S.A.D. SURVIVAL GUIDE
Check in on your Midwestern friends
Every December when Chicago begins to hunker down for the winter, I happily tell anyone who will listen— usually my coworkers who work remotely from warmer places, captive to my small-talk whims on a Google Meet— that “it’s not that bad,” and “oh, it’s okay, I’ve lived in the Midwest my whole life,” and “the cold just makes the summer that much sweeter!”
Four months later, like clockwork, I want to smother the girl who said that with a pillow. Because without fail I have forgotten about March, the objective worst month of the year.
Even though there were weeks in January where it was downright dangerous to have an inch of skin exposed for five minutes, the March blues are infinitely worse. The weather is better but still not nice— you don’t have an excuse to stay inside, but it’s not nice enough that you won’t be punished via freezing rain or winds for leaving the house. It’s fucking gross.
But against all odds we have entered April. It feels like I just crawled, wheezing, out of an air raid bunker. During an afternoon spent with my family, my cousin said “you must be freezing, your lips are blue,” and I had to correct her that my lips are just perma-blue now. The other day I looked at my pale, shriveled white hand under the fluorescent light of the CTA at nighttime, opened up Instagram Create mode, and posted “I should be shot” to my Close Friends story with no context1.
If you’re from anywhere with better weather, your cursor or thumb is probably switching tabs to Google “wellness check number Chicago,” but I’m not an isolated case. Everyone feels this way. Small talk lately has just been rounds of “hey, so do you feel fucking insane right now too? Why do we feel so crazy?” amid acknowledgements that the second the weather gets a bit more normal we will also feel a bit more normal.
The cute girly spin on this weather is to say something like “umm, my summer hot girl personality is defrosting” and set it to a PinkPantheress audio on your TikTok. My summer hot girl personality is more like when Margaret Qualley spawns in The Substance and has to crawl out of Demi Moore’s back and it’s all disgusting and then she has to stitch her back up. There will be the same eventual hot girl summer result. I’m just personally going through a lot more body horror to get there.
I don’t think anyone should have to go through body horror just to start enjoying the place they live, so I spent all of March trying to find a fix for my seasonal woes. Here are a few things that didn’t work, a few things that did work, and a postscript where I become Samantha from Sex and the City.
Things That Didn’t Help
Running a half-marathon, being stunningly beautiful, and being paid to be funny did not cure my malaise. Can you believe that such things are only skin-deep? That even though my life looks glamorous from the outside, I’m still kind of bummed about the weather? I wish more people were talking about this!
Things That Kinda Helped
Finding an item in my house, deeming it demonic, then casting it out
In my case it’s the copy of The Housemaid that I spent— get this— $25 on. Just terrible, terrible decisions all around. It was a book club pick and I did not vote for it, but I also didn’t expect it to be as bad of a read as it was.
I’ve always known that this item was demonic, of course. It’s a terrible book that reads like it was written by a precocious twelve-year-old. I couldn’t find it at the library, so I had to spend $25 on some other library’s decomissioned copy on Thriftbooks. The author, Freida McFadden, cranks out about eighty books per year and has racked up more plagiarism accusations than I can count. I have to believe it’s because she’s running a secret sweatshop staffed by sixth-grade Wattpad fanfiction authors somewhere.
The Housemaid has sat on my shelf for YEARS making me look less intellectual whenever someone comes over and looks at my bookshelf. Enough. I threw that shit in a rich townhouse’s Little Free Library a block away and have no moral qualms with letting it haunt someone else’s house. I can breathe easier already.
Day drinking on Sundays
This has greatly interfered with my half-marathon training but I guess it could be seen as a carbo load for my Monday long runs. (I had to move them to Mondays because, you guessed it, my recent Sundays have all been spent day-drinking.)
I’m not suggesting you go buckwild on a Sunday, but there’s nothing wrong with a few beers over a few hours. Or a mimosa and a Bloody Mary at lunch. Does a Sunday just have to be the militaristic ritual of clean sheets, grocery shop, vacuum, gym? Why can’t we hang on a Sunday? Why must we be so fussy about our ‘Sunday reset’?
Drinking on a Sunday afternoon forces you to get all of your chores done quickly in the morning— chores and errands that you would’ve spent all afternoon moseying along, doing slowly. But now you’ll hurry. The slight taboo in drinking on a Sunday, the promise of sitting bundled up on a patio with a few friends and a pint of beer, beckons.
Mental health spray tan
A booth spray tan is the closest a human can feel to being a car in a $5 automatic car wash. Step in, get sprayed down, get blasted with a heater, and come out gorgeous. It’s over in five minutes and you might look a little trashy up close but you sure as hell look better than before. That’s that. It’s the perfect piece of technology.
The Mental Health Spray Tan is the trump card against even the worst cases of weather-induced body dysmorphia. On your average March day I’m grumpy, evil, ugly, miserable. I have the complexion of hamachi crudo. I get told I’m beautiful and my response is “what the fuck do you WANT from me?” instead of “thank you.” Frankly, I’m the kind of evil woman they made an entire manosphere about.
After my tan I am breezy, charming. I get told I’m beautiful and I say “I agree!” and laugh like a fifties starlet. I smell like a shopping mall and my stomach is five different colors (the tan rubbed off in different amounts on the waistband of five different height pairs of pants but I’m blissfully ignoring it.) I’m driving in a convertible and blowing kisses to hunks on the street. I’m only applying a dab of makeup because it’s hard to top my natural beauty. I am happy.
So I am pro-MHST. I might get one tomorrow, now that I’m saying this. It’s nice to not have a reminder of your battle scars every time you pass a mirror. And the heater feels really nice.
Smoothie
I’ve been making this smoothie every other morning for weeks. It’s an immediate cure because it tastes slightly tropical, like something I’d be drinking in a warmer time and place, and is perfectly tailored to what I want2. Getting exactly what you want is vitally important when you’re hanging on by a thread.
That said, I feel a bit silly posting a smoothie recipe. It’s not rocket science. I get why you’d need a recipe for any food with more complicated instructions than “Blend,” but the best smoothie comes from the heart. You needn’t follow my ingredients and ratios. You should find your own.
But if you’ve read this far expecting a smoothie recipe, and you really can’t be bothered to come up with your own, I’d rather you do the following instead of asking ChatGPT:
Store-brand strawberry-mango-pineapple frozen fruit blend
Spinach or kale
Greek yogurt
If I have random groceries that I’m trying to get rid of:
If it’s tasty, add as much as I want
If it’s gross or a supplement, add a tiny bit
The one thing that’s proven to help that I didn’t try
Vitamin D supplement
(Samantha Jones voice) Honey, the only thing that’ll fix you is fifteen hundred CC’S of Vitamin D, stat.
To get real for a second: the only big thing that I did that definitely worked was doing things for other people. Whenever I’m doing something for someone else, whether that’s for a second or an hour or an evening, I’m out of my neurotic headspace and focused on something bigger. Do something nice for someone else today! Help your friends out! One example might be Venmoing me $45 to go get a spray tan.
Wow. Drinking on Sundays and dedicating your life to others. I really am just reinventing Catholicism.
xx Liz
Then I went and had a fabulous Italian dinner where I got free dessert likely because I looked so sickly the waitress thought it was a Make-a-Wish thing. Or maybe she thought I was cool and pretty. I have been hearing this secondhand lately, never from myself, because I keep seeing Peter Griffin when I look in the mirror. Such is March.
Also probably because of the vegetables.
Put me on your close friends story