THE SAD LAMP: A NORTH STAR FOR DEPRESSIVES

Ilana Glazer in Broad City uses her SAD lamp. (Screenshot from YouTube, taken by The Diamondback).

Oklahoma is the most overcast place I have ever lived.  This isn’t saying much, as my previous homes were in Alabama and Texas, but it doesn’t change the fact that, as far as I’m concerned, for the wintry months of the year I live in a cave with no light that isn't from a bulb.  After last winter, the few months when I pondered returning to an antidepressant and bought so much stuff on Amazon that I fear the working conditions are entirely my fault, I decided to buy one more thing on Amazon: a SAD lamp.  This is an interesting name for such a device, as it sounds, at first hearing, like a lamp that promises to never let me escape my vitamin D deficient cave. But a SAD lamp is for seasonal affective disorder (a perfect acronym) and it offers waves of light that are supposed to dispel some of the darkness.  Mine boasts that it delivers up to 10,000 lux, which are like regular light rays, but bedazzled. I even discovered that there are floor lamps that have the same effect! I began to daydream about a perfect home illuminated only by over the counter Diet Prozac.  

You could say I have a new idol, as I have spent most mornings this winter crouched before it, wondering if its bright white light would trigger something in me happier than I could conjure up inside myself.  The crouching is no joke; the cord is not very long. It’s not that I worship it explicitly, but implicitly it offers me a hope that, even if it is a placebo, also comes with a money back guarantee. For the low low price of $37.95 you might not cry over a subtweet.

I’m such a performance-driven perfectionist that I have walking depression, which means that I was told to “fake it until I make it” so much that the lines have blurred and I don’t know the difference.  It would appear I have made it in the art of faking it. Walking depression is its own manufactured light, a state of being in which I smile with deep sadness. I can walk around in the pit of my despair, but my hair is at 10,000 luxe.  It’s not that I don’t mean it when I smile at strangers; I certainly want to share with them the joy they bring me, and they do bring me profound joy. It’s just that I don’t have the capacity for a joy that lasts past the northward drag of my cheeks.  I’m certainly on and shining, but the batteries are almost dead. 

A lamp simply works until it doesn’t, and I in my darkness have felt the same sudden stop.  Neither lamps nor people tend to chirp incessantly like fire detectors, asking clearly for what we need, willing to wake you in the middle of the night to trouble you for a few batteries and a cup of sugar.  Fire detectors will warn you if there’s a fire and they’ll warn you if you’ve gotten so sure of yourself that you forgot fire was a threat. I often wonder if it would help me or destroy me to have some sort of chirp that would let people know I need new energy, new batteries, or—feeling ever in the distance of my life—a less manufactured joy.  I wonder if it would help me or destroy me to have a chirp that alerts others that the voices inside are untrustworthy narrators and they’re telling me to forget the threat of a consuming fire.

Just a week or so ago, we had the longest night of the year, though I would have told you the nights have been outdoing themselves at length for weeks.  The ever elongating nights are the worst part of winter, each night suggesting that the longest night might feel like the shortest night as soon as the sun sets again and the record is broken.  Early darkness makes the day feel shorter, but closer too, as all of the day scoots in. There’s a certain time of the day, in the late afternoon, when I will sometimes do dishes, looking out over my backyard every now and again, after every other cup or plate.  With each glance, the day is cut shorter, the longest night creeps in. The expanse I usually see in front of me inches closer, until I finally look up, taking my gloves off, to see nothing in the distance at all, only black. The sudden night brings a claustrophobic pall over my walking depression, making it have a seat, telling it to put up its feet for a while.  And it’s the sitting and the thinking that takes the legs out from walking depression, making it just my same old fashioned sadness.

A week or so ago, I called a Teladoc, because I began to have what I could only call at the time chest pains, and I dabble in hypochondria.  It didn’t take long for us to figure out my ailment: I drove for hours traveling for Christmas and it had taken a toll on my chest and back, and the pain was being exacerbated by my anxiety.  I am “I didn’t realize these were back pains, because usually my back pains are caused by my slipped disc” years old. I suffered from a tightness in the cavities of my body where the light, either from the sun or from Amazon, cannot touch, cannot enter.  I was in pain in the space where even a store bought hope couldn’t seem to make its way in. It doesn’t surprise me that it was a mixture of moving too fast and feeling too hard that gave me a panicked pain that I foolishly believed to be in my heart, because I let everything sit in my heart, even when it doesn’t belong there.  What should be a palace has become my junk room, decorated with that old fashioned sadness. It was, in a sense, my heart’s nudge that it is there, a gentle pain; my heart reminded me that it has edges, its own capacity, a few burdens and cups of coffee that it can’t fit every day.  

My heart, like the light, had faded out of my consciousness—I had taken it for granted, the way I never thank the sun in August, when I squint into it and wonder if it will ever be autumn again.  What a shame that it took pain, and not joy, to remember the space where I put all the things that do and don’t belong there, even when I know better. I’m a terrible steward of this sacred space, but the crux of depression is that I’m also doing my best.  My SAD lamp is like a North Star for depressives, the best way I can see in front of me, because I can’t find light inside the storehouses of my heart and in that case, bulbs will do. Sure, it’s manufactured guidance, but it beats acknowledging that I am as disconnected from people as I am devoid of light.  It doesn’t give me directions, per se, but with enough crouching in front of it, I will probably survive tonight, which will be the longest night, somehow longer than the longest night before it.

In this, the season of our longest nights, I’ll be grateful for a manufactured joy, not because I believe it is everlasting, but because I know it helps me move forward long enough to see the day when my light is not from myself, the day when darkness is no longer dark to me, the moment when the pall is lifted and the view out of the back of my window stretches farther than I can see.