Wintering To The Music of NYC
Seasonal Depression, HYGGE, and desperately attempting to feel good.
With the lingo of mental health now firmly part of the cultural lexicon, seasonal affective disorder (Ms. S.A.D. if yer nasty) has been vaulted into meme status. No longer is this Vitamin D deficiency a private battle marked with shame, hidden from all your friends, but a sort of inevitable hallmark of the solstice that we greet with resigned enthusiasm.
S.A.D. has been a lodger in my house since I can remember. I fled to Southern California at 18—ignoring all signs of our cultural mismatch—purely for access to sunlight. After enduring years of Northern California’s grey cloud indigestion (Many winters I recall yelling to the cinder block sky: “Make a f**king decision!”), blocking out the sun for months at a time, and thereby skewing my outlook on the world toward perpetual darkness. In LA, I assumed, my deepest inner turmoil, my existential woes, would somehow be softened by a sun tan. Ha!
Like any love affair, projection is a powerful illusion. Inevitably, the sheen of newness wears off, and one sees—as I saw in LA—the smog, the traffic, the relentless hustle. Basically, nuance. And that universal truth that one discovers behind every external circumstance we believe this time will nourish us completely: nothing outside of you will ever fully satiate your spiritual longing. It is all within.
Dammit.
So it came as a surprise (even to myself) that I packed up and moved to New York City two months ago (a plan in March of 2020 that was halted by the start of the pandemic); a city well-known for its brutal winters. I told myself that surely, after 36 years, I’d cultivated an arsenal of support to endure the winters I had been warned of, the winters that so many New Yorkers flee the moment their bank account allows it. Surely my resiliency would light the way.
And so far folks, it has been a true kick in the gut. To maintain an interior world in NYC is a full-time job, an intensive labor of both decompression, self-soothing and benevolent detachment. The world pre-pandemic, at the very least, allowed one access to the machinations of this grand metropolis at every hour. Feeling lonely? Head out for a walk, ride the subway, find a jazz show, or simply people watch. While this level of access remains available, the presence of a deadly virus that intensifies in winter forces even the mightiest indoors, removed from the sustenance of social exposure. All interactions must be carefully calculated based upon risk.
And so, by force, I have had to slow down, stay indoors much more than anticipated, and maneuver my actions around safety and health. In a city renowned for its productivity (lest we forget the deeply toxic layers behind the phrase “the city that never sleeps”), this can feel like a form of betrayal. If I am resting, am I wasting my time? Am I missing out on opportunities? Am I in the right place? One comes to NY to plug into its energy, to siphon from its seemingly eternal charge. Right?
Last weekend I got sick. It wasn’t COVID, thankfully, but it very clearly showed all the symptoms of burnout: fatigue, extreme exhaustion, weakened muscles, inability to focus or retain conversation, migraines. I slept, on and off, for nearly three days, and still would prefer to keep doing so well into March. I’m a firm believer that the immune system often communicates what the mind refuses to acknowledge. Should we exist too heavily in the realm of the the future, of what-ifs, of worries, anxieties and doubts, the body lassoes us into submission and demands an audience. Sometimes, that includes a fever.
What became clear to me in my prescribed horizontal time is the power of our capitalist conditioning to work like machines. It was not the first time I encountered the illness/epiphany dynamic, and surely will not be the last. I can write vividly of the systems that wrangle us into self-hatred (and I do, often), how they corner us into an infinity loop of “never enough,” and yet still be affected by said conditioning. We often fixate on topics that are monoliths in our personal lives that we wish to transcend. I write about capitalism and mental health simply because it makes me feel less alone, and calls out to those who might, in their own way, identify with their own experiences under this system. A consistent bid for connection in an increasingly isolated world.
Much has been said recently of the power of community care to fend off depression and anxiety, to name a few ailments. Self-care methods, while essential to cultivate, only take us so far when we have drifted from shore. Humans are social creatures, and the loneliness of this pandemic—in an already isolated social fabric—can wither the spirit, and hope’s fervent spotlight too. Some days, it has withered mine, and I long to simply lay in the grass with my chosen family, sharing food, stories, laughter and the simple presence of others as comfort, as sustenance. Some days I feel I am grieving this dream, that the pandemic dashed its possibility. Those are usually the days without sun, the days spent most removed from the world.
At the same time, the cultivation of an interior world is essential, and I’ve had to take on my spiritual self like a party planner. My partner, a veteran of decades of deep winter, reminded me recently of the pleasures of hygge, a Danish term for indulging in the small pleasures and cozy elements often associated with winter (See: thick sweaters, fireplaces, books, soups, slowness, rest).
I recently picked up Katherine May’s book on Wintering as a means to redirect my focus toward winter as a time of chosen regeneration, rather than resisted rest. One of the opening paragraphs spoke volumes to me:
Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast in the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or life event such as bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.”
The sense of being “left behind” in our present world can manifest in any season. Winter, perhaps, has a certain power to fire this panic into the subconscious, to center our attentions on what we lack, what is missing, what is seemingly deficient within us. The time alone with our minds, when we so often are rewarded for keeping them occupied, can be overwhelming. We can so quickly view ourselves as not enough, and worse: as banished to this existence.
Too often I speak of doubt in the intellectual sense, from a comfortable distance of a deckchair, though I am full of them. I fear some days that my previous career as an actor was my peak. I fear some days that my skills as a creative may not be congruent with the speed of the modern world. I fear some days that my desire for slowness is a weakness in a world that idealizes instant gratification. And when I ruminate on these fears and judge myself for having them, I do not allow them to function as vessels toward deeper pains I have been unknowingly avoiding.
I often take walks around NYC with headphones in my ear. It provides a soundtrack to my movements, a cinematic flourish to mundane tasks. And also, sometimes, it is a protective shield, a barrier from unwanted solicitations. Today though, I walked without them. I wanted to hear the music of the city, the calamatous din of subway cars on neglected tracks, the Altman-esque conversations drifting in sterephonic sound around me, the symphony of human voices that make up my surroundings. One often gets a boost of life’s vividness after illness, a greater appreciation for the details overlooked before being bedridden. Today I simply invited the world into my ears, no expectations, no demands.
Winter hasn’t even truly begun, but I know that this year, of all the years, I must greet it as a friend, a teacher. The ground we all walk on is enduring seismic shifts, and in the confines of our bedrooms it can sometimes seem that our isolation is insurmountable, our suffering endless. If doubt creeps in, I urge you to walk outside, to breathe in whatever air is around you, and to simply listen. Count the call of birds or the horns of buses. Listen to conversations, or the presence of the wind changing direction. Take in this winter, this hibernation as your chance to rejuvenate, yet again, and emerge a rested and nourished creature.
Your writing makes me feel less alone. So grateful for your generosity and for being led to your Instagram (which led me here). Thank you for how you see and create!