The first day of Spring is rapidly approaching. It is astounding how as time marches on, every January feels slighter longer than the last and every February passes in the blink of an eye. I have always loved the equinox/solstice phrasing to describe the turn of the seasons. It is a gentle reminder of how the passage of time is relative to celestial beings bigger than I can comprehend and evokes the small, cosmic-vertigo feeling of being so insignificant yet so deeply connected to the living universe around me. The “Vernal Equinox” just sounds so, I don’t know, regal to me, a little divine in its unique combination of letters. Between those two words, you are easily looking at over 30 points in Scrabble without any multipliers.

Ideally, in about a week or so, we (at least, those of us in the gloomy Coast Salish bioregion of Washington State) will be frothing at the mouths for the slightly longer, warmer days. Everyone I know will be clawing at every shred of sunshine they can get, desperate to dig their way out of the seasonal depressive caves we slide back into every Winter. We are usually blessed with an extraordinarily long Spring season, but it is hard to be sure anymore given the unpredictable weather swings that have settled in over the last several years with the onset of global climate change. There are, of course, the folks who, like frogs in slowly boiling cauldrons, remain steadfast that nothing has changed and that it is a waste of time, money, and energy to fret over something like the weather. It’s a remarkably easy stance to take when you are comfortably spewing nonsense from the old leather armchair in your stupidly expensive Pacific Northwest cabin where you haven’t quite seen the devastation of drought, monsoon, and hurricanes firsthand yet.

Yet.

On the other hand, folks are adapting. I spent a few hours a week last summer volunteering on a local Trans-owned and operated farm to get some firsthand experience with the restorative growing techniques and sustainable agricultural practices that I had been learning about in my master’s program. The wonderful farmer who worked with me explained that they have had to adjust which seed varieties they are using to ensure they don’t lose rows and rows of young veggies to a shockingly late freeze or have to toss dozens of rows of leafy greens that bolted too soon from a way too hot and way too early heat wave. The seemingly micro-changes in the weather had a significant impact on the way they needed to plan their growing and harvesting seasons.

Without seeing the environmental destruction in the Global South caused by American industrialization nor being on your hands and knees and weeding between rows of different kinds of brassicas you had never heard of before— it is hard to internalize how absurd some of these weather swings are. It kind of feels like with the non-stop change, the world burning down, and institutions deteriorating, how bad is a few heat waves?

I wonder if part of this dissonance is because we have been moving so fast for so long that is has become difficult to access memories from a time before things were this bad (I am not deluded, shit’s been fucked since white people decided to get on boats and discover the rest of the world, but you know what I mean). For example, I never stop to think about the last day of the school year in 2012, graduating the seventh grade to enter a lukewarm, drizzly June and not expecting more than just a week or two of “proper” summer weather until August. Without taking the time to pause and really reflect, it is easy to get swept up into believing that the reality I am currently taking in is just the new normal. So much so that one day, I looked up and realized I was wearing a mask under a dark red sun on my way to pick up a boba tea on the Tacoma waterfront to find any small way to celebrate my 21st birthday. That moment of presence came with the eerie realization that the Foss Waterway had been completely obscured by the thick smoke of weeks of wildfires and that this quick boba pickup interaction was likely the only human contact I would have outside of my partner for another several weeks.

I think a similar moment of awe and knowing gripped me about a week ago, when I finally slowed down enough to turn around and look behind me at the last few months. What I found was, unfortunately, not pretty, but I am grateful for the perspective as I process where the fuck my life went over this Winter. Especially as we are now staring down the barrel of Spring. Pun, uh, intended? Like I said, not great.

I tried pausing at the end of January to catch this sooner, but it was not for long enough to move past rationalizing and gaslighting myself to get to a place of understanding what my body was trying to tell me. January, in a nutshell, was miserable. I returned to work after taking two months off to finish my master’s degree and focus on sorting out some health stuff. I only was working two days a week, yet it felt like I was carrying the weight of those two months of missed work on my shoulders every single hour of every day. It was clear that the days I worked had such a lasting emotional and mental impact on me that it wasn’t until four or five days later that I actually felt human again.

The days where I was so burned out from work, I went back into what I call “auto-pilot.” A state of being that I also like to describe as my “brain in a jar” days. Days where I am so disconnected from my body, I forget it’s there altogether until I notice a bruise on my knee from sitting with my leg jammed against my desk for ten hours and not noticing. Days where I am the universe’s chew toy, simply going through the motions of the day to day without too much agency— visiting friends, sitting at home watching movies, sinking into my bed night after night, it’s just what you do to keep going. The length of time between my unperson days and the relief of my person days began to increase.

By the end of the month, I remember looking at Jake from the kitchen table through tears and asking what the fuck is wrong with me? I decided enough was enough. Surely I can map out my month in an Excel sheet tracking my medication, moods, exercise duration, socializing habits, and work to figure out where I had gone wrong. True, my work environment had become quite volatile with non-stop changes and my boss quitting suddenly and leaving us high and dry without any clue as to whether we would keep our jobs or not, given I have “anti-racism” in my position title.

I used this to rationalize why I was feeling so badly. I was certain that was what was wrong and that maybe if I just exercised more and stuck to a better self-care routine, I would be right as rain seeing as all those things were out of my control. I see now, in hindsight, that I am actually just a fucking idiot, but it’s not my fault! Being socialized to just deal with whatever is thrown at you without complaining really messes with your ability to think clearly and objectively about whether or not you are actually okay.

Weeks went by and it got worse. I cried more in the last two months than I had the entirety of the previous year. What, again, was wrong with me?

I kept on living on auto-pilot. Jake and I volunteered to advocate and lobby for Palestinian Americans at the Palestine Advocacy Day at the capitol building. When we arrived, we were told that we were the only two people from Legislative District 29 who signed up to meet with our representatives. We went through the motions as we were told. In the first few minutes of my first lobbying meeting with our Progressive-voter-guide-endorsed representative, Melanie Morgan, she very candidly shared that she actually did not know much about the events happening in Palestine and didn’t understand how a federal issue impacted her constituents.

A video of a young man, around my age, flashed through my mind of him driving with his parents’ dead bodies in the backseat of his car in Gaza because there was no longer access too ambulances or mortuary services. I started crying. Autopilot kicked in. I tried moving down the list of talking points. A letter we would like her to sign demanding justice for Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. An American citizen. A student. I said my sister’s best friend was fucking murdered by the IDF and she said she doesn’t do sign-on letters.

The auto-pilot got worse. I haven’t brushed my teeth. I need to go to the gym. I need to just do a little bit better and everything will be okay again. The Palestine event was heavy, I was sure I would be fine soon after.

A few days later, I caught a glimpse of fresh, fluffy snowflakes catching in Jake’s hair and marveled at how beautiful he looked. I welled up with tears. Autopilot. I went to take a photo of him and my iPhone gave me the error that I had run out of storage. I broke down. I only had this phone for thirteen months, an upgrade from my iPhone XR that I had clung to for the last seven years. Yet the same infuriating error message still plagued me. I couldn’t believe I fell for their trap. Upsetting, yes, but not exactly worthy of a full sob? I suspected I was still upset from the previous week’s advocacy.

I tried new ways to feel better. I started listening to audiobooks on short walks during the day and finally started Thunder Song, a collection of powerful essays written by local Coast Salish writer Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe. It had been on my “to read” list for months now. In the first few minutes of listening to the author’s narration, I began to cry. Why am I crying? We aren’t even near any of the heavy content yet? I was unsettled. Autopilot. Do the walk. Read the book. You’ll feel better.

Later that week, I forgot my sister got us tickets to see Cirque du Soleil. I watched the sad, lonely clown mime tears as his friends left the stage. I felt myself choke up. What the actual fuck is wrong with me?

Autopilot. I finally made dinner plans and visited my aunt, uncle, and Tayta after not seeing them for over a month. “Wela, Wenek? Ma shefnaki? Sho Malik? Ma zakertee endek Ayla?” Where you have been, my child and have you forgotten us? Where have you been? What’s wrong?

I didn’t know how to tell them that I’ve been crying over the most inane shit, haven’t been able to make decisions in about a month or two and so I said work is hard because I do DEI and trump and blah blah and they said say hamdallah for everything, if you lose your job everything will be okay in Palestine they lost everything if god wills it you will be okay. And for the first time in my life i didn’t hate them for saying that.

The next night, I experienced a pretty scary fugue state. I went into the shower and rubbed my skin raw. I stared. It felt like six hours. It felt like no time at all. I stood until my toes turned purple. My vision blurred. I still couldn’t move. Like sleep paralysis in my waking life, my internal voice screamed for someone to help me but nothing betrayed my face, nothing escaped.

The following day, I met with my psychiatrist to run all this by her and see if maybe we shouldn’t have removed my anxiety meds from my psychochemical-cocktail. I forgot to mention that while all this was happening, I have been weaning off of an SSRI since January. Again, yes, yes in hindsight duh but at the time it did not occur to me this could be contributing to my erratic behavior.

So, what the fuck has been wrong with me? The answers kinda blow.

First blow: It turns out the way I was stopping the SSRI forced me into some pretty serious withdrawals and in no less words my psych affirmed that I have been apparently been raw dogging life. Evidently, I had been subjecting myself to mood torture by resetting the withdrawal clock every few days. Never mind the dizziness I ignored, or the vertigo, or the fact that I lost 15 lbs in two months. None of that even crossed my mind. It couldn’t have been anything else but a failing of my ability to white knuckle life, blaming myself for not being able to bootstrap my way out of this pit despite scolding friends and loved ones for thinking there was something wrong with them and not this system.

Second blow: “Have you ever heard of PMDD?”

I did. And frankly, this is so awful to admit, I thought it was irrelevant. Dysphoria? From a period? I often pretended my period didn’t exist. I hated it. Like when I was 16 and convinced I hated pink because it wasn’t punk. Everyone PMSs before their period. Big deal. I never wanted to treat it as real because if I did, it felt like I was giving power over me, in some weird way.

Third blow: Turns out the SSRI we chose to stop treated PMDD, which often begins showing up for people with periods once they start treating other mental illnesses. Because I was on the SSRI, I didn’t have any symptoms. Lexapro withdrawals + being treated for ADHD + being suddenly unmedicated for PMDD = suicidal ideation, paralysis, mood swings, sobbing at sad clowns, thinking I have gone insane, and losing all autonomy over my body.

What a sweet synthesis of misery. I tried explaining this to Jake in a half-hearted can you believe this shit kind of way and to my surprise, he was actually taking all of this way more seriously than I was. He asked what made me think I was any stronger than a medical condition that was well documented to enable serious self-harming behavior up to and including suicide. Did I think I was stronger than it, or did I just believe that it was my fate to suffer? That to be a woman was to be in pain and that if something was wrong, it was my fault for not trying hard enough.

In that moment I thought back to how Sasha taqʷšəblu describes in her memoir hating the word “miscarriage.” How the word itself evoked guilt for having done something wrong. Neither of us were at fault for the way our bodies expressed to us that there was something going on that clearly needed our attention. And not our attention in a way that was expressed through punishment, disdain, and disappointment, rather through care, compassion, empathy, and curiosity.

I sit with a heavy grief for responding to my body with such anger. I am not yet sure how to process the sadness of not treating myself with the careful awareness and care that I constantly urge those around me to treat themselves with.

I ask others to reflect on their values and encourage them to build a life that honors those values. Community, friendship, advocacy, creativity, autonomy. Where were those values when I was convinced I just needed to work a little harder to ease back into normalcy? I found myself caught in between worlds. Between seasons. Between parallel timelines. Unable to access the part of me that knew what was wrong all along because of the belief that I still wasn’t doing enough.

This is usually where I wrap up my essays with some amount of clarity around their purpose in a neat and tidy way. This time, though, I think that the point of all this is simply to just allow ourselves to be. More often. More publicly. It wasn’t until talking with some close friends did I realize how common PMDD was, or how fucking serious some of those symptoms can be if you don’t know what is going on.

So, what does it look like to continue to live from here? To be a person longer than an unperson? To hijack autopilot and take a few wrong turns for the scenic route instead? How do we make time to slow down and be present and find time for family and friends and hobbies and ourselves and our partners while work still sucks, the world still burns, and the seasons remain steadfast in their marking of months going by?

It wasn’t until I realized that there will never be enough storage that I was able to sense some kind of ease within my body. That there is no new iPhone that will be big enough to hold all your photos because with every new iPhone is a better camera with bigger file sizes and there will always be an incentive to just buy their fucking cloud storage. The shattering of the illusion of constantly needing to be bigger & better reminded me there is no perfect to strive for. There is no way to get a 100% grade on your life, I think? There is no value in self-sabotage because there is no greater purpose that is achieved through suffering.

Sasha writes in her memoir about her namesake— her great grandmother Vi taqʷšəblu. Vi commissioned a symphony based on Coast Salish healing spirit songs and Chief Seattle’s Thunder Song as she felt like the people who needed healing the most would never access it outside of their reverent, high brow echelons of fine art.

I sat next to Jake in Benaroya Hall, surrounded by all the well-to-do old white people, and as the music swelled around us, I wept.

There is so much healing that needs to be done. We all need healing. Children of immigrants, children of Palestine, children of nature, we are suffering and we cannot keep pretending like we are not. Part of critical hope and radical care is naming our woes. Supporting one another through collective rage and sadness rather than trying to process it all alone. We must name our grief and grieve out loud. So, here we are.