Winter is one of those necessary evils that shouldn’t be underestimated – especially if you already have challenges keeping your life together. A friend of mine loves winter. That’s fine. They can have it. I need sunlight and the ability to move freely about.
Winter is better over and done with for the following reasons:
1. There’s not nearly enough sunlight. Seasonal Affective Disorder and general funkiness end up reigning supreme.
2. You can’t open your windows. Speaking of funkiness…
3. If you’re in a place where there’s snow, the roads are narrower. It’s harder to drive and it takes a lot more effort.
4. If you’re in a place where there’s snow storms, the days following the storms are made more difficult by the inability of people to adapt and cope with them. Everybody drives too damned fast, and they are all tired and worn out from shoveling, which means they have less resources to pay attention to what the hell they’re doing.
5. Being cold all the time gets old. So does not being able to go barefoot.
6. Bad moods and fatigue encourage over-carbing and eating all sorts of junk. Weight gain contributes to bad moods and fatigue. A vicious cycle ensues, culminating in the obese America we see today. Of course, you could argue that there are overweight people in warm climes, as well, but I’m too busy blaming winter to pay much mind to that fact.
6. Holidays, as promising as they always seem, never turn out that way. And that leaves us with months of wondering what we did wrong (again) this year. The winter holidays are the gift that keeps on giving.
7. Winter usually comes right around the time that you’re so exhausted from the crazy pace of autumn that you can’t even think straight anymore. It feels like a nice change from the autumn frenzy, but that feeling only lasts about two weeks.
8. The holidays, if they haven’t done enough emotional damage, can cut into your cash flow with all that gift-giving, keeping you at home in February, instead of languishing on a Caribbean beach.
9. It’s bad enough that the cold and darkness and bad weather keep you cooped up inside. But it also keeps you cooped up inside with other bad-tempered people who are as irritated as you that winter even exists.
10. It makes us deeply doubt the claims of experts who go on about global warming, plunging us into a vague but ever-present insecurity regarding our government, our political leaders, our scientists, our future. Who do we believe, anyway? It’s not enough to wreck us, but it doesn’t help with our general sense of uncertainty and the sense that — though we can’t quite put a finger on it — something seems wrong.
Winter – I’m glad it’s over.
Broken Brain - Brilliant Mind 
I have the philosophy that you have to get through winter to get the reward of Spring. But that doesn’t mean it has to be a terrible winter by most standards. A little winter will do.
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I agree with you, Broken: winter sucks. But I worry about reason number 10 you have posted. For one thing, experts predict that the weather is going to be more extreme, not just warmer. Over the past 10-20 years, the winters have seemed to be colder and the summers hotter here (Nashville, Tenn.).
And last May, there was a 100 year flood in Nashville–which can give even the most vocal skeptics visions of Apocalyptic nature.
But I truly do agree with you about Seasonal Affective Disorder and depression. The cycle of vicious over-eating and weight-gain aslo go along hand-in-hand with depression. When you think your fat, you tend to feel bad about yourself and therefore you eat more, which makes you fat and makes you feel…but you already made that point.
Along the same lines with depression — since both of us have sustained brain injuries — is the knowledge that our lives have changed forever. Some twenty years after our injury, most people we know don’t realize how we were before, but we know.
What we need to do is focus on recognizing what we, as survivors of Brain Injury, CAN do still, and what we can do because of our injury.
For more information about Brain Injury, please visit http://BrainInjuryTN.org.
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