slutting for sunshine

I am such a weather whore.

My mood fluctuates with the weather. The insides of my brain compress or decompress according to the shifts in the barometric pressure.

It's hell being at the mercy of the elements.

When it's sunny outside, and it does not matter if it's cold or hot, I come alive. The cells inside of my body begin to vibrate, and in turn, make me feel incredibly alive. If I had a hat, I would pull one of those Mary Tyler Moore moves where she throws up her hat while standing on a busy downtown street. Right down to the freeze frame on the hat in mid air.*

When it's sunny outside, I am able to wake up early. Sometimes really early (well, for me that is) - like 6am early. Even the cats are surprised when I prance into the kitchen for their morning feed. They're usually still asleep, stunned that I am not shouting at them to keep quiet from meowning up a storm.

When it's sunny outside, the whole house could crumble to pieces, and I'd still have a smile no my face. Why?? Because my skin is drinking in all that vitamin D and my eyes are getting enough light to shine away the darkness of any residual bad mood that was a hang over from the night before.

And what happens when it's grey and rainy?

I turn into a monster.

I have known this for a long time - my sensitivity to light and the elements, but it was not until after I had my breakdown, and my 'mental state' was moderated by medication that we discovered a correlation between my 'winter blues' and my mood. I tried 'light therapy' which was new back then (talking about 10 years ago) and it seemed to work wonders. Every morning (usually the same time every morning was the best) I would sit in front of a light box the size of my monitor, and go about my morning rituals - eating, reading, putting on makeup etc. And for 1/2 hour every morning, I would get my 'fake sunlight' which would trick my system into thinking that I was having 'real sunlight', which would, in turn, make my body begin to produce and metabolize the vitamin D that usually came from real sunlight. Sunlight+ vitamin D = better mood.

Well, it worked in theory, but in principle, it was not as flawless.

I am a night person by nature. I get my 2nd, 3rd, 14th wind after midnight. I have tried several times during my lifetime to re-switch my clock, but have failed miserably. Just as bats usually flight only at night, I work my best when the sun goes down and the moon comes up. But the late nights turn into late mornings because I end up trying to recoup my 'lost sleep' and push it into the afternoon. Waking up at noon or 1pm is not unusual for me, but what I accomplish in the few hours between midnight and 4 am is what a 'normal person' would accomplish in an 8 hour day.

Winter and the early days of spring tend to be the worst. It's either snowing or raining. It's cold and damp (which does not bode well for my already aching joints), which a happy camper it does not make (I am never able to pull off those funny mixed up - Elizabethan sounding tenses, but you know what I mean...) . Today is the perfect example.

I was up (not willingly) at 6am. It was still grey, wet and overall shitty. I could have gone back to sleep, and wanted to as I only had 4 hours of sleep under my heavy eyelids, but the cats, sensing my stirrings, through they would try shake an early feeding from me. I pulled the pillow over my head and drifted in and out of a choppy slumber.

E left at 8ish, and that woke me up a bit. The cats decided to become affectionate and walk all over my body, finally settling down near my stomach and feet respectively. I knew that the second wave of sleep would be the heaviest, but I could not resist. The warm duvet that kept my twisted in the sheets body comfortable was more inviting than the below pleasant body temperature environment that waited for me in the rest of the house.

So I slept.
Hard.

The alarm came on at 10. 11am, then 12:30pm. The hunger pangs were stronger than the guilt ones, so I pulled myself out of bed and made my way into the kitchen. I didn't even have to look outside to know that it was going to be one of those days...

I could have done my light box thing, but the drawback to starting it later in the afternoon is my schedule re-sets itself at a later time. So there is no real point of doing it anyway. I would still be up until 2am regardless.

So I am sitting here, starting my late day, with a whole shitload of deadlines and things to do, which now seem unbelievably overwhelming, and will go about the rest of my 'things to do' list and feel shitty for the rest of the night because I have wasted a day sleeping. My only hope is that 2mrw will be a sunny day so I can open my eyes to light which will flood my blood stream and brain stem with gumption and optimism to be able to tackle the subsequent shitty days until the next nice one comes by again.






* now who remembers seeing that Family Guy episode when Peter does the same thing, and despite him being 'frozen', the rest of the world continues to move around him...
Now that was funny.