Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness. Desmond Tutu

Summer sucks.

Summer has sucked for me as long as I can remember. Part of it is that there is no school, and little structure. But even when I was working, summer sucked.

I have been diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder, except that the season that triggers me is summer, not winter. Most of the times I have been hospitalized have been between May and August. On the other hand, I love winter — December is my favorite month. I hate July.

Today was not bad; it was overcast. Normally in summer, especially where I live, the sun falls down like concrete blocks. Sunlight has weight, sunlight overwhelms me. I can feel the sunlight scrape along my skin like sandpaper. And not only outside: I live in an Eichler, a mid-century modern home with floor to ceiling windows in the living room. I have taken to wearing sunglasses in the house on sunny days.

This summer threatens to be worse than usual. The sheer insanity of our public life threatens to break my brain. And keeping hold of what matters has become harder than ever.

I have described my concept of reality before: reality is the snowy bank of an ice covered river. The edge of reality, where the ice juts out over the water, is very very scary. The stranger things are, the more “unreal” things seem, the closer I am to the edge. And the harder it becomes to ascertain what is real. The ice gets pretty thin.

This is true in spades today. I can understand Donald Trump claiming his trial was rigged, that the verdict against him was a miscarriage of justice; doesn’t every convicted criminal do likewise? At least many of them. It’s all those other people, like Mike Johnson, speaking out and claiming that a jury that was picked from a pool of everyday people in New York was a tool of a Democratic cabal intent on destroying an innocent man, that upset my understanding of what is factual, what I can rely on.

It’s not that I believe what Johnson and others are saying, it’s simply so unbelievable that he and others who have sworn to protect this country from enemies “foreign and domestic” would be willing to so undermine the rule of law. I should be used to this sort of thing after the last four years, but I’m not. At least, not in the summer.

For me, I need to remember hope. I need to let go of the fear and instability that have gripped me, and work on just… being sane.

It’s hard to write about this. I have talked before about my mental illness but I don’t talk about my experience of it, generally. I’m afraid y’all will stop talking to me. I have had people in my life who have dropped me when I hit a crisis point. On the other hand, if you can’t cope with my bipolar, you can’t cope with me. Gonna miss you.

As far as hope goes, I need to heed the good bishop’s advice, and remember, that sanity exists in the middle of all this craziness. (Although I have to admit the light/dark metaphor doesn’t really work for me. Dark is beautiful, and gentle; light can be harsh and blinding.)

I can hold on until October, and December is only six months away.