So I was born in Florida.
and for some reason when I tell anyone that I'm moving away from Florida to the north, everyone just says, 'but it's going to be so cold', or 'are you going to be able to handle the weather' or 'just wait until it gets REALLY cold'.
I've decided that the coldness factor of living in the north doesn't suck at all- really, you don't deal with it much, it's a mild inconvenience when your hand gets numb while you are driving because you have to use it to touch your steering wheel, but it gets back to warm temperatures in a few minutes once you get to your destination. No biggie.
Now what no one warned me about. What would have been viable information to me, moving from florida to the north, is about the light to dark ratio here in Minnesota. That's about one of the only things that affects me differently living here in the winter than living in florida in the winter. I'm used to a lot more sunshine rays in my face, keeping me a pretty stable and happy lady. But I pretty much work 9-5 shifts and by the time I get out of work it's already dark. The lack of these rays has been pretty upsetting to my emotional balance.
When I got here Liz told me about this affecting her and said she was recommended Vitamin D to help. Someone said something about going to a tanning booth for a short session once a month or something, but I haven't heard much else on the subject. I've been trying to do my best with this part of it.
When it's dark out I feel like it's okay to go out and party, but not necessarily stay home and work on my projects and be productive, that's just how I did things for so long, especially because the fun stuff only happened until it got dark out where I was living. So that's another thing that I've been adjusting to. Which has helped with the lack of new work being produced.
I read up on some possible answers and S.A.D. [seasonal Affective Disorder] came up a few times, as well as just 'winter blues' [ http://www.d.umn.edu/hlthserv/counseling/common_concerns/seasonal_disorder.html]. It says stuff about getting a heating lamp, and exercising, postponing life changes till the warmer months. I stopped exercising sometime last year after all that crap happened, and life changes have been happening constantly for the past few months for me. Oops.
I only bring this up because I've been having some pretty extreme lows that as a person who's battled depression throughout most of her life it's bad when it gets to a point where I notice it enough to write about it. I usually know that there is an end to my crazy thoughts and that it's just 'that time of the month' and what-not, but what I've been experiencing lately [when it's happened] feels like it's all over. As in my life. It's very scary to feel like that, it happened for the first time in Nov, and it happened again last month. I know it has nothing to do with moving and all of the other crap that's happened to me recently, because I've been dealing with all of those things before and I know how my mind wraps around them, but this is scary different.
Why am I writing about this, #1 to see if I keep feeling like this for the rest of the winter, or if I feel like this again next winter, and if so or if not what changed. #2 to see if anyone else has experienced it to an extreme nature and how they dealt with it. and #3 just as a release from keeping the thoughts of it all inside my head.
So delicate we are.
