To all my fellow depressives, getting hit hard by the suddenly shorter, colder days? I’m with you. I’m on an unshakeable schedule when it comes to Seasonal Activated Depression (SAD – aww. Nice acronym. But wouldn’t Feeling Under-Cheerful, Killing The Happy Inside Syndrome be more accurate?)

Leading up to Halloween? Couldn’t be happier. The second after midnight on the 31st? The gloom & grey come down like a mildewy theatre curtain.

Please don’t forget, these next few months, until the spring kicks in and we can all start skateboarding on the serotonin rainbow of summer – you CAN get through this. One way is to go regularly help someone else. In a big or small way. Talk to someone regularly, or bring someone food or just your company. One selfish benefit of charity is it gives you a free vacation from inside your own head. Don’t worry – all that gorgeous nonsense & noise you’ve got rattling around inside your skull will politely wait until you come back.

And now I’m going to give you a weird piece of advice that’s always worked for me.

Read something Russian. Novel, short story, play, poem. Especially Pushkin or Dostoyevsky. Holy moley did those guys live train wreck lives, and they lived them in a state of near-constant, tomb-like winter.

They didn’t write happy stuff, those Russians. But man did they sling some defiant word-bricks at the darkness, as if to say, to their own depression and madness, “I own YOU. You’re merely renting space within my mind & soul. You REALLY want to stake a claim to my headspace? Then you’re gonna have to share it with some darkness of my OWN creation. I’m gonna give you a roommate called CRIME & PUNISHMENT that’ll
send you screaming out onto the Russian steppes.”

Read something Russian. Remind your depression that you have access to ancient, arctic gloom-blasts, and that if you can’t make it leave your head, you can sure as shit frighten it into being a polite guest until the snow melts.

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Patton Oswalt – To all my fellow depressives, getting hit… | Facebook