"Rainy days and Mondays always get me down"...amen, Karen Carpenter. I'm with you. Mostly the rainy days part, but sometimes a Monday can really send me to the bottom of my barrel.
It's the gloom.
I cannot stand the gloom of rainy days. Or the eternal grayness of Ohio winters. The cloudy shadow that hangs over Columbus in the fall and winter changes me into this weird person who I just don't like. As the years stack up behind me, the more intense it gets. I've always been sensitive to light deprivation. But I'm starting to wonder if I'm developing that seasonal disorder or something...
All right. Now I sound like Woody Allen, falling deep into hypochondria.
I know rainy days are necessary. I know that gloom makes us more appreciative of the light, literally and figuratively...spiritually. I'm not ignorant to that.
It should come as no surprise that my mind and emotions sometimes conflict. This is just one of those instances. Logical or not, the fact is that sunshine makes me the me I love to be. I'm my favorite version of myself when the sun warms my face, when I can feel its heat through the shirt on my back and the skin underneath. Even when the weather is ice cold and a blanket of snow covers the ground and hangs from bare tree branches, if the sun is shining, I'm me. I'm good. I'm my naturally happy self. But when the gloom inevitably returns, that me often retreats and the other me, the slacked-shoulder, melancholy, smiling-is-a-chore me takes her place.
Picturing myself like that...all sullen and sad, walking around wringing my hands and grumpy...wearing my thick plastic-rimmed glasses...
My God. I
am Woody Allen.
