Rosetinted

 It has, for me, been a gloomy start to 2022. I grew cocky with my management of the usual SAD dramas.  I had no symptoms in October and November, a sprinkling in December which were managed by festive feasting and indulgence and then BAM! The full throttle of every symptom known to us elite group of winter sufferers descended upon me, in January. After dispatching with an especially aggressive New Year’s Eve hangover, I was left feeling that it did not matter how much sleep I could muster, I would never wake up feeling refreshed. Never again. The thing about feeling under parr is that everything begins to pile up on over your head and the jobs that you used to complete in a minute, when you were feeling energetic, become difficult and time-consuming tasks.   It doesn’t help that there has been a distinct lack of winter sun, and that the skies have been low and grey, as if doing their best to mirror my mood. It hasn’t helped that I am low in haemoglobin and iron. Only slightly anaemi

  The Christmas holiday, it is meant to be a long awaited time off. The thing is I failed to make a decision about what I was having time off from.  You cannot - as much as you try, ‘take time off’ from yourself, that is something that you need to learn to live with, and I have been as irritating as fuck. I pushed aside my irritation by general ‘to do-ness’. Over the holidays,   I feel as if in doing the whole feasting and merriment thing, no matter how full or un-merry   I may have felt I have been somewhat connected to my ancestors. These are the ancestors who knew feeding their farm animals over the winter months was a job too far, so they killed and feasted upon all but a few- leaving meat on bone piles left behind for modern day archaeologists.   I wonder if Neolithic humans wondered what to gift Great Aunt Maud or just filled their solstice days with the kind of oblivion that is necessary when life is so hard, so short and so bloody cold. I also wonder how far back we can trace