My Kingdom For Some Serotonin

On an old "Barney Miller" episode (one of my favorites, actually) Barney (Hal Linden) is passed over once again for promotion and falls into a deep depression. His mood is reflected (and intensified by) a thick cover of fog that gathers outside in the New York air, and most of the episode features Barney glued to his desk, in a darkened office, staring out at the fog and brooding over the disappointment in his life.

I've felt much the same way this month. The Christmas holiday wasn't particularly enervating, but I did at least get a break from work and occasionally saw some people in social situations. Since then, for a variety of reasons, I suspect, my mood has been almost uniformly poor. Some of it is no doubt due to "holiday letdown". As I said, the holidays no longer hold much promise of joy for me so I don't tend to get very excited about them, but when you have eleven days off of work there is always a sense of having time to get unaddressed work done and also to reinvigorate your life. You're going to start that novel, or at least read some. You're going to be more organized and schedule cleaning on a regular basis. You're going to reconnect with old friends you've been neglecting, begin eating healthier or pay more attention to a long neglected hobby or passion.

Unfortunately, in my case at least, very little of that ever actually happens.

So once January rolls around and you haven't put in motion any (or many) of those laudable changes, you're disappointed in yourself because you realize that the small window you had to make those changes is now past, and you're going to be once again thrust into the physical and mental demands of the daily grind. You lose whatever brief glimmer of belief you had in your own ability to change and you just sort of schlep resignedly back into your old patterns.

It happens to a lot of people every year, I suppose but for some reason this year it's hit me harder than I ever remember. A lot of it is just probably my age; at 43 I don't have many more years to reasonably say "this has to be the year". I suppose it's never technically too late to change but if you wait too long all the people you need to help you on your journey will have already written you off and your struggle will be made that much harder, if not impossible. And admittedly, the weather isn't helping. It's been sunny the last couple of days, but before that I don't think I saw old Sol for three weeks or so. And the sun isn't putting much of a dent in the below zero temperatures in any event. No one can reasonably expect balmy weather in January, but this year has been atypical for recent winters, more reminiscent of the winters of my childhood; bitter cold, snow filled and windy. Long periods without sun deprive the body of serotonin, and depression can and often does set in as a result.

Social isolation is also a factor, I'm sure. I've seen the normal crew at work but that's hardly a social outlet; most of the time you're so busy working you are barely aware that there are human beings inches away from you, at least human beings with feelings and thoughts and personalities. And other times you are all TOO aware of those people and their own usually foul moods begin infecting or expanding upon your own depression. Either way, you really can't count on the work community for much of an emotional pickup. So you're left with the other agents of socialization; school, church or community groups. I do take classes but they are mostly online so obviously there's no human touch there, I don't attend church (which I suppose is worthy of another post) and the only group I belong to is a humane society which I love working for but, like my job, is generally so full of activity that the opportunities for chatting and interacting are small and not all that fulfilling. It therefore becomes a real effort to seek out people when I need them; they aren't just "there" unless I summon them (or try to anyway). And having very little family, I am not, understandably, anyone's priority anymore. If there's one overridingly depressing thought I have at this time, that last sentence pretty much captures it.

Now I ponder the class I have yet to start, the projects for work I want to start on but seriously wonder why I bother with, the friends and relatives I haven't kept in touch with well enough, the kingdom of clutter that is my home, and the life decisions that loom ever larger on my horizon (career, finance, spirituality, and other matters of import). I know how Barney Miller felt while he gazed out at that fog and wondered exactly what map he was following to bring him to this particular nexus in his life. I know what it feels like to have the atmosphere outside your window reflect the growing unease within your soul and to want to just sit in the dark until you can come to some sort of resolution or at least understanding of how things came to be this way. I know how it feels to doggedly re evaluate all the decisions you've made in your life and try to sense whatever pattern there might be behind them and use that to try to predict which direction you should take next to extricate yourself from what seems to be a dead end on your life maze. I understand how it feels to take stock of the whatever remaining resources you have and try to figure out if they are going to be enough to get you where you want to go, if you ever figure out where that is.

At the end of that episode, the detectives come into Barney's office and try to cheer him up. As usual with the show, everything isn't resolved in a favorable way but the presence of friends brings Barney back to himself a bit, and he re examines his place in life in a more positive light. Friends can do that for you. Most of the time they are there if you allow them to be and don't choose to live in the darkness. Sometimes we need solitude to reflect and decide, but it's hard to lighten up a dark room all by yourself. And as I sit here now, feeling more than a bit overwhelmed by life and apprehensive about where I'm going, I try to remind myself that at least a kernel of that uncertainty exists in just about everyone I know. Maybe the trick to not being totally absorbed by that darkness is having friends with matches, and hopefully having a few to light for them in return.