On the rhythms of things

I just noticed--I tend to take a long hiatus from about September to March or April. A hibernation, I guess.

I never felt like I was the sort of person to suffer seasonal depression or whatever that is. So many people claim that the winter brings them down that I'm inclined to think it's a form of mass hysteria rather than a bona fide syndrome. But I digress...

I finally went to see a shrink recently. I've not been happy with my reactions to certain kinds of stressors. I have been more explosive than usual, and the carefully constructed mind I've built has been showing wear. So, time for maintenance.

The shrink has determined that I'm mildly depressed (dysthymic), and that a bit of self-examination and talking can probably dislodge the things that put me in that state. Part of the process has been to delve into my memories and lay bare the things that have ground me down over the years: childhood traumas, school regrets, work disappointments, things like that. None of them are terribly bad in the objective sense, but I've been carrying a lot of shit around for so long that it's just a mess in that old skull of mine.

So anyway, depression and me. My sister did one of those genetic tests last year and discovered that we're basically just German. A little Welsh in there for color, but basically straight-up German, all the way down to the follicles. I hated that determination. I was raised thinking that I had a relatively diverse (albeit mainly just plain white) genetic profile--Irish, German, Russian Jews, even a few native Americans and Africans thrown in for good measure. "Friendly ancestors," is how I described it. Turns out, though, it was bunk. I'm basically just German. If some ancestor of mine boned a native of whereverthefuck, it was just someone in festive dress.

So anyway, depression and me. It turns out, I'm not exotic or interesting in any fundamental way. All the bizarre shit I've dredged up is pretty middle-of-the-road, and even my kind of sociopathy is mild. I'm just a kind of unsympathetic, Anglo-Saxon jerk. And apparently, I suffer from the same bullshit seasonal bum-out that a bunch of armchair psychiatrists self-diagnose themselves with every time they want it to be warm and sunny and it's just not.

So I'm genetically just German. And it's overcast and raining tomorrow (I hope).