Wisdom from the Trenches

Dreadful January. After all the cheery decorations get packed away, the friends and relatives end the revelry and return to their respective homes, and we all stop eating special foods to celebrate every single holiday, we are faced with a sobering reality. With its bills piling up and short daylight hours, January strips us of our cozy, twinkling lights, descends us into bleak darkness, and feels like the longest month of the year. It drags on and on, like a train blocking the road when you are almost late for work. It never ends. It is probably the least wonderful time of the year. At least for me. At least right now.

I’m all for fresh slates, blank pages, and new opportunities…but this January has hit me particularly hard from the moment I heard fireworks shoot off preemptively before midnight on New Year’s Eve. Normally, I feel hopeful. Out with the old…in with the new! I have 365 days (well, 366 this year) to fill with brand new adventures! But for me, 2024 started with a heavy heart – for no apparent reason. I just can’t seem to shake the feeling that this year’s outcome is bleak, and this month specifically is dreary.

Upon further reflection, I believed much of it came down to something very simple: the weather. My bum mood was very likely my body’s natural reaction to persistently overcast days. Apparently, like some emotionally complicated houseplant, I need the sun to remain perky and upbeat. Without it, I begin to slump, wither away, and die a little inside.

I know water is essential to life. I love to dance in the rain, when lightning isn’t involved. But sometimes, the rainy days bring a lack of vitamin D that brings me too far down that I find it difficult to get through the days. It’s as if the clouds in the sky don’t stop there – they hover over my head, rain on my parade, and cloud my thoughts. And I struggle. On the really bad days, I began to tell myself all the mantras: This is only one bad day, not a bad life. Everything in life is cyclical…the sun will shine once again. Rain, rain, go away…come again another day. You know, the lines we have heard a million times.

Here’s the thing: what if I told you that everything I told myself didn’t come true? What if I told you that the sun came out and shone brightly once again, but my world remained dark and my mood remained low? What now? That’s right – apparently, my low mood was not just a lack of blue skies and the yellow orb that hangs in it. Now that the deadly laser has returned, the gloomy mood has persisted. So I began to analyze all other possible contributing factors in my head: Am I eating healthy food? Yes. Am I exercising? Every day. Am I keeping a gratitude journal and writing in it daily? Yes. Am I talking to God? Yes. Am I making an intentional effort to connect with others in a meaningful way? Am I going outside instead of staring blankly at a screen? Am I taking time off to do something that I enjoy daily? Yes, YeS, and YES! I’m also on burnout because the amount of energy I must expend to keep my mental health stable when I have very little energy is super exhausting.

And therein lies the problem (I thought to myself): I have been operating on burnout since the holidays and the complete exhaustion tanked my mood when the festive decor that kept my mood superficially elevated came down at the end of last year. That, and the fact that February is rapidly coming up and holds traumatic memories, so facing next month is akin to staring down the barrel of a gun. It took me a hot minute to identify this new cause for the serious mood dip, but I eventually happened upon the source. It only took weeks of soul searching and pushing through all the cobwebs in my brain to discover it!

What can be done when you are doing all the “right” things, but your mood worsens anyway?

TAKE. A. NAP.

Yesterday, I canceled a meeting I was set to attend (honestly, it didn’t even matter and I should have canceled the one after it as well because that meeting was also unnecessary) and I flopped down on my bed to sleep. Did it reset my mood? No, it didn’t. Because, in my sluggish stupor, I forgot that I had an alarm set as a reminder on Tuesdays…and said alarm woke me up about twenty minutes later. So rattled was I that I could not return to sleep! The nap also threw off my schedule and I lay awake that night for an additional hour because my body stinks at simple sleep math. Twenty minutes of rest during the day does not mean I need to stay awake for sixty minutes more that night to ensure I get precisely 7.5 hours of sleep each 24 hour period. My diagnosis might be right. My solution failed miserably. I continue to struggle.

Listen, when it comes to mental health issues (especially when it comes to depression), sometimes there aren’t perfectly logical explanations or great solutions that are easy to implement. There is reflection and understanding and there are doctors, but there aren’t always tidy answers to every question we face. And that’s OK! In every area of life – good or bad, high or low, in sickness and in health – we all have to accept some level of trial-and-error, a touch of uncertainty, and the reality of imperfection, in our world and in us. We won’t know what we don’t know and sometimes, we can’t fix everything that’s falling apart. So what can be done in the meantime? I can focus on one thing and do that thing, if there is enough energy. If not, NAP. But most importantly, keep moving forward…one step at a time.

Because if I know anything, it is this:

Depression isn’t a DARK HOLE I fall into. Depression is more like a DARK TUNNEL I travel through.

Dear reader, if you find yourself in a dark place in life, rest when necessary, but please keep moving forward each day, one step at a time. There are brighter days at the end of this tunnel. I am doing the same – stumbling through the dark to get to the light on the other side. But I am not traveling alone…and neither are you. God is with us because He cares deeply about people, especially those who walk through dark days. We might not see it right now, but we have Light with us, in our darkest moments and on our hardest days.

This is the Truth: if we follow that Light, we cannot lose our Way.