On "seasonal depression," dark nights, or whatever the hell this is

Could just be winter.

Before I got sober, I used to “hit bottom” every March. At some point during those years I managed to activate my four remaining brain cells to figure out that something “happened” to me over January and February, because every March I ended up in rehab, a mental institution, or, finally in 2009, at the most bottommed out bottom I had ever hit, namely the one that ultimately got me sober.

I remember that one well. I had never known a low like that, although externally I was not in the worst shape I’d ever been in. I had a room to stay in at my mom’s house. My employer had taken me back for one more chance. I was seeing my kids occasionally.

But internally, for the first time in my life, something truly broke. On a morning that was like so many others, coming down off three days of drinking, shaking, shivering, sweating, I laid in that bed and saw my life roll out ahead of me like a long carpet might unroll. I saw the end of my life. And I knew I would die an alcoholic, and that there was nothing I could do about it. That was the real change. I always had a next move, a new gimmick, and new reason, solution, approach. That morning, though, I had not one idea left, and I felt I would give anything in the world to live one day free from the chains of alcoholism that had bound my body, brain, and soul for over a decade.

There’s a lot of talk about “battling addiction,” and I certainly did that, but my life changed when I realized it was a battle I would always lose. It was when I stopped fighting, when I had no ideas left, that I was able to hear what other people were telling me. I became willing to listen. I knew I needed help. I had lost faith in my schemes and designs. I would have done anything, and thankfully I encountered other folks in recovery who told me how they had gotten sober.

I don’t know how to explain this and it’s not very fun to hear, I imagine, if folks are reading this in hopes I’ll share exactly how I got sober, thinking perhaps of a loved one struggling with addiction. Or maybe themselves. But I refuse to invent things because it makes the story more pleasant or palatable. When I was writing my book I knew people would be waiting for the “big reveal sobriety moment,” the clear recounting of what I did, exactly, to get sober and stay sober. And I knew I couldn’t offer that. It would have required my lying.

For what happened to me remains something of a mystery. I don’t understand it and I doubt I ever will. I can say with clarity that the bottle killed me, and in that death I became a person who could listen, and thank god the people around me knew what to say. I can tell you it was in surrender that I found the “power” to get sober. And I got sober on spiritual grounds through 12-step recovery. Other than that, I don’t know what to say, and I certainly don’t claim to have a clue how anybody else can get sober. This is what happened to me.

I took my last drink March 4, 2009, and thus March 5, 2009 is the date marking the start of my sobriety. I have not had a drink since then. But none of this is really my point, which makes it a little odd that I’m writing about it, but whatever.

My point is I am a fucking depressed during this time of year and it isn’t just the dark, freezing, windy, wet, endlessly gray days of The Netherlands. I got seasonal depression in California where the sun never stops shining. This does not strike me as a vitamin D issue. Although admittedly, it’s much, much worse here.

After I got sober I reminded myself every year that I went “whacky” in January and February, that the world becomes heavy and strange, empty and foreign. That I become that way, too. I would expect it, wait for it. Sort of nod along when it came, ah, you again, hello. Knowing what it was, and most importantly, that it would pass, allowed me to get through it without any particular freak out or action. I’d try to eat healthier foods and exercise more. I’d go to more recovery meetings. Maybe I’d pray or meditate more often. But mostly, I would remember that “the darkness” happens every year. I am not broken, this is just my winter routine.

And it will pass.

This year I’m the lowest I’ve been in a long, long time. I don’t want to use words like “depression” because they tend to imply some sort of disorder that I should do something about. Get medicated or something. Even “seasonal depression” leaves me wanting, although it’s quite obviously the exact thing that’s going on. Lots of folks seem very interested in diagnosing themselves and then it sort of becomes their whole identity. I get that. My experience makes me wonder, though, if everything needs a name.

I have a long and sordid relationship with mental health diagnoses. I won’t do a whole run-down here but I think it’s an interesting discussion. Is it better to name everything? Does it all need a diagnosis? If we have a diagnosis, are we then able to actually do something about it?

DO ANY OF THESE ASSHOLES ACTUALLY TREAT MENTAL ILLNESS OR DO THEY JUST GIVE US WEIRD BANDAID OPTIONS INVENTED AT RANDOM?

Sorry for yelling.

I have mixed experience with this, as you may have guessed.

I have been immensely helped and immensely not helped through mental health diagnoses and subsequent medical treatments. After giving birth to my first child at 22 years old, staying in a room in my in-laws’ house with my 20-year-old husband, I had no idea what postpartum depression was, but I knew there was something very, very wrong with me.

The nurse who put her hand on my leg when I told her about how I felt, through tears, because I truly thought they were going to take my baby away, saying to me, “Oh, honey, you’ve got a bit of postpartum depression. We’ll get you fixed right up,” — well she saved my life, I think. She gave me Zoloft. It was like somebody lifted me out of a deep abyss I had been living in. In just a few months I had gotten myself a job, moved us out of the house (it was perfectly fine there, we just needed our own space), and felt returned to sanity, myself, and life.

I was on it for a year and went off. It was great. That was a fabulous experience with a diagnosis and medication.

During the peak years of my alcoholism and drug addiction, I was diagnosed with a whole plethora of illnesses: Bipolar II, Borderline Personality Disorder, Chronic Depression, PTSD, cocaine-induced schizophrenia. My norm was taking seven different psychotropic medications at the same time, although it went up to 11 at one point. They ranged from benzodiazepines like Xanax to antipsychotics like Seroquel to mood stabilizers like Lamictal. Effexor remains the hardest drug I have ever kicked, legal or street. I had Ambien, a major plus for folks like me back then. I even had a standing monthly Vicodin prescription for migraine. (Why the hell didn’t they give me triptans? Anyway.)

In fact, after I got sober and told my psychiatrist I couldn’t stay awake at work, he prescribed me Adderall. He literally gave me the equivalent of speed to just add on to my drug collection. I never took it. Even I, a literal drug addict, knew that was absolutely crazy. Speed instead of looking at the severe side effects of 7 different medicines? Wild.

For many years I used those diagnoses as a “excuse,” or, more gently, an explanation, for the way I lived: You see, I was deeply broken. I was damaged. My brain was faulty. And it made some logical sense. It seemed to explain why I, a reasonably intelligent person from a decent family, was a low-bottom drug addict and alcoholic: I was using drugs and alcohol to “treat” my mental illnesses. If all went well, the medicines would at some point straighten out my brain chemistry and actually treat my mental illnesses, and then I wouldn’t need alcohol and drugs anymore.

Problem was this never worked.

I just did drugs and drank a ton on top of all those meds which then left me really, really fucking crazy.

Every now and then I’d wonder if my drug and alcohol use were causing personality patterns that psychiatrists read as mental illnesses. For example, I distinctly remember answering my psychiatrist’s question about mood swings with the words, “Yes, I have mood swings. I am a cocaine addict,” but he still gave me the bipolar diagnosis. I was unsure about that, and privately suspected I was not bipolar, but I thought maybe I’d get some good new meds out of it, to make me differently high. Healthy!

When I got sober I immediately went off all medications other than Zoloft, the antidepressant, but was off that within a year. This isn’t everyone’s story and I don’t claim to know a damn thing about other stories. For me, personally, I was an alcoholic and a drug addict, and while I clearly had some mental health issues, none of them would be addressed until I got sober. It really is a chicken and egg situation, you know?

After ten years sober, I hit the deepest depression I’ve ever experienced, and received the mental health care I now believe was what I always needed, but it took ten years of sober life to get me ready for it, and a move to The Netherlands where they actually have longterm mental healthcare. I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD and spent 9 days in an inpatient trauma treatment center in 2022. I don’t know about the C-PTSD diagnosis, and frankly, I don’t care. All I know is the treatment I received for it was nearly impossible to endure but resulted in changes to my behavior that I had never been able to accomplish. Major, major changes. I am infinitely grateful. It really, really helped me.

In the center we did EMDR, exposure therapy, art, and psychosomatic activities from 9am until 6pm. It was excruciating. Absolutely miserable and I was certain those doctors were just sadists. If you’ve been through “exposure” trauma treatment, you know what I mean.

Fun fact, I came out of there more mentally unstable than perhaps I’d ever been but had no words for what was happening to me and no drugs to blame it on. I remember my children coming home from school and trying to tell me about their day but I couldn’t follow their sentences. I literally could not understand what they were saying. I felt a strange fog descend between the world and me. I can only explain it by saying it felt like I was living in a video game. Nothing was real. I would stare at my hands and try to make them feel like mine, but I couldn’t figure out IF they were mine. I realize this sounds insane. It was.

I couldn’t access my own thoughts. My head would fall backwards, literally, in this strange sort of heaviness. I would just sort of black out randomly.

I stopped leaving the house because I grew so terrified for the video game world and could not figure out when it was safe to cross the street. I would watch the cars and could see that they were “far away,” but I couldn’t figure out if that meant it was safe to walk. I stopped leaving the house. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t follow conversations. I told my husband I thought I had dementia or some brain disease, and if I had that, he had to let me die through euthanasia. I could not stay like that. It was the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had.

My psychologist, who I saw weekly, and my psychiatrist, who I saw monthly, did not tell me what I had. They gave it no name, diagnosis, or form. They said the trauma center was “too much” and my brain had started shutting down but “it would come back.” Meanwhile I got sicker, more withdrawn, terrified, and nonfunctional.

Eventually I ended up so desperate for answers I began scouring the internet at random day and night. I’d just input my symptoms into google in great detail and hit “enter.” I was desperate to find someone talking about this, anyone. Anything. What was wrong with me?! I came across a Reddit thread discussing exactly what I had. Oh my god. Then I googled that and it was clearly what I had.

I excitedly told my therapist at our next appointment, “I think I know what’s wrong with me! I have a thing called depersonalization and derealization.” She just sort of looked at me.

I figured she’d be blown away by the power of my discovery, but she only said, “Yes, that is what you have.” All nonchalant.

I stared at her. SHE KNEW?

I asked her about this. She said, “Yes, we’ve known what it is, but we didn’t give it a name because it may stigmatize and scare you. We were worried that by giving it attention it would entrench you in it further.” My god, the rage I felt. The depth of her condescension. They knew how scared I was, how desperate. They left me to wallow alone in abject terror with no answers, no guide, no name for any of what I was experiencing. Just darkness, confusion, a sort of dissociated robotic hell. What loneliness!

In that case, I would have benefited greatly from a name for my condition. Indeed, once I knew what it was and learned about why the brain does it, I could come up with ways to nurse myself slowly back into functioning and sanity, which is exactly what I did. That’s another, much longer story. But first, I needed a name.

I needed a fucking diagnosis. If it had a name it could be understood. If it could be understood it could be treated. If it can be treated, I can have some hope.

It took a year and a half for my brain to fully recover, for the dissociative episodes to stop completely, for the world to begin feeling connected and fluid again. But I got there eventually, and the path to healing began the moment I could put some form to what I was living through.

So I have lived worlds where diagnoses were thrown at me, seemingly at random, and did absolutely nothing to help the core of my problem, and I have had diagnoses withheld from me when I desperately needed them.

My cousin had a mental illness, a very serious one, and stopped taking his medication. In November 2016, he stabbed our grandmother in the jugular vein after eating dinner with her, killing her instantly. He was in the fury of a paranoid delusion, a victim of a mental illness none of us knew he had, and a family that let him “try golf” instead of his medications because “they were making him fat.”

So we have paid the ultimate price for neglected mental illness, for families that prefer to shove things under the rug and pretend a bit of healthy exercise can do the work of complex medications warding off full blown psychosis. I would have liked to know what he had. I would have told my grandmother not to go there. My own mother and son were in that house with my cousin just a few weeks before he killed my grandmother. It could have been my boy. My Mom.

So now I sit, 2026, thinking about the darkness of my days, writing to you this story of naming and not naming, healing and dying and almost dying, of living again. And I wonder what it would mean for a darkness to just have a place in me a few months out of the year, when it seems the gray will never end. I recall how the hardest part of that dissociative era was that I could not find myself. I would look within and find no self. No person. Nothing at all. What does a person fight for if they can’t find the one alive? When there is no sense of person behind the diagnoses, the darkness, what exactly does a person pull from?

Back then I simply had to believe she was in there somewhere. I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t feel her. I could barely remember the woman I was even a year or two before, the one who wrote a book, and spoke at events, or raised kids and had friends or made love or read books. I had not one recollection of that woman.

But there was no real choice, was there? I had to believe in a thing I couldn’t see. I had to act as if she were there, buried, and would come out again when it was safe enough or the time was right or whatever it is that governs this sort of thing.

I came across Saint John of the Cross at some point in that darkness. He spoke of a “dark night of the soul,” a time when everything that once brought you meaning is gone, and even your god has deserted you. When nothing, absolutely not one thing, brings even the remotest sense of meaning, and you are truly, truly alone in an eternal dark night.

Only what John of the Cross offered was that the darkness had a purpose. He said maybe it strips away all that we rely on to ultimately bring us closer to God. I didn’t know about any of that, but I do know he was the one person I found in all those years who offered a bit of meaning behind the darkness, a bit of purpose to my suffering, and I clung to him for dear life.

What if it meant something? What if it would make me more human, more real? What it were transforming me into the woman I needed to become? Could I ride it out then? Could I trust it? Just enough to keep going, go all the way in — no running, no relapses (for I really did consider it), no numbing. What if I went straight to the heart of my pain, stayed in the darkest night, over and over again, trusting there was some mystical meaning occurring here. Sounds dumb, sort of, but desperation knows no bounds. I needed to believe the darkness meant something, and he gave me a way to do that.

He told me a new woman would emerge, one more time. Even from this. And she would have been wrung out and wrung dry, closer to the source, perhaps, however I may define that.

Because that was always the piece the medicine and the doctors couldn’t give me, and they aren’t supposed to. They couldn’t help me when I was in bed, alone, when nobody was looking, my life rolling out in my mind like a carpet would unroll. And not one damn person to tell me what the point is. What it could mean. What it might mean. This is my night, and mine alone. Always has been.

And there’s only one more week of February.

There was blue sky the other day and it felt like WE MAY MAKE IT AFTER ALL

Want to write with me next month? I’m teaching a workshop called “From Memory to Memoir” and one called “Write Anyway.” The memoir workshop is for anyone with a shitty first draft or a vague first idea. We’ll talk about how to turn a collection of memories and experiences into something people actually want to read. It’s a craft-focused workshop but we also talk about process, and the ever-fascinating subject of writing about other people, including family, friends, enemies. Lol.

Write Anyway is about fear, speaking truth anyway, and developing a sustainable writing practice based on authenticity and genuine voice rather than validation, praise, or censure. It’s for the person who wants to write more honestly, or write at all, really. It’s also about speaking truth in the strange online context we’re in these days. We don’t shirk from the real conversations.

Both workshops are online, six weeks, and quite intimate. Come hang out with me. Let’s do some writing.