Solving my Winter Blues
Have you ever heard of the winter blues? You know, that time of year when the sun is scarce, everyone’s cooped up indoors, and people just start feeling a little down, a little depressed?
Well, I’ve been dealing with it for the past four or five years, and it’s been a struggle. See, during the summer, I’m all about my physical and mental health, working hard to improve myself and feeling great. But as soon as September and October hit, it’s like a roller coaster. I start overeating, reconnecting with people who aren’t good for me, and generally struggling. There are days when getting out of bed and taking a shower feel like insurmountable tasks.
So I started looking for solutions. I talked to my family doctor, my mom, and my friends, trying to figure out what was going on. My mom suggested I just needed a wife, but I knew that wasn’t the answer. My doctor told me to take Vitamin D and supplements but it didn’t help much. Everything still felt hard.
Everyone around me kept telling me, “Aleks, it’s just the winter blues, this is normal.”
It was frustrating not to be able to control my own emotions and thoughts. I didn’t want to keep coming back to this emotional slump for three or four months every year. Should I maybe move to California where there is no winter?
I wanted to be free.
I went to my mentor and he said it’s not because of the season as the cause, but a symptom of something that happened during that season.
We went back and forth, I listed all the times my heart was broken, and all the times I was bullied, but we kept hitting a wall. No matter what I came up with it, none of it felt big enough at that time of the season. So I started to think “Hey maybe everyone is right, it’s just a season thing.”
Fortunately he kept pushing me on it believing that there is something there and I am just not aware of it.
Finally, he asked me “Highschool was a hard time, how was summer for you before highschool?”
“Summer was awesome I said, I got to hang out with my friends, we would play baseball, video games.”
“Ok, then when September hit, what was it like?”
“High school would start, my friends in Grade 9 and onward started to have their friends. It was fine.”
“Fine? So when your friends would go spend time with other kids…what did you do, what did you do for lunch.”
“Ate at the table we used to hang out by myself” I replied matter factly…
“By yourself? That must have been hard”
When he said that…tears started to pour down my face. I didn’t realize it, I blocked it out but I remembered at that moment how painful it was.
Suddenly it all made sense, how even in my 30s I am still that 14-year-old kid re-living those days physically when winter comes around.
The amazing thing is that because I realized the root cause I can now actually deal with it. No wife, and no supplements would have ever helped that little kid. He just wanted to be loved and have friends around him.
So I decided that every year leading up to September I will make sure I plan my weekends, and my social life to be full of people who love me. I am going to show that little 14-year-old Aleks that he doesn’t have to be alone anymore.
I believe in my heart that I can heal that kid and I believe we can all get to a place where we don’t have to keep repeating the loops we are stuck in.
When you go see a doctor and you say you have a cough, the doctor would ask “What other symptoms are you experiencing?”
A good doctor would never say “Coughing is the problem…take this cough medicine.”
Dig deeper and believe me, once you know the cause, the RIGHT solutions will always come right after.
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