I can feel the Seasonal Affective Disorder playing in my peripheral. Not quite here but also not, not here. 

It is strange how familiar the transition from summer brain to winter brain has become. First, it is just the ghost of a thought, a blurred image in the corner of my eye, a heaviness somewhere between my lungs and heart. Not quite making it hard to breathe or beat -- just making it hard. The pin prick of emotion with no cause clouding the space behind my eyes. 

I think I would call the first stage of SAD, "the desire to feel melancholy.". Because that is what happens. I, ridiculous human that I am, will begin to gather and harvest sadness in all the places that I can find it. Music and books. Real life and fiction. Past and future. It's not hard. There's a lot of sadness in the world. And that's the tricky bit. How do you lean into the melancholy without being swallowed by the abyss?

Accepting my depression helps me locate this pull towards melancholy early and often. When I pretend that I am perfectly capable and healthy, I drown under the weight of misplaced emotion - both melancholy and frustration. Winter never makes any sense when I try to act like I have the same brain that I had in the summer time. The other side of accepting my depression is knowing that I have survived 30+ winters with their season of melancholy and the abyss has yet to swallow me. I visit but I don't stay. 

I say that even though I have known enough people who did not come back out of the abyss to know survival is not a given. Hope is such a fickle thing.