Nobody Is Ready and We Are in Denial
One of us spirals going into winter. The other one gets hit in spring, which sounds wrong until you think about it. Either way, September arrives and the denial is immediate.
August is a Sunday. September is a Monday. You know it's coming, the weather has been unreasonably good, and you are going to drag summer out until everything outside is visibly dead before you admit it is over.
Fall Is Cute. January Is the Problem.
Fall gets a pass. Pumpkins, Halloween, people still going out, actual events on the calendar, and then straight into decorating and the Christmas party. It genuinely lightens the whole thing.
Then January arrives and there is nothing on the horizon until roughly May. Five months of doom and gloom. And if you live somewhere it rains all winter, it isn't even cold-and-sunny, it is just grey and wet and over by three in the afternoon.
The Sun Clocks Out Before You Do
Dark at 3, 3:30. You arrive at work in the dark and you leave in the dark. So when exactly are you supposed to see daylight? Go outside at lunch, technically. It is pissing rain. Why would you bother.
Book the Trip When It's Worst
This is the actual tip and it is the opposite of what everyone does. People book travel for spring break, summer break, whenever there is a natural gap. Wrong.
Book it for the single most depressing stretch of the year where you live. That is when you need to not be there. Put it on the credit card. One of us is gone most of October and going to Hawaii in January, which is not financial advice but it is working.
Some People Get Depressed in Summer
We do not understand this and we are not sure we believe it. How do you feel worse when your body is getting more vitamin D than it has had in months?
Apparently it is brain chemistry and some people genuinely cannot handle that much light and end up hermiting through July. The one part we do get: by the end of summer you have done so many events you are exhausted and a little break sounds nice. That is not depression though. That is a social hangover.
Every Month Is a Day of the Week
Summer is the weekend, obviously. May through August is Friday into Saturday. Christmas is a Sunday, because you know what is coming and you have to see everyone you have been avoiding.
January is the most Monday month of the year and it is not close. September is the argument: one of us says Monday, the other says Thursday, because the weather is the best it gets all year and everyone is finally back in their routine and out of the way.
Putting the Calendar on Trial
If you had to pick one month as the worst, which is it? We could not agree.
February is short but punchy. Everything is down, sales are down, the mood is down, and it packs all of that into twenty-eight days. What is the point of you. What a short bitch.
March might be worse. It feels like double the length of any other month, work picks back up so there is more to do, but nobody is having any fun yet. It is all of the effort and none of the payoff.
And January is just brutal across the board. Short on daylight, unproductive, and the weather has not even started trying.
July is the best month and anyone who disagrees is wrong.
What Actually Helps
Work out, especially in the worst months. If you cannot get your steps in outside, you have to make it up somewhere. A gym, or a walking pad in your living room so you can move while you watch something. The routine matters more than the workout.
Take vitamin D and take more than they tell you. If it has been weeks of rain, you are low. Build the level up properly rather than taking one occasionally and wondering why nothing changed.
Have a hobby you rotate. Cooking and baking through fall, reading, painting, whatever. The point is not the hobby. The point is not rotting.
Tanning beds, genuinely. Not even to tan. Once every couple of weeks, or the red light ones, and you feel it the same day.
Get daylight early. The most obvious advice in the world and still the one nobody does.
Make the plans before you want to make them. Yes, you will resent your past self a week later. Do it anyway. Winter makes work, home, couch, repeat incredibly easy to fall into.
One Thing a Month Is Enough
You do not need to jam the calendar. You need one thing to look forward to per month.
Supper club is the best version of this: a group of girls, once a month, a restaurant or someone hosting, food none of you have tried. Social, low commitment, gets you out of the house.
Also: pumpkin patches, apple orchards, Christmas light shows, the gardens in spring. Somehow the only people who do seasonal things are people with kids, as if you need a child as a permission slip. You are allowed to go. It is not lame.
The Stats Are Lying
We looked it up. Women are supposedly around nine times more likely to experience seasonal depression than men, and it affects roughly fifteen percent of the population.
We do not believe either number. Women are the ones who go to a doctor and say it out loud. Men feel it and say nothing. And fifteen percent? Where we live it is closer to eighty.
So tell us: do you get it, and which season? What is your favourite month, and which one would you remove from the calendar entirely? We suspect everyone has a month they hate for a very specific reason.