My darkest week of the year

The last five years have found this week to be my darkest week of the year. Not necessarily correlated to gray skies and wet weather, but somehow mysteriously linked to physical symptoms and mainly, a really low and dark mood.

I am no stranger to depression, and I have done enough counseling and self-therapy work to know how to lay low and get through these bouts. This year however, those "pictures on this date" popped up and I went down the rabbit hole discovering that there is a definite history for this week. The greatest insight I had when I reemerged from the rabbit hole, was this: "my year will be better the rest of the year than it is this week". Every year has taught me that no matter what battles I face throughout the rest of the year, my mood will be better equipped to handle it all than it is this week.

The best advice I can give myself is to be dark. Recognize it, find the darkest parts of my thoughts so that I can talk to them, settle in to the low energy and make it a resting place. In the wettest weather, I can choose to sit outside in the mucky mud and commiserate with the worms that seem displaced. Gardening is my place to fall when I'm down, happy, sullen, elated, impatient, settled, restless and peaceful.

Those repetitive years of this dark week began to finally break towards a change in 2018 when I sat outside crying and feeling the rage build up in myself at the garden being nothing but muck. But nothing isn't truly nothing, so I enlisted two moody teenagers to collect cardboard at the local appliance store with me. We layered cardboard, food scraps and mud into a messy raised garden bed. It was a mess, it looked like failure. The garden bed was framed in with black metal fencing and looked like a cemetery of my broken dreams, layers of debris and compacted with all the clever insults my teenagers could muster towards me at this offensive task.

That epic failure brought about the beginning of appreciation for darkness in a new way for me. We now raise a few worms, compost in an urban setting successfully, garden as best we can, and those teenagers know the value of those critters of the dark. If I had not met my own darkness and sat in the mud, the value of all those things would not be known.

This year, I'm not sure yet what the learned value of my darkness is, other than having no doubts I'll make it through. For now, that is good enough. This year, I suppose the habit-break is to be able to write about it all. To write this and look back to the mucky me that found beauty in that dark week and commiserated with the worms. The darkness allows us the rest in decomposition, and if its good enough for the critters and the worms, I'm going to be okay with it too.

And the bag of lights? Those were a gift from my husband. We started collecting burlap coffee roaster sacks this year and he shoved lights into a bag for me to see from my office window. He wasn't thinking of my mood, he just knew lights outside might be a nice touch to the chaos of the garden at this time of year. Yes, indeed they are.