The return of the sun (original) (raw)

Today is March 21st, the vernal equinox, the day when—at least in most years—a small lump of iron-rich rock, slowly rotating in a tilted orbit, briefly presents its equator to its small unregarded yellow sun. Across both its hemispheres, day and night stand in perfect equality, except at its poles where horizontal daylight streams across the wastes of ice.

Personally, I think of this as the day when the sun returns.

It is also my sixtieth consecutive day without pharmacologically significant amounts of caffeine, and about my fifty-fifth day of awakening. The degree of personal change I've experienced in the past two months has been simply extraordinary.

It's like, when I stopped drinking coffee, I was released from some kind of fearsome anchor that had been pinning me to the floor of a cold and murky sea. Suddenly I just began doing stuff. All those little things that bother me, that make me think, "I really should..."—they've started getting done. Tidying my room. Catching up on my accounting (after eight months!). Getting on my bicycle again (after a year and a half!). Getting the garden back into shape, after three years without pruning. And following up a hundred mails, letters, jobs, and obligations.

It's not that all these tasks are new. These are things that have been on my mind, in some cases, for years; in some cases I've had reminders sitting right by my desk, very gently nagging at my awareness. The difference is that I now have the energy and initiative to address them. And the truly astonishing thing is how many loose ends a life can contain. I've been whittling them down for over a month and there's still no shortage of them.

How could simple caffeine have suppressed me for so long? Well, naturally it's not just the caffeine. There are many factors, interleaved and combined: the lengthening days, the cumulative effects of psychotherapy, my steadily improving relationship with akeela, my blasé attitude to work, my increased physical activity, and, not least, the self-reinforcing positive energy of feeling that life is improving and things are getting fixed.

Best of all, this new energy feels entirely natural and unforced. I have not resolved to tidy my room; I've just enjoyed putting things away and enjoying the space. I've been doing gardening because it's fun. I've been doing my accounting and bookkeeping and emailing and organising because disarray is faintly claustrophobic and distracting, whereas an organised life leaves space to breathe (and paradoxically requires much less effort). I haven't had to motivate myself; the motivation has simply arisen from within.

I'm half afraid that this won't last, that my momentum will run down, that it's all just a brief interlude of optimism between the months of dysthymia. I certainly don't believe that this is the end of depression: major depressive disorder is in my genes and my synapses, a black dog that will walk alongside me to the end of my days. I've had minor recoveries before, only to lapse once more.

Even so, this recovery is extraordinary in its duration, its intensity and its stability. I'm starting to dare to hope that aspects of it may actually be permanent: that even if things go dull again, this may still be a marked change in my baseline mood. It truly seems, as the days lengthen in the northern hemisphere, that the sun has returned to my world.