Gannon Knight Perspective

     The winter blues. Cabin fever. Seasonal Affective Disorder. Whatever you want to call it, it has effectively left a thin layer of icy sleet on our already tired, cold winter hearts. Everyone, it seems, is in a kind of funk. I blame it on a mix of a few things. The semester is just far enough along to lose its luster, for one thing. The weather is warm enough one day to melt the snow, then cold enough the next to freeze the earth back over. It doesn’t help that the weather is probably to blame for more than a few of us feeling, well, under the weather.
     We’re in the thick of yet another Erie winter – the kind that for which “cold” and “gray” are too kind of adjectives. “Biting” and “bleak” are probably more apt descriptors. I came to Erie because, at the time, I was in love with winter – the snow, the cold, everything. Breathing in freezing air made me feel like I was alive.
     That was younger me. Older me hates younger me for doing such a foolish thing as moving to a city that has a

winter meaner than a schoolyard bully. In the past couple of years here, I’ve been prone to awful, horrible moods I call “the quiets.”
     You’ve probably had “the quiets.” They aren’t the sort of despairing depression that consumes you violently – I just refer to that mood as “it” because it’s not worthy of an actual title – but rather the sort of feeling that creeps over you like sitting in the eye of a storm, in which you just can’t summon the motivation to do a damn thing.
     That’s the kind of mood winter cultivates in me – “the quiets.” The sort of still feeling when everything in you is silent. You’re not happy. You’re not sad. You’re nothing. You lack all motivation, even to do things you enjoy. Admittedly, that’s one of the qualifications of clinical depression – the “it” – but as a person who has experience with that, I can say “it” and “the quiets” differ greatly.
     Life with “the quiets” is a life on auto-pilot. You don’t struggle with anything because you don’t really feel anything. Essentially, you become as gray as the weather.
     So why all the description and no solution? Because I don’t have one. This merely serves to point out that I’m not the only one who’s got a case of “the quiets,” and you’re not either. Erie’s winter is an equal-opportunity Debbie Downer, so we’re all in this together.
     I guess I normally just ride out “the quiets” and capitalize on those few moments when the eye of the storm passes, freeing me from being paralyzed. So, until the sun comes out again, the only thing we can really do is sit together in our stillness – having someone to share “the quiets” with doesn’t make them any less quiet, but it can make them less gray. If “the quiets,” however, do dissolve into the dreaded “it,” finding someone to talk to is as simple as walking into Gannon University’s Counseling Center.
     “The quiets,” “it” and the bleak winter aside, we never have to be alone in our stillness.