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British Summer Time Blues

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
        Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
        Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
        Late schoolboys and sour 'prentices,
    Go tell court huntsmen that the King will ride,
    Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

John Donne. The Sun Rising.


I don’t share the joy that the majority of people do to that loss of an hour to change over to British Summertime. I have to have darkness to hide away from life and the pursuit of happiness. Paradoxically I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and have to use a high intensity light box to survive the winter and its denigrating effect on my moods and depression. The light lamp stimulates hormones like melatonin that to some degree moderate my moods and depression. However I also need the comfort of the darkness that the winter months afford me. I can draw the curtains as evening comes and curl up in my ‘safe place’ like a hibernating Polar bear.  I love that feeling of turning up the central heating and bathing in the safety and warmth that becomes my comfort blanket. I welcome the cold oppressive darkness that winter brings. The dark banishes the world and the troubles that it brings to my door and life. The inky dark cloaks me and comforts me; the light brings me distress and discomfort; I can see the real world, it is a world that attacks and often frightens me. I cannot become impassioned and join in when people enthuse about bud break and the longer days I always feel sad and discomfited that I cannot retreat back into the shorter, darker winter and autumn days and the further bleak aspect that the winter months afford me.

I know that is a puzzling aspect to my ongoing and long held depression; it is an aspect of my depression that few people will sympathise or empathise with. It is expected by others that I will become ebullient and enthused by the prospect of longer, brighter days and shorter nights; that I will shout from the rooftops that winter is over. I often feel that if I could operate in life with one of those eyeshades that people often wear on long haul flights then I would happily do so. However, paradoxically I have to have a bright light to keep me from sinking into a suicidal low during the winter months! How do those two opposites comfortably sit with each other?

My legion of therapists past and present have always struggled to understand this paradoxical aspect in me: the need for light, any bright light, to maintain my sanity and yet the paradoxical rejection of it and my ability to survive in my personally constructed dark world. However, where does this seemingly to me aberrant, misunderstood, undiagnosed psychology come from?

I do firmly believe that I do not have the ability to make or generate endorphins; I never have that ‘natural high’ that is so commonly talked about. I marvel at people that talk of a ‘natural high’. I cannot seriously think of one time that I have had such an occurrence in my life, save for orgasm and many of them have been ‘flat’ and mechanical. I have exercised and exercised strenuously but have never ever felt a ‘runners high’. I often just become exhausted and irritable instead of the much publicised rush that is supposed to happen. How do scientists measure these things?  I also firmly believe that my ME/CFS feeds into all the above observations.

It also begs the question do I actively suppress the ‘natural highs’ to one of oft experienced homogeneity and safeness? My life is and has been always been a plateau of cold and dark places that I am, on the face of it, ‘happy’ to inhabit. I feel that I dare not rise above that plateau for fear of losing my ‘safe place’; my dark, ‘curtains drawn’ world of warmth and comfort and safety.

The dark cold, short winter nights are a safety zone that I can sympathise and empathise with; I believe that it is one that affords my psychology its beloved safe place. It is that safe, silent, place that I retreat into during my depressive phases. It is that safe, silent place that I believe keeps me sane and yet feeds my depression and depressive tendencies. It is also in that silent place that my ideations exist and that is a very dangerous place to be.

 Nb: Since writing this article I have been diagnosed as being BPD, Bi Polar 2 and having Disassociative Identity Disorder. Perhaps in there is the answer to my questions posed here.

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