On Autumn and Hope

Becca and I diagnosed ourselves with Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder (RSAD) one particularly harsh summer during grad school. (For those just tuning in, Becca is my Ethel Mertz; the Louise to my Thelma; my exception (see He's Just Not That Into You)). Seasonal Affective Disorder, commonly, is when you get sad and depressed during the winter from the cold and lack of sunlight. Becca and I get sad and depressed during the summer. It's just too damn hot and humid in this swamp that passes for the nation's capital. You can't breathe and there's no hope for girls with thick, curly hair and all that sun is devastating to my alabaster skin.

So maybe it's just the turning of the season, but this year the cooler, humidity-free air seems to be carrying healing straight to my summer-dry soul.

The decadence of my first salted caramel mocha after months of unsweetened iced green tea.

A cardigan and a scarf thrown over the same outfit I've worn two dozen times this summer, making me feel disproportionately more competent and together.

Cool mornings to walk and pray and breathe and cool evenings to sit outside with good friends and sleeping with the windows open.

I try to remember to say a blessing on each healing moment. Bless you, chill in the air at 5am. Bless you, butternut squash. Bless you, apples to pick this weekend. Bless you, mountains in the distance that I couldn't see through summer's haze. Because when I do, I remember how these things are blessing me.

All this delicious autumnness seems to be fortifying my soul, wrapping my sad heart in a cozy sweater, making me brave, tempting me to hope. I hear whispers in the trees with leaves just beginning to think about turning, "it's time."

And so I bought prenatal vitamins and have actually taken them 5 days straight.

And even though it made me shake, I picked up the phone and made an appointment and my friends (bless them) threw me a parade, raining words down on me like confetti, celebrating the obscene amount of courage that one small act required of me, rebuking me for feeling stupid about that.

Summer is giving way to fall, like it always does and like sometime in mid-July I always fear it never will. As it does, I remember a universal truth, as true of my heart as it is of the seasons:  this too shall pass. This season of mourning and emptiness will not last. Joy will come, like the fall probably, in fits and starts and with a random heat wave in early October, but it will come. Indeed it appears to be on its way.

"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns." - George Eliot                      (Kenyon College in the Fall)