“Now I understand completely. Winter gives me Old Testament vibes”

Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa, wrote a lovely piece for the New York Times about her SAD lamp. “How bad could winter really be?” she’d thought, as a kid living in Florida, seeing families on vacation get giddy from the sun.

Now I understand completely. Winter gives me Old Testament vibes. Every morning over the past few months I would look out my window and think, “What else could this be but a punishment?” I saw the invigorating effect winter had on some members of my community — they were out sledding, throwing snowballs, using the cold to work up an endorphin rush. I watched the Winter Olympics. I observe it all and yet I fail to comprehend. Winter just makes me want to see how compact of a fetal position I can ball into beneath a down comforter after guzzling cough syrup. The only physical activities I can seem to manage are throwing the remote control at the wall after seeing the weather forecast and learning to program my space heater with my socked toes.

So, at my psychiatrist’s urging, I decided to try out a happy lamp for seasonal affective disorder this past January. I plugged it in at my office and sat in front of it as if I was a bed of hydroponic lettuce. My expectations were high. I wanted to get wasted on light. I wanted to get stupid. I wanted to get an unstoppable urge to go sing karaoke.

But of course it didn’t quite work like that. “Substitution can increase longing even more than deprivation can,” she writes. Is anyone here a SAD lamp enthusiast? I am perpetually tempted, and the way Nutting describes her grudging, half-hearted affection for hers (“Like a human-size moth, I submit daily to its glowing gravity… the moment I turn on the lamp and light floods throughout the room, I can’t help thinking, Something is happening in here!”) still has some appeal. Or maybe I’ll just move back to Texas and embrace another set of seasonal problems. [NYT]