return to light
I’ve heard it said - and wisely - that depression is a condition whose primary symptom is the conviction that you’re not actually sick; that you, and the world, are just fundamentally grey. (A symptom only intensified when the mentally healthy suggest that depressed persons are magically capable of curing themselves through sheer force of will, as though depression is little more than solipsistic apathy, and not the consequence of a self-cannibalising brain.) Which means that, even when you have a diagnosis - even when you know, for real, that there’s something wrong - it’s spectacularly easy to gaslight yourself into doubting it; to wonder if you’re not just overreacting or making it up to explain your inherent awfulness.
If I needed any more objective proof that my five years in the UK have been marred by Seasonal Affective Disorder - which is to say, depression induced by a lack of sunlight - then our first day back in Australia has provided it in spades.
Reading outside, in the sun, feels like reinhabiting my body. I am smiling. The parameters of the world are no longer psychically delineated by the walls of the house, the possibilities for the day curtailed by what can be done within them. Even when the temperature is cool enough that I have to wear a jacket and layers, I don’t feel uncomfortable, like my only viable option is to retreat indoors. In Scotland, the frigid humidity is a seeping cold, wet-drenched air like icewater numbing to the marrow of knuckles, burrowing under the layers I disdained to wear even for the extra comfort they might have provided, because it was so meagre. I was never truly warm, not in five years. God, what a penance! (The Vikings had it right, I think. Hell is ice, not fire.)
The sun feels closer, here. More real. There is birdsong in the garden, humour in a kookaburra’s self-important fluffle of feathers, fat admiral birds with their bullet heads and sabre beaks. I half want to cry.
I feel more real here, too. I am more real.
I’m home. I’m home. I’m home.
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jenndoesnotcare said: Welcome back lovely! If you’re ever in Sydney & want a cuppa send me a message :)
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