The Turn
Hello again my friends! And happy solstice! The days are officially getting longer again and thank fucking god the light will be returning, though not nearly soon enough.
Because for now, the dark has come for me. I held out longer than I have in previous years, but Seasonal Affective Disorder will have its way. Objectively things in my day-to-day life are still quite pleasant - good, even - and work picked up just enough that I should manage to scrape by through end of the year. I have pleasant plans for my birthday and Christmas, and a week-or-so off work in which I plan to do a lot of pleasant reading and writing, and maybe some 2025 project planning.
But despite all this pleasantness, my brain seems to have been completely leeched of serotonin and every small imperfect thing makes me want to either CRY or MURDER, or just go back to sleep. And I can’t blame my hormones at the moment. I think I’m just gonna have to power through with extra trips to the gym, which restore my equanimity quite well for about 24-48 hours before I again wake up feeling like the entire world just needs to fucking go to hell. Who the fuck invented winter at higher latitudes? What are they even doing up there in Norway? I’m sorry, but Gløgg is not that great.
To be absolutely fair, I also think some of this melancholy is a bigger stress release. The world is not in great shape. Things feel unstable and unpredictable. The news has been extremely punishing, and The Discourse often more so, even though I’m mostly off social media now. In the last two weeks, I’ve developed a persistent twitch in my left eyelid.
Also - I am not going to go into too much detail on this one - my sister had a heart transplant almost exactly two weeks ago. Her long-term prognosis is very good, but as you might imagine, recovering from a heart transplant is a very big ordeal, and her recovery is complicated by the fact that they had to do extensive reconstruction on her chest wall. It’s very slow going, and it has of course taken over absolutely everything for my family in New York. And it’s been stressful for me in a weird, different way, since I’m physically removed but the daily ups-and-downs (of which there are many) are always sort of running in the background.
Anyway, pretty much every single person I talk to is ready to put this year behind them. And perhaps this time of year always takes on a certain extra weight for me because my birthday, the holidays, and the new year all fall within less than ten days of each other - so it’s not just a new year for ~the world~, but also for me.
This year allowed me to slow down, rest, and do some very much needed internal recalibration. Because resting and stock-taking have been big personal themes this year, it’s also felt fundamentally like a transitional one. And perhaps that feeling is enhanced by the literal transitional quality being 39, on the cusp of one of those big-deal “milestone” birthdays, and one that is specifically associated with the transition from “being young” into being… something else.
Tomorrow, specifically. I will officially no longer be “young” tomorrow.
It’s a weird feeling but not a bad one. Life begins at 40, they say, and my 30s were… a mixed bag. Exciting things happened (I moved to Europe and am still here!), but they were also difficult in ways I didn’t anticipate. A big chunk of these years felt like they got “lost.” And while I’m very conscious in retrospect that’s not actually how it works, I’m looking forward to tackling the next decade with renewed agency and some rather hard-won perspective. I am Saturnian through and through, and we are late bloomers but we get it done.
Maybe the world has just been conspiring in various ways to make me think about death, or to put it in less morbid (and more accurate) terms, the inevitable fact of mortality and what it means for the experience of being alive - and the cyclical nature of rest and action, or contraction and expansion, which I’ve also been thinking about a lot in the last year. When I was home in October, my mother complimented me on how balanced I seem. That balance is imperfect, but I do feel it.
Anyway, happy birthday to me. And happy solstice - aka the actual New Year - to all of you.