L'Hiver

As a Canadian, I feel like my moods changes as much and as often as the seasons. I'm not sure if it's only me -- I always feel like my emotions are unique -- but the winter season affects me so drastically: the shift in temperatures, the dry and then damp, moist ground, and the flux in precipitation from snow, sleet, hail and even rain. How does one dress every single day? How does one manoeuvrer and cope during winter?

It's hard for me to feel genial about life when the world outside feels drab and in perpetual alteration. I struggle sometimes to get out of bed right now; I'm scared to wake up to another cold, frigid day. And on the days that there is sun, a little bit of warmth, and even though it is a break in pattern, it's simply not enough -- it's so transient. I'm not sure how people who live through fours seasons do it every year their whole lives, and how they can just go. How you can enjoy days on end with sun, warmth, and then transition into sweaters, layers, parkas...

I live for balmy, sweaty, hot weather. I live and will die for for that. I crave it so intrinsically. I don't even know how I am here right now. Sometimes, I feel like winter is my suicide. A mini death occurs inside of me. Everything looks dead to me in winter. I just can't look at the world and feel proud, brave, or positive. I am in awe how uncomfortable it is to be exposed to the elements, how I have to trudge through the snow, how I am going to get through this day.

Winter has this depressing impact on me where I feel completely existential, lost for words, lost for who I am, and I critique unrelentingly to no end. I ponder and start to question things that I normally feel so confident about. I start flipping through pictures endlessly of warmer and beautiful places. And I long. And I almost cry because I won't be there. I'm not there right now. And I need it right now. I'm slowly going crazy. Winter does not make me feel like myself. Winter makes me hate myself. Winter.

I want to know when my last Canadian winter is so I have something to look forward to because right now I am losing strength and I feel very lost.