Winter of My Discontent

It’s remarkable how quickly things go downhill for me mood-wise once we enter the dark season in the Netherlands. It’s like flipping a light switch from on to depression. I struggle every year, but I have coping mechanisms. I’ve got my SAD lamp, I force myself to get outside, regardless of the rain, and I work on my art. At least I try to do these things, and when I do, I feel better. But most days it’s a struggle to muster the activation energy to get out of my pjs and shower. The non-summer months in Amsterdam are not for the faint of heart. I’ve long said this is why the Dutch were master painters. It takes perseverance to make it through the big gray, and you’ve got to make your art. 

I don’t like to feel my feelings. Not a fan. It may come as a shock to you that I often deflect how I am feeling with humor. Each time I sit down to write an essay I think about Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. I think about how you can choose to tell a horrifying story the funny way, or you can choose to tell a horrifying story the horrifying way. For the most part, I choose the former. This is because I don’t like to feel my feelings, and I also don’t like to inflict my feelings on other people. It seems rude. Alas, I am an adult who has lived for some 52 years in this world, and I have learned that I must, in fact, feel my feelings or else bad things can happen later down the line. It’s most inconvenient. 

The complicating factor is that I am not well equipped with the necessary skills to access my feelings. Years of stuffing them down to survive, and all that. I often can’t identify them. For instance, right now I am experiencing feelings related to being an empty nester, my mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s, and my home country’s state of politics leading up to the most consequential election of my (and most other Americans and indeed of America herself) lifetime. Grief, perhaps? A deep sadness, most likely. I am not numb to these events, which I have learned is favorable, as my past experience has revealed that being numb indicates I have bypassed the opportunity to feel the root emotion and graduated to depression, which I now endeavor to avoid. So, the way I have learned to access these pesky feelings that must be felt is by listening to music.

I don’t know why, but music is a direct line to my emotions. Speed dial, if you will. It takes me a little while to find the right song, but when I do, the floodgates open and my feelings well up from my stomach, through my heart, and out my tear ducts. I put my earbuds in and I walk and weep and weep and walk and I don’t pay any attention to people I pass, I just cry my little heart out right there on the cobblestone streets. Once I find the magic song, I listen to it on repeat, for however long it takes. I’ve been listening to Chicago’s Wishing You Were Here for approximately eight hours a day for four days straight. When I get to the part where Peter Cetera sings “And I’d like to change my life and you know I would, just to be with you tonight baby if I could, but I’ve got my job to do and I do it well, so I guess that’s how it is,” I belt out the lyrics right along with him, over and over and over again, tears streaming down my cheeks.  My husband is used to this. So are the geese who live on our canal. It’s fine. They don’t mind. And it works. I cry every goddamn emotion out of myself until I am empty. Exhausted.

Then I fill myself back up with things that make me happy. Like going to the Tuschinski Theater to see a movie all by myself in the middle of the day. Or wandering around the Rijks Museum admiring the Dutch masters. I always give a shout out to my buddy Van Gogh.

I bet he would have liked Chicago. 

The view from my living room floor where I often lie and look at the rain hitting the stained glass while listening to my crying song on repeat. Lying on the floor is a big part of my life. Please be impressed that I used lie vs lay properly in these sentences.

In addition to the book of essays I’m working on, I’m writing a short story about this haunted mirror in my house. This mirror has seen things. It wants to tell you all about it. You’ll want to listen. Come closer.