Yes. I hate winter. And as of late, fall. I say this every year. Why? Because I do. Fall means the leaves start to change color, and Halloween and Thanksgiving are coming soon. Winter means that Christmas is almost here and that the New Year is right around the corner. Fall and Winter also mean that all the things I enjoy doing outside are over with. Golf, not freezing, wearing shorts, BBQing and grilling without needing to put on a coat and gloves. These are just a few things I love to do, but thanks to an early (and record-breaking) snowfall this year, fall golf is off the table, and we also lost a few weeks of cooler temps before getting shit on.

Just a heads up: This is going to be a long post. I will not give a TL;DR. either read it or don’t. I’m not going to be sad if you don’t, so if you read a few lines and call it good, no worries. You’re all still good people and I understand if you don’t want to read a rambly post by someone who shouldn’t be allowed to have a blog.

Okay, so saying I hate fall is a bit much. Winter, though? I am 100% a loather of winter. Fall can be good. It’s a shame that for the last four or five years our falls have just become early winter. I remember fall as a kid. Raking and jumping into big piles of leaves, or being in high school in the marching band and playing at football games. Instead, fall hit and we got another week of summer, and then we had maybe half a week of fall after that. Now we have over a foot of snow on the ground with another 7 inches or so on the way. If fall was actually fall and not just winter part one, I might be inclined to remove it from the list. Until then, it stays on the border of “Extreme Disdain” and “Pure Hatred.”

Let’s discuss winter. Why do I hate winter? Well, let’s get the obvious out of the way. I really don’t like people, and since these same people can’t drive in the snow, it makes winter especially unbearable. That and the heat in my car does not work but maybe 15% of the time. It’s fun driving to work with fogged up windows even after letting your car warm-up for 10 minutes. I wrote a post about this a year or two ago (probably before my blog was purged by Modwest so the article is long-gone) so I won’t go into any more detail than this. Instead, let’s get to the real reason(s) why I hate winter.

Like most people, I work a desk job. I am indoors for 100% of my shift. The department I work in is inside an interior room with no windows to the outside. Our air is filtered and piped through an HVAC system so it’s always stuffy and very dry. What does all this mean? It means that I spend 9 hours a day inside a hermetically-sealed box with 5 other people getting no fresh-air and getting no sunlight. This also means that, much like a very large percentage of office workers, I tend to suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder come wintertime. What does this mean? Well, it means that between Fall and Spring, I am usually in a minor to a moderate depressive state. With the COVID shit going on and other factors, I’ve pretty much been depressed since around April of this year. “But what do you have to be depressed about?” Well, I am glad you asked because even though I have a pretty okay life on the outside, my mental health is really taking a hit this year.

First off, let me get this out of the way: I am by no means asking for attention or implying that I am in any way shape or form going to do anything to harm myself. That was old me. New-ish me doesn’t do that. Now, back to the topic at hand. Depression isn’t something that just happens. It takes time to build and to grow. Sure, you can wake up and not feel right, but being truly depressed is chronic and feels like it never ends. This is something I’ve dealt with in the past more than once. As far back as high school and as recently as last year I have dealt with bouts of depression. Some range from lasting a week or so before I can pull myself out of it, but the worst was a few months. The state I am in currently is the longest I’ve gone without being able to clear my head and start to improve my mental health. I am finding that this time it’s getting harder to be positive about things and to find ways for me to decompress, lower my stress levels, and get my mind out of the fog it’s currently in.

I play video games. I know, a real shocker, right? But, video games are a way for me to relieve stress. Sure, I sometimes get worked up over stuff that happens when gaming, but overall it’s a way for me to unwind and relax. I don’t have a computer aside from my shitty 9-year-old laptop and my work laptop. My desktop died over a year ago and I haven’t had the money to buy new parts. All of my PS4 and console games are somewhere in storage. This sounds like a great post for reddit.com/r/firstworldproblems, but for someone that uses video games as a way to disconnect from the real world for a bit, it makes things difficult. I enjoy gaming with friends but most of my friends have ditched their PS4s and gone strictly PC or are on Xbox. I don’t own an Xbox One so gaming with those friends is not possible, and not having a PC means there are maybe two games I can play with friends right now. You might be asking yourself “Why does this matter? Just play single-player games and shut up.” Well, you’re correct. And I do mostly play single-player games. But not having a desktop computer means I can only play older stuff that I’ve already played through a bunch of times, or the games won’t run well which in turn just ruins any sort of fun that could be had.

Multiplayer gaming is one of the greatest things ever. Hopping on to play Destiny or PUBG with my friends was always something to look forward to. Now, I have nothing that will let me play either game with my friends. See where I am going with this? It’s so hard for me to sit and relax and play a game whether by myself or with my friends that I just end up more stressed and more upset. One of the main things I used to do to help with stress is now only causing me more stress. Then, because I can’t afford new PC parts or an Xbox, I start worrying about finances and when I might be able to buy a few parts to start piecing a new build together. Worrying about finances gets me worried about my job and how absolutely fucked I am pay-wise. This, in turn, causes more stress, and before I know it I am sitting at work in a dark office doing breathing exercises to keep me from losing my shit. Twice within the last week, this has happened. I start to think about one thing and before I know it my brain has snowballed every little thing possible into one giant ball of stress and worry. I have no outlet for this. I can’t vent to anyone without being told things like “If you hate your job get a new one” or “If you hate snow just move.” Yeah, because it’s just that easy to completely uproot my family and move somewhere else or to find some other job that will allow me to provide for my family. I can’t believe people actually say this shit. If it was that fucking easy then I would’ve done this years ago. Not only that, but let me be selfish as fuck and force my wife to quit a job she absolutely loves just so we can move somewhere else so I can make a few dollars more an hour. Instead, how about my employer gets out of the fucking 1990s and pay their employees a liveable fucking wage.

“But what do you really have to be stressed about? You have a job, your health is decent, you have a wife and kids that love you, you have a roof over your head. Just shut the fuck up and get over it you wuss.”

The above phrase is not something I made up. I have literally been told this on three separate occasions within the last month. Maybe not 100% word-for-word on all three, but that above sentence was said to me, in its entirety, when I’ve mentioned to someone what’s going on with me. People like to shit on men when it comes to us expressing our feelings or our worries. “You’re a man, you don’t get to show your feeling. Suck it up and be a man.” Well, you know what, to those that believe this, go fuck yourselves. I don’t care if that just cost me a few friends. If you honestly believe that men with issues like mine should just deal with them and keep them bottled up and whatnot, then I don’t think we should be friends anymore. Having that thought process of just bottling everything up and not being allowed to tell someone how I felt led me to eat a bottle of pills. I don’t even know if said pills would’ve really been that bad for me, but at the time I felt like I would’ve been better off not having the thoughts I did in my head, and I also felt that the world was better off without me on it. I was alone with my thoughts. I had no one to talk to that gave a shit. My mind wandered to a bad place so I ate a whole bottle of pills I found in the bathroom. At the time it felt like the right thing to do. I immediately regretted what I had done and forced myself to throw them up. I went back to my room and cried for an hour or so until I fell asleep. I was ashamed. I felt like absolute garbage. And you know why? Because I felt like if I had shown any weakness, or that I wasn’t well mentally, I would be thought of as a lesser person because of what everyone expects from men. “Men don’t talk about shit like that, just man up and deal with it.”

I was able to pull myself our of the mental state I was in a few ways. I started working out. I started eating better. I started a blog (my old Xanga blog RIP) to get my thoughts and feelings out onto some form of media, even if I wasn’t directly speaking with anyone I knew. This was back in 2010, around October or so. After a month I started to feel better and by the end of 2010 I was back to my old self. Very few people know about the incident with the pills, well, very few knew about that until now. I am not proud of what I did that night. I know two people who have killed themselves. I know what it did to their friends and families. But in that moment all I thought about was myself. It was the most selfish thing I had ever done and something I will never, ever, do again.

So if anyone actually made it to this point, first off, thank you for taking the time to read this. I seriously appreciate you taking the time out of your day to read the crap I am writing. Secondly, you might be asking yourself, “What does this have to do with winter?” Well, all of this crap happened during the winter, when my Seasonal Affective Disorder likes to rear up and make my mental health go crazy for a few months.

This year has been an especially rough year for me mentally. First, we welcomed a new baby girl into our family. this was of course a cause for celebration, but it also added to my list of things to stress over. We have a second tiny human to keep alive. Second, COVID-19 decided to be a thing. I worked from home for 7 months from March until October. That’s 7 months without talking to or seeing any of my coworkers (aside from a few brief encounters) and working from my house. Going to the store or where ever else I needed to go and be near people felt like gambling. Here is what was on my mind for the first few days after COVID-19 hit Montana:

• Would I come in contact with someone infected?
• If I did, would it affect me?
• If it did affect me, how bad would I get?
• I have diabetes and other health issues, would I die?
• Would I bring the virus home and infect my wife and kids?
• Would Rosalyn be able to fight the virus off since she is still developing an immune system?
• What would my family do if I did die?
• Am I going to be able to find toilet paper and paper towels?
• Hand sanitizer?
• What about cleaning wipes that we use every day for cleaning?
• What’s going to happen with work?
• What if the company has to shut down and I lose my job?
• What happens if we no longer have health insurance?
• What happens if Elizabeth loses her job?
• Groceries are flying off the shelves, what if I can’t find food?

To say my mind immediately went to some extremes is an understatement. Sure, some of those fears were valid, but many were absolutely off the deep-end.

Third, and this happened more towards summer, was when Elizabeth was off for summer break. We had to rely on my paycheck alone for pretty much everything. I don’t make a great deal of money and as such bills and groceries were harder and harder to cover as the summer progressed. I had to rely on credit cards towards the end of summer and now I have to pay off larger balances than I want, but as I sometimes had no choice, it was something I had to do to make sure we had food or gas in the cars. This in turn got me worried about our finances again, and as I stated above, this starts a whole snowball effect which leads me to end up in a dark room by myself doing breathing exercises to keep me from losing my mind. Except I was at home. In an 800 square foot house. Without a dark room I could go sit in. Unable to do my breathing exercises. Instead, I had to just sit and do what I could at my desk while the kids were screaming and making loud noises and also while my wife is talking to me asking me questions and I am doing my best to not explode and to also not ignore her and try to answer what she’s asking. This was happening in the spring and summer. Now that we are in fall/early winter and my Seasonal Affective Disorder is already ramping up, I am really not looking forward to the next few months. I am working back in the office now and I am around a few people that I can at least verbally talk to throughout the day. I also have my dark room back so when I start to get overwhelmed I do have a place I can go to get away from things for a bit.

I just want to be able to go outside and hit some golf balls. Or throw some meat on the grill and not have to put on boots and a coat. I want to be able to watch Charlotte ride her bike and have fun. I want to watch Rozzie crawl in the grass. I want to sit outside in my chair on my deck at night, and look up at the stars and just relax and think about nothing. I want to take my kids to the park. I want to get a bike and go for a bike ride of my own. Instead, thanks to winter, I can do none of this. All of these things require me being outside. Winter takes away 99% of the things I do to keep my mental health in check. Instead, all I can do is play video games. And don’t get me wrong, I love gaming, but that is having less and less of an effect on my stress levels as the years go by.

I hate winter.