for it in himself.
Patient: You should go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it's warm and fragrant with the scent of pomegranates, but here it is not suited to the climate. With whom was it I was talking of Diogenes? Was it with you?
Doctor: Yes, with me yesterday.
Patient: Your Diogenes did not need a study or a warm habitation; it's hot there without. He could lie in his tub and eat oranges and olives. But bring him to Russia to live; he'd be begging to be let indoors in May, let alone December. He'd be doubled up with the cold.
Because Chekov’s patient is right (or at least he’s being sensible). We are affected by our surroundings to some extent, whether you’re Diogenes in Greece or an inmate in Sibera. Again, that’s why Modest Mouse sounds like that and Jack Johnson sounds like that.
And sure, maybe it’s a common trait for a normal human like myself to get upset after days of cloudy weather. But is that anything to be hung-up on? Is it anything to be ashamed of? Even if I do get a bit inwardly-dramatic about it, even if maybe I’m just sad and I don’t have SAD — even then, that’s nothing to feel bad about. Because everything seems to resolve when the sun comes out. And sooner or later, the sun always comes out.