Letter #26: trying to literature review my way out of winter blues

reading time: 4m.

I’m at a bus stop on the calmer side of Waterloo station. My bus is 20 minutes late. I’m afraid of phone snatchers so I put mine away. For the first time all week, I do nothing. I don’t check Slack. I don’t answer emails or texts. I don’t scroll or play music. And I certainly don’t do the CrossMath Daily Challenge. I just stand very still and listen to myself breathing.

Just after my mother’s book club in Khartoum discussed an Arabic translation of Norweigan Wood, I came across a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. In his story ‘Sleep’, the narrator is a woman who suddenly stops sleeping. This happens twice. The first time, she’s at university. Over time, reality and dreams blend into one. Her existence in the world seems like a hallucination. Yet, none of her classmates notice. On the second occasion, she is clear-headed enough to perform all her duties as a mother and housewife. She follows the same daily routine, most of which are activities she does not particularly hate or enjoy. Her husband and son do not notice that she’d stopped sleeping. As the days pass, she begins to be alarmed by the fact that everything she does seems to require very little consciousness. She begins to seek thrills at night while everyone else is asleep (to her eventual detriment).

I recall the short story as I wait for the bus because I have felt similarly for most of the winter. I find the timing odd because winter has been my least harrowing season this year. In the summer, I had Real Glaring Problems. The kind of Problems that I’d recall as I was waking up in the morning and lose my appetite. Some nights, I’d stay up and upset myself thinking about extreme possibilities. On those nights, my friends would remind me that most situations in life settle into middle-grounds. They were right.

By the end of autumn, all the Real Glaring Problems had indeed been resolved into moderate outcomes. I made it to winter. And I don’t have any Real Glaring Problems now. I am busy. Good-busy. Productive. I’ve achieved all my Q4 goals. I go to the events and gatherings I’m invited to. In the absence of the Problems, I have returned to my routines and regularly scheduled programming. But for some reason, I am not happy. (It didn’t even help when I changed my hair three times like Solange in Cranes in the Sky)

Perhaps I had forgotten that happiness - like love - ‘does not just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new’. Like Murakami’s character, I had removed all glaring dangers, returned to the monotony of life and expected it to grant me joy. But that’s not how it works. Certainly not for me.

At university, whenever my flatmate wanted to get herself out of a rut, she would start naming three things she was grateful for every night. I know that gratitude gets a bad rep because it is often brought up in dismissal of real, valid concerns. “You should be more grateful,” is often a critique and an attempt to shift blame more than it is ever earnest advice. But seeing how effective it was for her, I started doing the same. And it worked. Simply because our minds are naturally predisposed to take stock of what is wrong. I am always aware of everything that needs fixing. Anything that is uncertain or concerning makes itself known. But listing what I was grateful for meant I was manually taking stock of what was good. This made the image of my life in my mind more reflective of my reality. Consciously knowing that I am okay is not the same as routinely acknowledging everything right and good. I make a mental note to revive the habit.

When the bus finally arrives, I put my earphones in and listen toلأنك عندي كل الخير. The writer describes a lover who is so familiar that she seems to have been born out of a joy within them. Her pores explode with light whenever she laughs. They write, “with you, it is as if I’m a living thing.” I think about what it means to feel like a living thing. I imagine it is the opposite of what the narrator in Sleep was experiencing and what this winter has felt like.

I think of the people who make me feel like a living thing, one of whom is a coworker who is so hilarious that I can’t sit next to them when I have important tasks to finish. When I arrive at the work social I am headed to, I find them and we perform Mamma Mia in a karaoke duet so soulful that I nearly lose my voice.

All week after that, I play ABBA’s discography and perform for an imaginary audience in my flat. It feels ridiculous, but it also feels necessary. Everything has been so serious lately. I need to remember and recommit to inconsequential delights. I need to give them names because the horrors name themselves. How could I forget that the answer is always to be more grateful and to take life less seriously?

How do you get yourself out of a rut? And has winter been blue for you too? And do you have a favourite ABBA song? Write back to me.

Salam,

Dinan Alasad