Several people who I have paid to make such observations have told me at different times that I suffer from varying degrees of depression, sometimes. This often makes sense to me: Sometimes I am clearly irrational about life, and react with unwarranted negativity to perfectly reasonable, unremarkable situations. It also makes sense to me that this kind of feeling can be remedied by the right kind of therapy: There are drugs to simply lift the brain chemistry a bit. There is psychological therapy to dig up and understand the roots of these feelings, buried or denied so deeply that the connection between cause and effect is invisible to us without a patient helper to shed some light on it.

Then there’s my old companion: Seasonal Affective Disorder, a syndrome with the perfect acronym. I can minimise it with a light on a timer switch to fake the dawn every day, but never wholly eradicate it.

Susan Ivanova: It’s just that I’ve always had trouble waking up when it is dark outside.
Commander Jeffrey David Sinclair: Commander, we’re on a space station. It is always dark outside.
Susan Ivanova: [forlornly] I know… I know…

Someone once remarked to me that the crises in people’s lives always seem to strike in one of three places:

1. At the start of Winter, when the horrible realization sets in, that one is going to be cooped up with negligible natural light for the next three months, wearing heavy clothes and waiting for the next cold virus to come along.
2. At the end of Winter when the horrible revelation strikes, that one has been cooped up with negligible natural light for the last three months, wearing heavy clothes and waiting for the next cold virus to come along.
3. At Christmas, when it starts getting too hot to sleep at night, and light well into prime-time.

The thing that troubles me today though is: how do I tell when the problem is ‘real’? Talk to enough psychologists for long enough and it becomes clear that everyone is in denial about something. We’re all hiding from one truth or another, even if it’s just acknowledging the need to trim your toenails. That being the case, who am I to say “I’m miserable for no reason”? How can I really know? Sure, sometimes discontent is obvious: if your dog just died, it is probably premature to diagnose ‘chronic depression’. If the answer isn’t obvious though, how can you be sure you’re not just hiding it from yourself?

Then again, inventing reasons to fear the unknown and unknowable is also referred to as ‘paranoia’. Very few people living in this brave new millenium need any more of that in their lives…