My November Disorder

I have lived almost all my life in a four-season environment, but it’s a fact, year after year, each November finds me in a mood disorder. I am not at all happy that experts recognize now this condition as a common disorder in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year experience depressive symptoms in the winter, or at the beginning of the winter.

Sleeping too much is a sign, completed with less energy, and even my symptoms are never severe, I am concerned about these since I consider myself a very active person for the rest of the year. I cannot bypass the fact that in medicine and psychology, a syndrome is “the association of several clinically recognizable features, signs, symptoms, phenomena or characteristics that often occur together, so that the presence of one or more features alerts the doctor.” Recently, the term has been used also in psychology, but in this field, a specific syndrome even defines the known combination of phenomena seen in association.

At some ages of our life we all have to face the empty nest syndrome, a general feeling of grief and loneliness parents or guardians may feel when their children leave home to live on their own for the first time. Since a young adult moving out their parents’ house is seen as a normal and healthy event, the symptoms of empty nest syndrome often go unrecognized. While all parents are susceptible to experiencing empty nest syndrome, there are factors that contribute to some parents being more likely to experience it than others are.

The result is a depression, as well as a loss of purpose, worry, stress, or anxiety over the welfare of the child, but also rejection feelings. The change seems to be stressful rather than refreshing!

For myself, a very similar syndrome seems to be the seasonal affective disorder, also known as winter depression, winter blues, or seasonal depression. I associate empty nest with winter, because I see birds flying South, I even see their empty nests in the empty-leaf trees and the sunrise is not any more accompanied by a bird concerto (in Bucharest this is, in fact, a whole year situation, but I have the chance to live very close to Floreasca lake and green area!). Since I am a very solar person, enjoying much more the summer heats than the winter colds, I always consider I have never done enough in the past summer (like for the leaving children).

As an active person, I don’t go more towards a depression and soon I find out I have many  things to do. I am never prepared for the birds’ departure, but I shift aside the terrifying thoughts, and I am treating this as the big November adventure. I start looking to my own needs, focusing on some positive points and, most of all, I try to rediscover the love of my life, a new one in the last years!

Bucharest also helps me handle the situation. Numerous concerts, exhibitions, openings, events, clubs’ reopening… all keep me occupied and unstressed.

More than this, the winter solstice on December 21, which is forthcoming day by day, will give me back the hope! From noon of that day I hope for more sun, for an early spring and for a coming soon summer with much more things to do!