Today I returned to my room on campus, and almost immediately set to turning my Solstice altar into a generic wintertime altar. For altar cloths, I like to get a yard or so of appropriate fabric and then just hem it; a friend of mine picked this cloth up for me. I chose it because it is black with white snowflakes everywhere. It's pretty and proper for the season, yet, as I joked, "The fact that it's on a black background reflects the darkness in my soul."

I have issues with winter. Mainly I flat out don't like it. I was born in Kentucky and raised at that level of the South, where winters are short and mild, and snow happens but is a huge thing. But almost 7 years ago now I moved up north, to southern New York, and after a few years there went to college in Massachusetts. I really should have seen what the end result would be when I experienced my first northern winter and had a spastic fit with a month left to go because there wasn't any grass to see.

I hate how it's just white, white, everywhere, and the sky is so gray, for months on end. I hate the cold. I hate going out in it, I hate the way it makes me feel. I hate bundling up in huge coats, I hate getting up when it's dark out, I hate the very thought of going out in it.

Last year was my worst by far. I was living in a small basement room with loud, obnoxious pipes, and not sleeping well, and I really bottomed out that year. I used to be the sort of student who would still be trying to go to class in the midst of a mental breakdown; suddenly I was oversleeping a lot and even skipping classes and meetings, and avoiding the work I was supposed to be doing -- avoiding things and classes I should have been enjoying. I was frequently angry and spent a lot of time sitting around and wondering why I was turning into such an incompetent human being.

When I stumbled across descriptions of Seasonal Affective Disorder for the first time, it fit like a glove, and I went to our school counselors to talk about it and get it confirmed. By then the weather was warming up, and I was feeling much better. I was madly productive over the summer, working a 40-hour job and getting far less sleep than I usually need but functioning fine. And I spent the time plotting how I was going to handle the upcoming cold weather. I started slowing down again as the temperature started to fall.

I was very afraid, to be honest. Sometimes I felt confident in all my ideas, but it's easy to be confident when it's 80 degrees and sunny; sometimes I would have fits of fear, wondering how I was going to get through this again and wondering what I'd do if I ended up stuck in the north a few more years. I ended up discovering Apollo. At the time I had been fighting with a very close friend for a year, and Apollo was not only a sun god, but he reflected many of the qualities I had begun to miss in this friend; I thought, "this is an influence I need in my life right now." And I've tried to think actively about him ever since. I also formed a bit of a relationship with Persephone, obviously for her connections with winter and even the idea of seasonal depression.

So far I've been doing much better this year, though certainly not where I could be. I'm on a kick to be healthier in general, and have begun eating more fruit, exercising more, drinking more water. I am in a much better living situation and my sleeping habits are much better, too, and I have been finding other ways to help myself cope. But I'm still struggling, and it looks like I'm going to be relocating to Boston in a year, so I'm going to have to deal with this a while longer yet.

Part of me feels stronger for all of this, like if I take it one day at a time I can manage it all, and like I know I'll get through, because I have chosen to fight this because it was my decision to move to Boston with my significant other after I am done with school and because I made that choice I must deal with the consequences. But I still have fits of outright depression over it. I'm tired of this, I'm tired of winter; I want 60 degrees and the smell of things growing, I want to run around in strappy shirts and feel the sun on me and the air humid enough to sit on my skin. I want to just hibernate over the next few months. I feel resentful that I have so many exciting things I could be doing and then I just feel bad and can't really enjoy it. I feel bleak myself to think of how much more of this I'm going to have to put up with before I'm finally able to move back down south.

When I put the new altar cloth down I realized that I wanted everything on the altar to be COLORFUL, in order to contrast it. And I simply don't have much to put on it right now.

Well, that's ultimately the point of the entry. I've been big into altars this year, because I feel that I am finding all the important things I ought to be thinking about each season and putting them in their own space, where I can see them, and be considerate of these things. But it's looking like this year, at least, my winter altar is going to be a work in progress throughout, and I'm going to have to spend the next month or two thinking of and making things to put on it. I find this an appropriate reflection of the thoughts I'm having to go through at the moment. "Okay, winter is here. Now what do i do about it until it's GONE?" I'm hoping very hard at the moment that the altar and the deities I'm now associating with will help me in trying to deal with it all. I am very tired of swinging back and forth between struggling to stay positive and feeling a depression I can't control, and which will disappear as soon as the temperature rises. This seems like such a stupid factor for my entire mental well-being to be swinging around on.