Published on 12, July, 2020
Anyone else have this?
Where most look forward to ever more daylight, it's around now that I start to miss in advance the clear delineation between day and night. That first evening leaving work and it's still daylight depresses me profoundly in a way I can't quite explain. The aggressive insistence of Spring I suppose.
I'm really going to miss my 4.30 pm twilights, but I suppose if we had our personal favourite seasons (autumn/winter in my case) all year round we'd never appreciate them to the extent we do.
Anyone else understand/have this reversal of the more conventional form of SAD? It's not that I won't get *something* out of the warmer months of flourishing nature, but witnessing Spring's birthpains is like an assault on the senses. Daffodils kind of disgust me - they're so raw, the early shock troops of the season, forced out of the soil into cold harsh misery and screaming in pain. Crocuses too. Like the visual equivalent of being near chopped raw onions or something. Snowdrops at least look more pleasant and delicate, but they're so impertinently 'early' - can we just have winter for now please, thanks? Anyone get this, or am I just sounding insane?
All the while that I'm moaning to myself about the chaotic sleep pattern which means I woke today, again, around 4pm obscures the fact that by sleeping so late I am *deliberately avoiding the daytime*. Daytime, you see, is when frightening or nerve-wracking things are most likely to happen (a sudden knocking at the door; a letter/envelope whose very 'official' appearance scares me; a phone call out of the blue bringing unanticipated news concerning me etc etc). All of these fears and the tension are quite ridiculous and out of proportion in my mind, yet I still have them every single day; so, I'm lying to myself when I moan (internally) about sleeping late because at heart I am facilitating my own avoidance of the day.
Is there an element of this in your behaviour/attitude, Shard? The rawness-reaction you mention is very familiar to me but I wonder if our antipathy is basically an aversion to the ever-present in-your-faceness of daily life. Life is like watching a tv set when somebody's turned up the controls - colours, sound, brightness and so on - to eleven or more.
That's a gerat analogy, and I think on some level you've hit on the very essence of the thing! All that unforgiving blaze of light and churn of revival still to come, and part of me going 'can't I just rest a bit longer?' Not that life truly ever slows at any point, but darkness allows a little more of home and hearth without judgement. Or walks without conspicuous ugliness. Resistence is futile, as you say. The future lies this way>>>...
This is something I posted here the other day because it really struck me, especially the final sentence of the extract, and even though the moment of surreality takes place at night and not day. It's from a review of the tv show 'Black Books', a programme with no connection to autism or autistic people:
'The premise is simple: misanthropic Bernard owns a secondhand bookshop, the perpetually hapless Manny lives and works with him, and frustrated romantic Fran spends most of her time drinking in the bookshop with them.
Each episode starts off with something upsettingly normal: a hot day, the necessity to do taxes, a new coffee machine, a confusing temp job, a small holiday. The comedy comes from these characters’ almost complete inability to engage sensibly with the world around them.
One of my favourite episodes takes Bernard out on to the cold streets at night after he’s been locked out of his shop, forced to engage with movie theatres, pornography shops and fast-food stores, an escalating horror that’s both unique to him but also somehow completely understandable. You begin to see why these people have withdrawn from the world and hide out in a grimy bookshop. The outside world is surreal and strange and antagonistic.'
It bothers me that Dylan Moran's thinking that life is bonkers & surreal so often echoes my own thought when, after all, his (public) opinions are merely deliberately-comic routines of his.