JanuWeary

January is a non-negotiable 495 days long every year, particularly if you live north of the Equator, especially if you live in the American Northeast. The Julian calendar is a lie and so is the New Year. You are still stuck with yourself and the bleak atmosphere of January. 

December? December is Mary Poppins as your babysitter, all your needs met and your booboos kissed and your trees topped with sparkly angels, and January is the month when Mary Poppins blows away, gripping her snowy white parasol, and the only person who’s left to babysit you is Boo Radley who doesn’t know any jokes or games and just likes to sit in the corner and peer creepily out the window, waiting for this all to end.

I am not made for January. Thinking about it reminds me that Heaven is a place with unlimited cookie dough and an endless December. January is a box with a gray lid, and within the box is one of those plastic trays segmented by little compartments for various chocolates with mystery fillings. Only in the January box, there is no chocolate nor mystery. Rather, each little pod contains items you collect in January: overpriced gym memberships, kale chips, self-loathing.

Here is a list of good things that happen during January if you live in the American Northeast: 

1. We remember Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy.

2. We get a day off work/school to remember Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy.

3. The Golden Globes are an event that happens in California and also on television if you have cable. 

4. We then get to enjoy the Fashion Recap after the Golden Globes.

5.  Some things go on sale. Like cars you don’t want to drive in January. Or TVs you don’t want to haul home in January. 

That’s it. The complete bucket of January joy poured out. (But be sure to toss salt on it or else it will turn to ice.)

It seems the only people who are happy in January are Zumba instructors. They get to be inside and elevate their frothy endorphins while doing a hip-hop dance that I will try to follow but invariably just grapevine my way into a deranged Macarena.

Besides Zumba instructors, there is another human living in the American Northeast who does not struggle with the Jans/Febs. 

I live with this human. His name is Husband. Husband is relentlessly chill. In fact, where hardship and woes are concerned, he is an all-around cool customer. I am told this is the mark of his birthright as a Canadian (show me a Canadian who is not earnest, I dare you), so even-keeled and fair-minded. This explains most of his immunity to the Jans/Febs.

There is another reason, though, that has nothing to do with his natural disposition and everything to do with his upbringing which was largely devoid of holidays, celebrations, birthday cakes, and all the trappings of my girlhood steeped in Americonsumerism. Where my December was a cozy hearth with stockings hung on the mantle, Husband’s was, you know, just a regular mantle, probably with the music stand he set up in front of it so his parents would believe he had actually practiced his violin (instead of watching “Days of our Lives” as was his weekday practice). He had no holiday letdown growing up and therefore he just soldiers into the barren month of January without expectation. Whereas my January is a snowglobe with snowflakes swirling around a bottle of anti-depressants and a lost mitten, Husband’s is a snowglobe with a peaceful tableau reminiscent of a Thomas Kinkade painting before they were mass produced by underlings.

Do you know anyone who has none of the post-holiday funk, none of the snow-capped mountain highs of the holiday season and none of the deep valley lows of the daunting new year? Isn’t it a little curious? What is there even to talk about in January if not lamentation? Perhaps I am getting the chorus wrong here, though, because Husband is the son of immigrants whose entire lives have been one, long, strong lamentation. His parents did their darndest to build a better life for their sons in a country that was as foreign in its culture, language and traditions as they could possibly imagine. They were not concerned whether they were going to have to pay express shipping on the shearling bathrobe they had embroidered with a monogram. They were interested in paying their rent and not being deported. That has a way of informing a boy who becomes a man who understands what a real crisis is. A crisis, contrary to what my Jans/Febs contend, is not Sephora running out of my favorite--actually, no crisis involves the word “Sephora.” Forget I ever mentioned it.

Much as I’m inspired by Husband’s non-subscription to the holiday and post-holiday tectonic shifts, I’m not really sure what to do with myself in this partnership. The balance in mental health tilts so far it hits the ground on my side of the marital teeter-totter after New Year’s Day. I can’t transpose his upbringing onto mine, nor would I want to; I can’t trade glasses and see it all anew. Ann Voskamp already stole my idea to write 1000 happy thoughts down and emancipate herself from the sads, (and she’s a Canadian, too, so you know mine would never be as earnest as hers anyway). 

I can try on a new pair of perspectacles, though. In fact, I’ve been practicing since earlier this year when my old man got a bunch of baseball tickets. My stepmom Julie’s Christmas gift to Pops was a trip to see the Cleveland Indians play at spring training in Arizona. “This is strategic, see,” explained the old man, who specializes in being pedantic about life decisions, “My old mentor Jack once told me you should plan your trip in February because that’s what going to you through January.” The simple plan struck me as oddly profound. It’s not that dangling a carrot just a short distance from one’s nose is a brand new concept. But I am dazzled by the notion of manufacturing a personal holiday just far enough in the future to get us through. That is, not relying on a civil rights hero to have a birthday observed or for a bestie to decide to come for a visit, in order to incentivize our survival of the Jans/Febs. 

When we’re young, we have to rely on forces outside of our control to spark our great expectations. We circle the date around the calendar as to when the junior high dance is scheduled, and we count down the sleeps until we get to leave for Girl Scout camp. Then we become grown-ups and I can only speak for myself in that sometimes it’s as though I forget that I have agency in how I plan my life. Sometimes I get so psyched about remembering to bring my reusable bags when I grocery shop (I AM THE GREATEST! ECO! HUMAN! EVER!!) that I forget that this is not the point of being an adult. Do better for yourself, Kendra. Do better for nine year-old Kendra who wrote in her diary “It’s Friday and I have to wait a whole two days for school again, what a bummerrrrrrr.” Do it for that girl who didn’t know what fun tasted like. Put the little totem of fun a few miles down your path. Then run your guts out in the race to get there, through the Jans/Febs, through tax returns, through snowbanks and through the pennant flagged car lots trying to sell Cadillac convertibles. Run your guts through all the bologna until you reach that marker. Then, do what Mark and Julie Stanton do at Spring Training.

For context: Mark and Julie are the most Midwestern people you will EVER meet. They make friends EVERYWHERE. Once, while on vacation in Savannah with them, Husband and I got up from the table for a few minutes at a restaurant and a couple of strangers sat down in our place, probably because they smelled the Midwestern on Mark and Julie Stanton. They could sense this was a friendly kind of couple. They had told Pops and Julie their whole life story by the time we got back to the table, leaving nothing out. Net net, Pops and Jules are at spring training. Naturally, they are SO PUMPED because of something they refer to as "Vendor Heaven," which, let me translate that Midwesternese for you: they are irrationally excited over strangers who carry over-the-shoulder satchels full of overpriced snacks to sell you while you watch sports. Pops and Julie text me that they are keeping their eyes peeled for one vendor especial. 

One of my gal pals had been to spring training in the past and bore witness to this supposed snack elysium. She also told us about a particular beer vendor who was so memorable that my folks would likely know him when they saw him. She relayed that the vendor was “stout” and “intense.”

Well, given no other physical description, Pop and Julie texted that they had found The Beer Guy.

The next day, I receive a short video clip from Julie of a poor man’s John Wayne explaining his career trajectory as a beer vendor to his new confessor, Mark Stanton.

Me: “He’s exactly how I imagined him. Did you buy a cold one?”

Julie: “We bought a cold two. He explained to us that he’s battling exhaustion and peaked too early yesterday. Also gave us his itinerary for the next week. Gotta be in top form for the Giants.”

I share the video with my girlfriend who had been at spring training the year prior. She responds, Mmm, he’s not her beer guy. But that she now wants to hang out with my parents at an Indians game and compare notes about favorite vendors of the suds in a ballpark in Arizona.

This is how you sidestep JanuWeariness, it turns out. You buy yourself some tickets to a baseball game that will take place in February and look forward to meeting your beer guy. It doesn’t matter if he’s not someone else’s beer guy. It doesn’t matter if you don’t drink beer. Just embrace him or her, embrace the experience, and boom! Lookathat. It’s already March. Home run.

From the messy middle of the mid-winter muddling through

The temptation in writing about hard things is to wait until they have passed, until we are on the other side, our feet firmly on the shore as we peer back out at the choppy waters and sigh, so glad we’re not still treading water and trying like the dickens to avoid a shark attack.

Where we get it twisted is not in the writing of it, but in the presenting of it. As far back as high school, I remember our brilliant creative writing teacher Mrs. Sheridan (swoon, we all loved her so) explaining that it’s fine to write through the pain, but if we want to present it as the truest thing, as the thing about which we are most confident, we need some distance.

It’s not that writing about it while we’re in the messy middle of it is wrong. It’s not that we’re unreliable narrators. It’s just that our vision is limited. We’re myopic. We’re nose pressed to the glass of the hard thing on display. We’re smelling the fresh flowers at the funeral parlor. But what a thing we’ll have to write about in a year when they’re dried and shriveled. We’ll smell the fresh in our sense memory but we’ll also have a story to tell about the bouquet that looked like it had been caramelized in a cast iron skillet.

I’ve been trying to write through my winter depression this year, rather than wait for it to pass. It’s a seasonal depression, and one I treat with light therapy and a low dose of anti-depressant, along with talk therapy and a high dose of aerobic exercise and binge reading of sadpants memoirs and inhaling Hershey’s kisses by the bagful. I wish I could say that writing through the heaviness has been leavening. But I still feel as though I wake up most days with an elephant squatting on my chest. I still feel like making a salad is possibly tantamount to climbing K2. I still want want to be hugged and for nothing to be expected of me from anyone. I am still depressed and trying to fight through it. Writing does not help to change this or cure this, but it does change my awareness of how I am coping.

Just yesterday, for example, I realized that it’s not that I become a different person, per se, that I’m inhabited by a depressed monster of a different color. I’m not unrecognizable. I’m still there. It’s that it takes so much effort to pretend that the depression isn’t also there. I still think my kids are funny and their Big Chungus memes are still ridiculous. Sometimes my face just winces instead of the easy laughter flowing out. So I wish sometimes to just go join a different body. One that doesn’t have the elephant sitting on it.

I think about the line in the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” where they resign, “We’ll have to muddle through somehow…” and I’ve always genuinely wondered what the somehow actually looks like, and how they’d carry on until the fates allow for a reunion. Those aren’t the songs that get written, though. It is the blog post that gets written by ya girl and right now I’m muddling through. I’m grateful for a husband who truly understands, two Voxer chatgroups that make me feel heard, two beautiful kids that see my penchant for sweatpants and forgetfulness and love me anyway, and Bill Cunningham’s Fashion Climbing on loan from the library.

Holla from the messy middle.

Oh gosh. Not another crybaby with depression.

This is not a crybaby post about depression. Whatever that means.

It is, rather, a very practical post about how I live with depression and generalized anxiety disorder, especially in the winter when it worsens. I've learned to make practical modifications so that suicide ideation is no longer a very real part of my every day and so that I am not an entirely miserable person with whom to share tubes of toothpaste and children and life.

I've been envisioning this post for awhile now. It's been rattling around in my head, dancing with delusions about how I'm going to package it cute-like as if living with depression were a Betty Crocker recipe for making pineapple upside-down cake. But depression slows me down and drains me of motivation (when I am otherwise a fairly hyperactive person with a zeal for socializing and hobbies). I realized this post would never happen if I didn't just aim low and crank out something, albeit not very fancy.

So here we go. Some things that have helped me stay afloat through especially hard months in Depression Town. I hope it helps someone. 

I learned a long time ago that taking a particular dose of a particular anti-depressant helped me to feel a certain way. It means I don't laugh really hard like I used to. This also means I don't cry at the drop of a hat like I used to. I take my pill every day and I may very well take it for the rest of my life. Oh no, aren't you afraid of being dependent on a chemical? I am afraid of a heapton of things in this world. Many are beyond my control. Many exist as figments of my imagination. Many exist well beyond the horizon line of my lifetime. I can't be preoccupied with them. I take each day as it comes. That's what effectively living with depression looks like to me. Taking my prescribed dosage and being thankful for healthcare coverage and not worrying about how many more days I will need to keep doing the same--that's my jam. 

I am not a morning person by nature. I often take hours to fall asleep at night and oftentimes I don't stay asleep. Every semester, I teach an 8 a.m. class. When a colleague evaluated my teaching last semester, she said, "I can tell you're not a morning person but you do a really good job of trying to pretend you are." I laughed. Just because we have depression doesn't mean we can all have a schedule that is favorable. Still, I have learned to fake only what is necessary. I wouldn't recommend faking pleasure or friendship or happiness. I am willing to put a brave face forward in my early classes, though, because it only requires that I show up, prepared and ready to face the day, and I can tell that most of my students are trying to do the same. We are in the early morning struggle together.

I keep my life very simple, especially in the winters. I rarely say YES to things, and prefer a month of lame weekends to busy ones. I don't like to dread activities that should otherwise be fun. I have learned which friends will take things personally and which friends are safe to tell that I really don't feel up to things right now. Some friends will hold it against you and others will totally understand that you just feel overwhelmed by social expectations but look forward to seeing them when you're feeling better.

The hardest thing I have found about living with depression is still being present for my hubby and kids. They may ask so little of me, e.g. to read a book to them or listen to a story and yet Depression, liar of liars, will trick my mind into thinking it's a huge mountain to climb. The best way I have learned to be present is to be honest right out of the gate. To say to my kids almost immediately when I pick them up from school: Mommy is having a hard day. Do you ever feel like you just want to watch TV and not talk to anyone? That's how Mommy feels today. My kids are remarkably accommodating when I let them know that I am wearing my grumpy pants and it's not because of anything they have done. My husband is a living saint where depression is concerned and gets it and doesn't hold it against me and makes me salads without asking. Praises be.

To that end, the final strategy I've learned to help immensely when I feel depression cloaking me is to practice radical self-care. I am uncompromising when it comes to eating healthfully and exercising just about every day. Depression will tell me that I deserve to eat a pan of Rice Krispie treats for dinner and be a wicked slob. Fast forward to when I am so much worse off and feeling all frumpalump and really? No, Depression. You may win the battle of the couch potatoes but this yoga mat is not your battleground. Move along.

I am thankful for my faith and for my friends and family who have loved me through some rocky times. Depression can be a badge and a burden but it can also be the reason that blessings flood us when we need it most. Sending courage to all the depression warriors out there, and those who love them. <3