As someone who often dismisses social contracts that seem stupid or pointless, I'm guilty as anyone for making small talk about the weather. However, perhaps it's not entirely unreasonable to engage in such chit chat, because it really does tend to affect our lives in very fundamental ways, every single day.
I strongly believe that I suffered from seasonal affective disorder, probably for the 30-something years I lived in Cleveland. I didn't really start to think about it until I was seeing a therapist post-divorce. I made jokes about it for years prior, but as I was thinking about my life and what I wanted it to be, it started to occur to me that maybe I had a legitimate problem. I spent a lot of winter being lethargic and feeling crappy, with the short days and weeks of uninterrupted, flat gray cloudy skies. What should have tipped me off was the extraordinary energy I felt on a sunny day in January, no matter how cold it was.
Believe it or not, moving to Seattle pretty much confirmed it for me. The summers there are pretty much sunny and 76 every day, while the early parts of winter are very rainy (let's call it misty) on a consistent basis. But there is a fundamental difference in the two winters I lived there. One, the world doesn't appear dead because of the dominance of evergreen trees everywhere. Two, the flat gray sky was never a thing, and it seemed like we would see the sun most days living in the slightly higher elevation closer to the Cascades. It seemed like I would frequently find more clouds in Redmond and come home to sun in Snoqualmie. I guess what I'm getting at is that the Seattle weather stereotype is nonsense, and me getting all lethargic there was rare.
For the two winters we spent back in Cleveland, this only confirmed how shitty it was, and what it did to me. Regretting the move back there likely didn't help, but it was clear by the second winter that we had to get the hell out of that area before the next year. In that context, it shouldn't be surprising that we ended up in Florida.
What got me to thinking about this was the unusual series of days with Cleveland-like skies in the last two weeks. The cooler weather is to be expected (although we had some silly 80+ days around Christmas), but it usually isn't so cloudy for so long. It hasn't brought me down exactly, but I do find myself wanting to hibernate and sit around more. I'm thankful that it will be more sunny over the next week. I don't know how I "survived" for so many years up north.
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