DECEMBER
You spend much of this month awash in the familiar fog of your Annual Depression, Virgo. Your Annual Depression is, of course, different from your Seasonal Depression—which arrives in Springtime—and also different from your Summertime Ennui, which lasts from June to October.
An adept reader may notice that very few months—few weeks, even—manage to escape the stain of your timely, persistent sadness. But let me tell ya, you’re really cuttin’ a rug in October and November. Leather jacket weather electrifies you, disallowing any laments. However, as it is no longer leather jacket weather (which in New York can sometimes extend into December), you have no choice but to follow the melody upon which your pied piper ass brain chemistry insists. And much like the fate of the rats and kidnapped children subjected to the fabled pied piper’s magical song, your destination is also one of vague, confusing bleakness.
Your sadness’s punctuality has not necessarily made it easier to understand. Due to a profound ability to self-indulge, your historic approach to sadness has been to engage in whichever depraved activities sound likely to produce any feeling at all. When you were younger, these activities were usually painted in the three primary colors: drinking, smoking, and kissing any unstable man who would say something offbeat and mean to you that you could laugh/complain about with friends indefinitely.
Time passes. You stopped drinking, started pretending that smoking isn’t cool, and married someone who never says mean stuff to you. Without alcohol’s bright red hue, sickly yellow smoke stains, or the intoxicating blue of a man saying that it’s actually safer for you to walk alone at night than him because he’s “so small,” in recent years you’ve found yourself painting your sadness with a comparatively subdued range of colors.
Sadness soon became ordering overpriced pizza and buying clothes that used to be lingerie but now are just considered regular clothes. Your sadness listened to devastating music that, preventably, made everything much much worse. But hey, at least you were feeling something!
More time passes. Suddenly, a nefarious new player enters the scene: practicality. Sadness may feel like a fate you wish to escape, but that’s just because you’ve never had practicality sprinkle its dismal beige confetti onto your daily imaginings. Whatever tortured, lightly self destructive activity you may have engaged in the past—wearing your grandmother’s square dancing dress and drinking something called a “big mama” before an improv show where you were required to rap all of your lines, for example—is shown as it truly was: desperate, aching, and counter to any reasonable person’s idea of a balanced, healthy life.
When sadness whispers, Order the vegan pizza from Williamsburg Pizza, for delivery, who cares that it ends up always being $47, practicality intervenes with cruel reality checks about “income” and “savings” and “budget” and “the middle of the pizza always being sort of uncooked leading to overall dissatisfaction you typically forget.” Practicality forbids these casual whims, these cries for fun and feeling.
In several eras of your sadness you’ve engaged in a daily, somber pilgrimage to purchase an enormous piece of vanilla cake you eat quickly, joylessly. These days, practicality whispers in your ear information you already know but choose to repress. It reminds you that you’ve described this cake as “technically bad” on numerous occasions. Since you take no prisoners (never have leftovers) the cake’s gargantuan portion size is a challenge whose reward can only ever be a headache with the force and immediacy of a hearty kick in the nose. You pay $8 (before tip) for this experience, practicality hisses.
Instead of letting your sadness dream up wild ways to process (or sidestep) your feelings, your inconvenient practicality marches onto the scene to say why each of the fun distractions you seek will make you feel worse. Though not always the straightest line to emotional stability, your sadness evasion strategies were usually pretty imaginative before loathsome practicality rotted your brain. Taking mushrooms alone in a cemetery, taking acid alone in a cemetery, taking acid with a friend at a cemetery—you’ve tried everything.
Without any gratitude from you, your sadness has shaped your adult life with varied and unusual experiences. Without sadness, how would you know what it felt like to be high on mushrooms alone in a cemetery covered in snow? Without sadness, how would you know what it was like to see a truck driving towards you, high on mushrooms, alone in a cemetery covered in snow, as a man rolls down the truck window to tell you that due to the snow they’re going to need to shut down the cemetery early, and do you want a ride to the exit? Without sadness, how would you know what it was like to sink into the seat of a truck of a stranger, high on mushrooms, riding through a cemetery covered in snow, drowning in suspicion of the man driving the truck, who, sensing your full bodied trepidation, is trying to put you at ease by telling you the astrological signs of all of his children?
There’s really nothing more depressing than surveying your options for feeling alive and realizing none of them align with What’s Best For You. If the medicine you use to escape—or enjoy—your sadness is laughing about your foolishness with friends, it becomes much less ideal to be goal-oriented. What can you laugh about if your to-do list is always finished?
Maybe the point of sadness is to help you shake off the not infrequent rigidity of being a Virgo, Virgo. An inexplicable, non-linear, impractical excursion can snap you back into feeling alive in no time! Even if the feelings of aliveness are that of financial precarity, sugar headaches, or being frightened by a nice man helping you escape a cemetery covered in snow. They’re still feelings of the living, Virgo. You can be balanced when you’re dead!
I laugh out loud when I read your posts! The mixture of truth and absurdity are perfection.
Keep 'em coming!
"In several eras of your sadness you’ve engaged in a daily, somber pilgrimage to purchase an enormous piece of vanilla cake you eat quickly, joylessly." - felt this in my soul