The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.
Lucille Ball
My brain needs a lot of light. It just does. Which is why I am going to ask you not to judge me when I say that I have two birthdays – my real birthday in January and my summer birthday on the same date at the end of August. August wasn’t a month I chose arbitrarily. No. It came from months of research and testing, which concluded that this was the perfect month – balmy, breezy, not too hot but warm enough, little chance of rain… It is the same reason my self-created Black History month starts from the 1st of August; February is far too dreary (more on that in the next post).
I tend to go somewhere warm for my January birthday if I can, but it was impossible this year due to the virus we are going to call ‘The Unmentionable’. My birthday was a cold, dark, rainy, windy, wintry affair. It was bleak! This made my summer birthday all the more imperative. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of these people who drags everyone they know to useless functions (like a Taco festival) because “It’s MY birthday MONTH”!I mean, why would I? That’s what my long-suffering partner is for. Just kidding, and to clarify, my birthday only lasts a modest 3 days – I’m humble that way!
So, you can imagine my disappointment after it rained for most of August and the month before that and the one before that, with some instances of flooding. We have had ourselves a real English summer in Switzerland. I might as well have been back in England. I had to pack my bags for Annecy in France and escape like I stole something. I refused to spend my summer birthday in constant rain and darkness and I needed to get my Vitamin D (from sunlight, not anything else. Get your dirty mind out of the gutter!)
It was definitely worth it. It was worth the alarmingly large cotton swab excavating the deepest, tenderest parts of my nostrils in order to get a test because I was only partly vaxxed. It was worth the long drive and the sudden wave of trepidation that comes along with having to go to a petrol-station restroom. It was worth being stuck in traffic and seeing the nose-pickers in other cars. Newsflash: car windows are transparent – we can see you furiously picking your nose and eating it. Gross!
I wrote about my previous visit to Annecy a couple of years ago (you can read it here) and it is still one of my favourite places. Lake d’Annecy is one of the most beautiful and calming bodies of water. It was the perfect location for my summer birthday. I was out there basking in the sun, chilling on a pedalo, not even pretending to pedal and letting the other person do all the work; standing waist deep in the water at the Lake’s edge with wine glass in hand getting tipsy… Good times!
This, however, is not a post boasting about a lovely weekend maxing and relaxing on a lake, consuming more than a decent amount of food-porn-worthy scrumptiousness and pink champagne. No, really. This is about how some people, not unlike sunflowers, require a certain amount of sunlight in order to thrive. Research has shown that darkness and decreased exposure to light causes the brain to produce more melatonin, which causes lethargy and depressive symptoms in sufferers of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Melatonin is the hormone one’s body produces in response to darkness and it signals the body to prepare for sleep. Some people don’t believe SAD is a real thing and have said so, straight to my face. Well, it is real and for some, it has been compounded by ‘The Unmentionable’. SAD is serious and can cause anything from anxiety to depression. And when the part of your brain that requires light is starved of it in the colder as well as the warmer months, something’s got to give.
Of course, I would rather call it Sunflower Syndrome because SAD sounds… well, so sad. It’s not about telling oneself that rain and darkness are beautiful, or willing yourself not to be affected by the weather. It’s about the wiring of the brain. Speciality lights, mindfulness and meditation can go a little way towards helping but at the end of the day, it all comes down to that big, bright orb in the sky putting a twinkle in your wrinkle.
