Our dark hour

“There’s more suicide in the spring,” she said.
I must have misheard her, I thought. That has to be backward, right? Cause we all know winter is worse.

Bumping along a dirt road outside of Anchorage Alaska our tour guide was explaining what life was like far up North. Describing how it is to ride the undulation from summer months of constant sunlight to winter doldrums of complete darkness. This answer about suicide resulted from a question about depression.

How could you not sink into sadness when light doesn’t appear for weeks? A man wondered.
We’ve all felt it.
As days grow darker we feel our energy suppressed by the decline in solar exposure.
But I’ve also felt the inverse.

I can still feel the uneasiness from a particular spring day during my childhood when the sun was shining brightly and I just wasn’t up for it. After a cool gray Pacific Northwest winter, all of this brightness felt like weight of expectation.

Even as I kid I missed the cozy feeling of a drizzly day that didn’t demand much. When you felt free to play outdoors or lay inside. All this sunlight felt like something you should “make the most” of.

Even as we all expressed surprise to how humans act on depression during the late spring vs winter, I…