Cyclicality

 Do I always get lazy about blogging in October, right before having to (rudely compelled solely by my own slightly obsessive sense of tradition, to be clear) blog every day in November? I'm going to say odds are good, because my Facebook memories and past blog posts have gradually made clear a pattern of... patterns. My seasonal depression is almost comically seasonal. If I'm feeling overwhelmed and exhausted in a particular week leading up to Christmas, a memory invariably comes up saying oh look, I felt exactly the same this same week last year. 

This is both helpful and a little distressing. Do I have free will? Am I just a hamster on a wheel? In some ways it's comforting to see that my mood bottomed out just like this last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and I was so fatigued and miserable that it seemed like something MUST be medically wrong. And then I felt better, and nothing major was medically wrong, and this time I am also probably not imminently perishing and I will feel better. 

But next year at this time, I will probably feel like crap again. Is it better that I know that? Probably. When I finally figured out that I get depressed every January, I stopped thinking that I was going to make a bunch of robust new year's resolution and make the coming year my bitch. If we were traveling, I gave myself a ton of time to prepare and acknowledged that I was probably going to have heightened anxiety beforehand. Sometimes I talked to my doctor and bumped up my meds. 

But it also feels a tiny bit like this is accursed knowledge - like it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, or like I'm going to spend some of my happily-swimming-along days bracing for the icy drop-off. 

Whatever, I don't know the answer, I'm just spitballing here. I try to keep an open mind about most things, which I think is a good thing, but sometimes it just results in a terminal case of wishy-washyness. Wishy-washiness? 

I feel like I need at least one more good paragraph for this post to be an acceptable length, but I'm out of words. Man, November is going to be tough. Or not - maybe I just won't do it this year, whatever, I'm breezy, *carefree laugh*. What? Shut up.