A Sadness Like Winter's

Notes on Depression, Caffeine, and The Insistent Future

I suspect depression is creeping up on me. It was bound to happen—it always does. Even in sunny California! It was 80 degrees last week, but my bones aren’t fooled. Remarkable mind I have. Clever body, too. This flesh knows the seasons even if the square of earth where I sleep has forgotten to honor them.

I’ve been taking time to hold counsel with my body lately. The process of going inward, finding pain and concealed emotion, is still new and challenging. Being a control freak, one of my key instigators for these sessions is my fear of addiction. It’s a helpful tool for psychic insights. Addiction can tell you a lot about yourself.

Do you like uppers or downers? Do you need more or do you need less stimulation? What feels comforting to your mind? What would your body give up anything for? How does it go about justifying its hedonism? Is it hedonism—to feel simply alive? What questions do you ignore? What secrets do you keep?

Lately, I’ve been letting my addiction to caffeine run rampant. I caught myself with an almost-Millennial-grade cringe the other morning as I ass-dragged to my first cup of the day. “Coffee is love, Coffee is Life” I thought to myself, rubbing three barely active brain cells together. I stiffened, realizing how close that was to the pathetically simpering “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee” shirts and mugs that were the object of my unbridled scorn at sixteen. Humiliating. But I’m not sixteen anymore. I guess you either die an energetic juvenile or live long enough to see yourself become a stimulant-dependent adult.

At 25, a quarter of a century, my body longs for speed.

Speed that will make the rate that days are flying by match the rate my mind processes them. Give me something, anything to snap my synapse at the same rate as a computer processing chip (roughly 100,000 times faster than human thought, according to the informative, but terrifying book I’ve been reading this week about AI “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”). But nothing too hard, of course. Nothing that will rot out my teeth or ruin my already defective heart. Coffee is safe. As I caught my subconscious murmuring like Gollum, Coffee is love, coffee is life. Isn’t it?

I slipped from my modest one cup of aeropressed espresso into two from a French press. I use the same amount of grounds, so... theoretically the amount of caffeine I ingest must be about the same. I’m no chemist, but the logic holds. However, if one of my friends invites me to a café in late morning, that’s quite alright. I’ve only had a pre-coffee coffee. So then two cups and a latte. Permissible. Naughty, but still safely within the parameters of modestly over-indulgent consumption.

I usually stop there, but as the days have gotten shorter, my body can’t help but suggest an afternoon tea around 5 p.m. Black, if you don’t mind. And a nap. Naps are good for us! They pass the time—I mean, they restore our dopamine and allow our brains to clear out waste.

I spoke to my father recently. He famously drinks a 64-oz thermos of black coffee every day and has black tea before bed. We both metabolize caffeine strangely. We can fall asleep right after drinking it.

“I’m like you.” I said to him. “It doesn’t keep me up. I guess it just... keeps me going.” He nodded with a bemused smile and raised eyebrows. He understands what’s slowing down in me. He understands the shaking in my hands as I reach for the hot water in the morning, before a single milligram of the drug has touched my tongue. He knows what waits for me if I don’t abuse a stimulant here and there. He knows the darkness of our uninterrupted nature. It was his first. Of course he knows.

And so we drink coffee and we pretend we don’t feel the cold creeping from the outside all the way in.

Depression isn’t an oppressive sadness. Not to me, anyway. It’s absurdly misrepresented in media. I can’t remember who first explained depression to me. It was probably when I was four. My brother died during birth, I’ve written some deeply tragic things about that previously if you’re feeling a morbid curiosity.

Understandably, after his death, my mother experienced a catatonic depression that she barely survived. Her state was explained to me with words I could understand at that age:

“She’s so sad she can’t do anything.”

Sadness is such a heavy thing to carry. It takes enormous energy. After tantrums, I remember the exhaustion of my tiny body. HEaving sobs that melted into dreamless sleep. Of course her sadness kept her in bed. Everything checked out to me.

When I went off to college and found myself slipping, I never suspected depression. As a life-long neatfreak, the piles of clothes in my room were far more offensive and concerning to me than the complete emotional vacancy. I didn’t feel sadness, hell, I didn’t feel anything.

I remember calling my best friend after months of moving through the world like air was molasses and I was wrapped in Iron Man’s first draft.

“What’s going on with you?” He asked.

“I don’t know, I just can’t do anything. I can’t even clean—I feel like I’m going insane, I know what I need to do I just physically cannot do it.”

“It sounds like you’re depressed.”

I burst into tears.

“Oh.”

In many ways, my life is quite similar now to the circumstances around my college depression. I’m in a loving relationship, living out a life away from home that I have dreamed of for years. A lot is expected of me, cognitively. The burden of that is a constant source of stress, but I’m managing tasks well enough to survive. Thriving is out of the question. We’ll get there, I tell myself. Now, I need to focus. To lock in.

I’m in good shape—my body is taken care of, but the mind inside of it is like a lifeless animal. Mechanic, actually. Going through the motions. So heavily. The best parts of my days are when I’m eating or laying down, when the burden of moving my brain is lifted, and I can just rest. Just be. The philosophy of animism has really resonated with me over the last year—that humans are complicated animals; our needs remain tied to nature, which is quite as alive and spiritually significant as we are.

We are not so strange, alien, or evolved that we no longer need sunlight, warmth, touch, and to spend hours gazing at expansive horizons. Most illness, I’m aware, comes from a disconnect from nature. Interestingly, this seasonal nonsense afflicting me doesn’t particularly give a damn that I’ve been taking long hikes, spending time with friends, having delicious intimacy, and eating well. It isn’t impressed with my follower growth or my creative breakthroughs. In fact, it would prefer if I did less of all of those things that make me feel alive.

Recede, it hisses at me. Go home, stuff yourself with sweets and bourbon, and sleep until you are fat, ugly, and forgotten. Only then will you know peace. Only then will all the raging darkness in your head, the hurricane you’ve been holding back with the fortitude of a sheet of tissue paper propped up by a q-tip, leave you alone.

Of course, I’m tempted to give in. It is no easy feat to continue living semi-normally with such a noise clamoring inside your head. There’s plenty to marvel at. There’s plenty to pour gratitude on. It just doesn’t seem to matter right now. Plus, everyone is receding in their way. “Cuffing season.” I dislike the carceral tint to the colloquial, but recognize the seasonal pattern. Many people are falling in love. We can, therefore, predict great social recessions as these budding relationships begin demanding thick fertilizers of alone time. Something about the cold always forces us into the arms of another’s warm body, doesn’t it?

So why am I so strange? So desperate to be nothing.

If I could exist as mere mist for a few months, or perhaps as a feral cat—devoid of responsibility and complex emotion—I suspect all would be well. But I remain cloyingly human. Distressingly body-bound, as ever. Expected to participate and postulate and fear the onslaught of horrors beyond decency’s comprehension as a headline every other day. Sure. I am the universe, incarnated as a tiny filament of the universe, trapped within the universe, experiencing itself. What a sicko. I’ve been tempted to do hallucinogenic again just to give it (the universe) a piece of my mind.

Forgive me, I am so fortunate to write this at all. I woke up grateful for my life and had an almost offensively beautiful day. I’m writing this by romantic candle light, the wasted tea leaves of my afternoon cup weeping stale tea into a ceramic tea saucer beside me. My week has already been ripe with wholesome events and many more await me over the weekend. I’m almost done bleeding for this moon. My hormones are nearly rebalanced. This awful thousand-pounds-of-hollowness on my chest will soon dissipate.

Everything I want personally and professionally is unfolding neatly into my shaky hands. Perhaps it’s the foresight that eats me alive. The knowledge that after the reprieve awaits the Sisyphean task of continuing with certainty that it will happen again.

What has really stopped me from unbridled moping is the suspicion that it’s all contrived. Depression is the HIGHLY intended outcome of the media landscape we’re all regularly submerged in. A sadness like winter’s is far more merciful than a sadness like CNN’s. At least Winter knows nature’s mercy. Knows rest. Not at all like the abomination that is the modern 24-hour digitized news cycle.

If I may be permitted a projection, I anticipate this is the last year we will be held to the flame of unchecked mass media consumption. Call it willful optimism, but I anticipate that AI is about to close the doors of all social media permanently. Maybe not this one—though I would personally like to perform citizen’s arrest style take downs of the LinkedIn Substackers and AI-list publishers. Fuck those people.

A woman who professionally supports women giving birth posted a video that found my feed recently. Her message was to the “We’re So Cooked” crowd:

“You wouldn’t be so hopeless about the state of things if you knew what every single woman says during labor, right before she gives birth. Every single one.

She says ‘I can’t do this.’

Midwives know that that phrase means it’s already happening. So remember, every time you hear that same sentiment echoing across the internet, what you’re hearing is affirmation that we are about to birth a new era. Just breathe.”

I’ve flowered this with my artistic interpretation of her sentiment, but the core truth remains. It is my greatest recent solace.

The fact that a new world is being born is clear. My concern is that we are not prepared to raise one better than the last. We are not busying ourselves imagining a new world and how we will be better stewards of it than our ancestors were. We are only lamenting this one’s death, because with it dies the desperate dream of a utopia, effortlessly waiting to carry us out of the holes we spent our whole lives digging. Forgetting, perhaps, that a sick and useless part of us likes digging, wallowing like pigs in the filth of our own design. Maybe part of me likes this suffering.

(A heap of official, very important and thoroughly ignored mail is staring at me hard from the corner of my desk as I write this. Whatever. Fine me.)

I guess no one’s ever truly ready to be a parent—to a child, much less a future. But that’s never stopped either from falling, bloody and full of life, into our hands. So I try to rest as much and love as deeply as I am able. And that will have to be enough.