Happy March. The rain has been steady and insistent—rivers overflowing, streets flooding, both of our dogs look permanently like waterlogged Paddington Bears in their yellow slickers.

Still, last week while walking to Alley Cat, there were two solid hours of sun, which is exactly what you want in the Mission, which is colorful and steams with a heat that isn’t ever a reality for San Francisco: for this part of the city to be somehow hotter than the rest of it. An open-faced sky.

The two hours of sun, plus the two bulbs finally emerging from my tulip bed, are offering a bit of respite: March will be easier, if only because it signifies the end of Winter, which has felt particularly long and sad this year.

When the rainy season hits, I find myself dreaming of the high desert. Tuscon, my grandmother’s old, flat ranch house with the baskets large enough to hold my child body, cold terra cotta tiles that matched the shapely ones curving like fault lines on the roof. Cacti with their arms in the air, holding atop their heads screech owl nests and bats and colorless flowers.

Instead, because it’s clearly a year to stay close to home, I find myself going on weekend trips to places I loved as a child, places that signaled to me, when we moved from Southern California to Northern in the late-nineties, that we’d found abundance in the form of rocky shorelines and tide pools.

My mom, sister, and I took my niece and nephew to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium at the beginning of February, a belated Christmas present. We rented a little house in Seaside, and cooked, and played endless games of Uno, and gave each other nicknames, and spent one rainy day combing the streets of Cannery Row, eating salt water taffy and looking at the leggy jellyfish and seizing any moment when the sun disentangled itself from the clouds.

My favorite exhibit has always been the giant female octopus, even if she has crammed herself into invisibility in spaces the size of a bell jar.

Octopodes are extraordinarily smart, though that isn’t exactly why I admire them. I love them because they are seemingly equal parts fierce and vulnerable.

An octopus can make her skin raised or bumpy, change color, turn to spikes, or do anything necessary in order to match the landscape around her, by controlling the projections on her papillae. While this is a feature of both male and female octopodes, it is usually the female who deploys this skill, turning to a one-woman battalion if her young are threatened.

They have three hearts. Their blood is blue. Octopuses are boneless, which is how they can wedge themselves into jars, behind tight coral or curl around objects or plants in the sea.

Octopus mating rituals are nothing special. Many marine biologists have remarked that they look like “they’re just going about their business.” No pomp. The male octopus has a mating arm, which he extends and inserts into a cavity on the female octopus, keeping his distance lest she try to ensnare and strangle him.

“The males have a host of tricks to survive the mating process,” says Katherine Harmon Courage of BBC Earth. “Some of them can quite literally mate at arm’s length. Others sneak into a female’s den disguised as another gal, or sacrifice their entire mating arm to the female and then make a hasty retreat.” 

Female octopodes are larger and hungrier than their male counterparts. It’s every bit as likely that they’ll mate with a male as strangle and eat him. Conversely, the females die shortly after laying their many eggs, dissolving their own bodies to feed their young. Joan Halifax uses this as an example of pathological altruism in her book “Standing on the Edge”.

As I stood at the edge of her tank at the aquarium, which was covered with small, white, rectangular signs that featured a picture of a camera with an X drawn through it and words reading “DO NOT FLASH THE OCTOPUS”, I watched men of all sizes and shapes shine their iPhones directly in her one visible eye. I thought about the lines from the Mary Szybist poem:

The Lushness of It 

It’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you—
not that it wouldn’t reach for you 
with each of its tapering arms:

you’d be as good as anyone, I think,
to an octopus.  But the creatures of the sea,
like the sea, don’t think

about themselves, or you.  Keep on floating there,
cradled, unable to burn.  Abandon 
yourself to the sway, the ruffled eddies, abandon

your heavy legs to the floating meadows 
            of seaweed and feel 
                        the bloom of phytoplankton, spindrift, sea-
spray, barnacles.  In the dark benthic realm, the slippery neckton glide over
the abyssal plains: as you float, feel 
                                    that upwelling of cold, deep water touch
the skin stretched over
                          your spine.  Feel 
fished for and slapped.  No, it’s not that the octopus 
wouldn’t love you.  If it touched,

if it tasted you, each of its three 
hearts would turn red.

Will theologians of any confession refute me?
Not the bluecap salmon.  Not its dotted head.

The fourth time the flash flashed—when the octopus didn’t reach through the glass and strangle and eat the man next to me—I put my body between him and her. “You’re done here,” I said firmly. He looked at me with surprise, his own pupils large in the low light. I could see myself shining in his own pupils, arms crossed, a good foot shorter. Something moved in the blackness there, and I felt it as surely as a heart turning red: this is a man who has hit women. He looked at the people gathered around us, the children with their faces flat to the thick glass, and he walked wordlessly away.

Perhaps I love the female octopus because she is like the very best people I love: shape-shifting according to circumstance, principled in her priorities, and completely no-bullshit. When she needs to, she exercises extraordinary boundaries. At the same time, she knows when it’s time to acknowledge a great cause—in her case, the need to keep alive an entire next generation of youth.

The no-bullshit of animals means there’s no performance of self, no need to deconstruct the way a self is socialized. Maybe animals are a living manifestation of honesty.

Perhaps I love the female octopus because I have reached a level of self-awareness that includes knowing what I struggle to become.

When I was young, my adopted dad used to take the door off my room when I was in trouble, which always felt like the worst punishment imaginable. He read our emails, our diaries, listened in on our phone calls—he asked his friends around town to keep an eye on me and my sisters. When I had my first kiss in the almond orchard by my middle school, he knew about it before I even registered what had happened. Boundaries seemed, until embarrassingly recently, like a luxury that only the very well-adjusted and heartiest-hearted among us got to have.

Context: my adoptive dad was abusive. I got in trouble for everything from legitimate fuck-ups of youth (skipping class) to things that just bothered him (burning incense). As a manipulative, MENSA-level genius with a history of Vietnam-era warfare, my adoptive dad know exactly the kind of violation taking a door off the hinges was for a teenage girl.

Boundaries seemed, until embarrassingly recently, like a luxury that only the very well-adjusted and heartiest-hearted among us got to have.
Click To Tweet

To circle back around–maybe the female octopus isn’t the best example of boundaries. However, she’s a really great example of understanding where her boundaries are. Anger, for example, is a useful tool because it shows us where our boundaries are, and thus, how they’ve been violated. And while we can’t be 100% certain that the female octopus is angry when she strangles and eats her mate (she might just be hungry, and that’s okay), she has a robust understanding of how to get where she needs to be in the world. She doesn’t care about whether or not her behavior is socially acceptable.

This is the moment where I meet and try to channel the octopus—there seems to be a lesson in this for me/us: the realization that boundaries are necessary for cultivating and protecting the work you’ve done on yourself. That psychic, emotional, physical, intellectual, romantic, platonic energy are expendable resources that all work together in an ecosystemic way.

We are taught, especially people socialized as female, that:

• we have no right to boundaries
• putting up boundaries means sacrificing love and care
• putting up boundaries means people will leave rather than invest the time to respect them
• putting up boundaries is cold-hearted, or less vulnerable than not
• putting up boundaries means you are inflexible, unavailable to change

Furthermore, that forgiveness is not only a) mandatory, but b) must look like inviting someone back into your space and life, and lastly, c) the work of the person most harmed in the situation to do and do alone.

On boundaries, the magnificent Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes says:

“What steals energy that you do not fully grant, is a thief in the house of the psyche. Whether it be a person, a place, a memory, a conversation, a meeting, or you yourself being the leaking seal around the chamber wherein the treasure is kept.

Think on these things if you lose energy easily, and make the adjustments to what you can and cannot engage with, accordingly, as you can, as is within your will and within your power.

We all have an energy range, as does a light bulb. Put too little or too much or too sustainedly or not sustainedly enough energy through the vehicle, and the light will not be the brightest as it has been constructed for/to/with/about/regarding.”

In her podcast ‘Tarot for the Wild Soul’, Lindsay Mack says this of boundaries: “The management of the fences around the property of yourself are necessary to make sure your crops and cultivated self is taken care of.”

What a concept to realize that setting boundaries is something that usually happens because you love the people involved. My friend Joey Gould insists, “’No’ is a love word.”

Here’s the not-so-secret thing about introspection in winter: the season is, itself, remarkably boundaried. You have less energy, sleep more, are more accountable to the animal of yourself because the borders of your landscape (the weather, the city, the clothes, the darker days) are starkly clear. And perhaps tulips, and sun, both respectively breaking from their bulbs and the clouds, teach us that we must hold on to the borders of ourselves even as the world around us becomes less obviously boundaried.

The lessons we learn from the female octopus may not be one of taking her boundaries as our own, but rather, understanding what our own boundaries are. What’s more: how to be both fiercely protective and generously tender at the same time.

Dare yourselves to reach in.

Winter is lonely.

While Winter is difficult in the best of times, it is significantly more so for those of us who are disabled. Between inaccessible sidewalks covered in ice and snow, chronic pain flare-ups triggered by cold temperatures, and early sunsets eliciting depression, many of us end up stuck at home.

As somebody with a severe mental illness who’s also spent several Winters (and Autumns and Springs) housebound with chronic pain, I’ve had many opportunities to observe the ups and downs of these particular conditions. While I’ve found much joy in being indoors all day everyday (writing a million words a day! Reading hundreds of books! witnessing sunsets that look like rose quartz carnelian lapis lazuli bleeding through the sky! daydreaming! connecting with weirdo cripples near and afar! not being street harassed!), I’ve also fallen into such deep wells of loneliness that I became dissociated and disconnected from reality.

While Winter is difficult in the best of times, it is significantly more so for those of us who are disabled.
Click To Tweet

Even for those who are not fully housebound, mobility becomes severely limited when it snows, and our participation in friendships, communities, and public spaces, as well as our ability to do boring survival stuff like run errands, is hindered. Remember, while some of your disabled pals might look cute and productive online, we are struggling at home.

Initially, as I was adjusting to becoming more-or-less housebound, the sheer aloneness of it all triggered some of my worst symptoms, including paranoia, suicidal thoughts, and intense rage and jealousy. I was also sincerely frightened. Frightened that my pain would get even worse, frightened that my friends would leave me. Those things did happen, but I’ve survived thus far, I’ve learned a hell of a lot, and I want to share some of it with you.

Before offering suggestions, I’d like to note that many disabled folks are either too shy to ask for support, overwhelmed with unlearning internalized ableism and navigating our culture’s insistence on self-reliance, or simply burned out. When conditions are chronic, and when we’ve been let down by friends in the past, many of us, myself included, are weary of reaching out.

If you have disabled friends — and most of us do, I hope — I can assure you that they’ve experienced at least one of these barriers to asking for support, if not all of them. Instead of waiting for us to reach out, please dare yourselves to reach in.

1. Bring us food.

Whether you’re gifting us with a take-out or delivery meal, carrying groceries, or cooking at your home or ours, disabled folks need warm, healthy food in Winter. We’re often not able to provide it for ourselves. Ask your friends if they have any food intolerances, and show up accordingly. Consider either gifting us with food, or working out a budget with us so we can give you cash (or a trade, like editing services or a Tarot reading!) to pick up necessities. I personally am fond of burritos (yam! Pulled pork! All the toppings!) and rotis (veggie korma! Lamb! Extra peas and broccoli, please!), and am often in need of vegetables, fresh greens, and bananas and avocados galore. Maybe cantaloupe, kiwi, and watermelon, too?

Disabled folks need warm, healthy food in Winter. We’re often not able to provide it for ourselves.
Click To Tweet

Chopping fruits and vegetables is not always possible with chronic pain, so pre-cut and pre-packaged is a better way to go. Many disabled folks are poor, so it’s wise to check in and see what your friends can or cannot afford. For example, I have perishables delivered from Walmart, which means I eat a lot of discounted oatmeal and Mr. Noodles, but fresh produce delivery services, much-needed as they are, are beyond my financial means.

2. Come over and read with us.

Sometimes we don’t need intense conversation (though often we do!), but just company. I read 121 books in 2016, but haven’t had a lot of pals to discuss them with, and am not able to participate in book clubs for many reasons, multiple disabilities being at the top of that list. But I’ve been underlining, taking notes, asking questions, and dreaming. And I’ve been writing. I spend a lot of time in libraries, but that’s not a possibility in Winter. Reading different books in quiet company, chugging coffee together, interrupting the silence now and then to read a favorite line out loud or discuss an idea the author is describing, would be dreamy.

3. Send a text.

Send a text just to say Hi, I’m thinking of you. We don’t have to be BFF’s. If you haven’t talked to someone for three months, six months, a full year, please consider texting them to let them know you value them and haven’t forgotten them. Magic will happen. To be alone at home for such an extended period of time feels, and often is, a form of abandonment. It’s easy to believe you’ve been forgotten. There’ve been many times in my life when I’ve received a short text with a few cute little emojis at a moment of despair when they were needed the most. You could be the person who sends that text. (And hell, maybe we could dare each other to (re-)learn how to talk on the phone as well.)

4. Text to say more than just Hi.

Let’s have real, tough, vulnerable, magical conversations. Let’s share what’s going on in our lives beyond small talk and the weather (even though I actually love discussing the weather, and it’s something I’m doing this very moment). Let’s ask each other difficult questions. Let’s ask each other about our dreams and then work toward making them come true.

5. Set writing goals together.

I’m lucky to have many friends who are writers and zinesters. Whether or not we can be in the same space, we often share word count goals, writing prompts, and words of encouragement. Alone but together, we get stuff done. Writing can be lonely work. It makes a difference to have a few pals to check in and exchange ideas with.

6. Shovel and salt our sidewalks.

Many, if not most, of us are living in buildings with negligent landlords (to say the least). Whether or not other tenants in the building understand that we’re disabled and take these small tasks into mind, many don’t, nor should they have to. While general maintenance of the building is the landlord’s legal responsibility, in my experience, it’s been rare indeed to have a landlord who keeps up with ordinary chores. Have you ever tried to push a wheelchair through snow? Have you ever held your cane’s icepick toward the ground, only to watch it slip out from under you? Clear sidewalks are necessary for the safety of everyone, especially disabled folks. A small path cleared from our entrances to the sidewalks (and garbage bins!) is a lovely gift to give a friend. Remember to clear the pathways at your homes and workplaces, too.

7. When you invite us somewhere, please give us as much accessibility information as possible.

A few years ago, I created the term “accessible physically, financially, and emotionally” as an attempt to define and navigate various forms of in/accessibility beyond ramps. While exploring this term is beyond the realm of this specific piece, you’ll find it useful to think of these terms when describing spaces to your friends. Are there stairs? Is it scent-free? How much will it cost? Will there be seats to rest our sore bones? These are just some basic, beginning questions to ask. Whether you’re inviting us to a public event or into your own home, these queries are crucial.

8. Support our work.

As you may have noticed, disabled folks have tons and tons and tons of incredible writing and art online! And in books! And in zines! And more! And more! And more! And even more! We’re everywhere!

Disabled folks are creative as gosh.
Click To Tweet

Disabled folks are creative as gosh, and many of us write compulsively — not because we’re getting paid or getting paid well, but because we must. If you like our writing, a) tell us so, b) share it, and c) keep clicking on our Paypals, Cash.Me’s, and ko-fis. I and many of my friends are on social assistance. Although it’s recommended that one spend 30% of their income on rent, most disabled people spend significantly more than that to live in substandard housing — for example, I spend 75% of my income, and rent in small towns and cities alike is only getting higher. That means literally every penny and every dollar count.

Be kind, be generous, show your appreciation! (But also, don’t just value — or co-opt! — our work: value us.)

9. Understand that while our pain must be acknowledged, it’s not the only thing we’re capable of talking about, and many of us may not want to discuss it at all.

I write about pain often, but I don’t love discussing it in person because it often turns into a trigger-y cryfest for me. Experiences of chronic pain are not only physical, but have emotional, financial, and spiritual repercussions as well. For those reasons, it’s a complex and stressful topic. If you haven’t experienced debilitating pain resulting in limited mobility, as well as the misunderstanding and invalidation inherent in the medical health-care system, please know that it can be a sensitive topic. If we don’t want to talk about it, please don’t take it personally.

10. If you say you’re gonna show up, please do your best to actually show up.

We all cancel plans for various reasons, and that’s okay, but when folks say they’ll be able to give us rides or help carry groceries, and then stop calling, this has devastating consequences on our mental and physical health. Here’s another term I recently created: “Inconsistent (or intermittent) interdependence.” In cripple communities and disability justice spaces, we talk a lot about interdependence. But because I’ve never felt a sense of belonging in a particular community, or experienced consistent and reliable care and support, I haven’t been able to relate to the interdependence model. Instead, I’ve labeled it as inconsistent, which is more true to my own experience, but leaves space open for possibilities — sometimes friends, new and old, really do show up!

This list is necessarily incomplete. I encourage you to try a few of the suggestions, see what works and what doesn’t, and write your own lists. Talk to your sick and disabled friends. Talk to each other. Stay warm, stay weird, and keep living.

Original illustrations by CB Lavery.

By Emma Phipps

Content warning: suicidal ideation

It’s like clockwork. Every year, right in the middle of October, I find myself stricken with panic and exhaustion that has nothing to do with my job or my personal life and everything to do with one simple environmental factor. The sun is going down, and all it takes to make my stomach drop is one glance out the window to see the sky growing dark by 6:30 p.m. The feeling is primal and consuming, and it’s at the root of my seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

Once classified as its own diagnosis, SAD is now categorized as a variety of major depression that manifests in a seasonal pattern. For most, SAD occurs in the winter months, as the weather becomes colder and the days grow shorter, but some experience seasonal depression during spring and summer. The symptoms of SAD often mimic major depression, including feelings of sadness and hopelessness, increased anxiety, disrupted sleep patterns, loss of energy and motivation, changes in eating habits, and even thoughts of death.

I first noticed my SAD symptoms in my freshman year of high school when I joined the swim team. Our daily practices took place in a windowless basement pool after school, so by the time we emerged to be collected by our parents, the sky was already dark. I woke up before dawn to catch the school bus, spent the whole day inside classrooms, and missed the rest of the afternoon light during those swim practices. Soon, I started to feel almost as though it were dark all the time, and my mood darkened because of it.

Some experience seasonal depression during spring and summer.
Click To Tweet

It wasn’t until college that I finally articulated exactly what it is that sends my brain into an anxious, depressive spiral from mid-October until April or May. As the sun rises later and sets earlier, and the nights slowly but surely consume the days, I feel in a very literal way as though darkness is surrounding me on all sides. It’s an existential claustrophobia. No matter where I turn, no matter how I try to adjust my schedule, night is there, waiting to swallow me whole.

Every symptom I experience is a byproduct of that simple fact. I panic when I realize it’s already dark and I haven’t eaten dinner yet, like I’m being chased by a force far outside my control that’s stealing daylight from me. As soon as the sun goes down, I start to lose my ability to keep track of time, thinking it to be 10:30 p.m. when it’s actually 7:45 p.m. Late evening usually finds me scurrying around my apartment anxiously trying to finish everything before bedtime, even though bedtime is still hours away.

My sleep schedule suffers from there — either I want to go to bed far too early, or the confusion causes me to stay up far too late. The lethargy and exhaustion always lead me to sleep in, sometimes passing out for as long as 14 hours, which only makes it harder to fall asleep the next night. The longer the cycle persists, the more lopsided my schedule becomes, making me sleep through the morning and miss more of that precious daylight.

Lots of intersecting factors increased my likelihood of suffering from SAD. According to the National Institute for Mental Health, seasonal depression is four times more likely to occur in women, and younger adults are at higher risk as well. My family has a long history of mental health issues, especially depression. All of those factors combined put people like me at much higher risk.

When I bring it up among my friends, there seems to be a general misconception that my altered mood comes from the cold weather or the impending holidays. Though those factors can exacerbate symptoms of SAD for some, they’ve never been my primary complaints. I don’t find biting cold any more uncomfortable than scorching heat, and the holidays have always been a bright spot in those darker months. For me, it all comes down to light — or lack thereof.

And according to most scientists, lack of sunlight is at the root of all seasonal depression. One study, published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2002, found that the brain produced less serotonin, the neurotransmitter thought to be responsible for our happiness and sense of wellbeing, in winter than in seasons when sunlight lasts longer. Other studies suggest that it’s an imbalance in melatonin, not serotonin, that causes seasonal depression. Either way, the resulting symptoms are somewhat similar, since melatonin is the chemical responsible for regulating circadian rhythms, and its disruption in winter months could account for SAD sufferers’ feelings of lethargy and near-constant exhaustion.

The anxiety caused by the encroaching darkness is, for me, always accompanied by those feelings of lethargy and exhaustion. I lose all my motivation and have to force myself to socialize. Going to the gym or walking to the grocery store seem like herculean tasks. It just seems easier to stay in bed, eating take-out and rewatching Parks and Recreation for the tenth time. Unfortunately, all of those things just end up contributing to the depression and the anxiety until I gradually slip into a state of mind that’s frightening and far less likely to happen to me at other times of year.

Suicidal thoughts and ideation aren’t uncommon for SAD sufferers, and when I first started getting them in high school, they terrified me. I would be at the top of a flight of stairs, and the thought would come unbidden into my head that it would be a good idea to hurl myself downwards. As time went on, the ideation evolved and got more creative — ”Go sit in the snow and wait for death to take you! Lie down in the street and let traffic do its thing!” — and it took me a while to realize that it always started rearing its ugly head at around the same time each year.

According to most scientists, lack of sunlight is at the root of all seasonal depression.
Click To Tweet

The suicidal ideation certainly doesn’t alleviate the feeling of being relentlessly pursued by a dark force, but as I’ve learned to live with my illness, I’ve become better at remembering that it’s a result of faulty brain chemistry. Any time the ideas pop into my head, I remind myself that I definitely want to live. But I wasn’t always so good at dealing with it, and there were times when I thought I might somehow be irreparably broken inside.

Maybe I would have been able to figure out what was going on with me a little sooner if SAD was better understood and treated as less of a superficial problem. Many people I’ve talked to think it all comes down to physical discomfort. Few know about the chemical shifts that occur in our brains when we’re exposed to less daylight. The acronym, too, is, admittedly, a little problematic — I have SAD, but that doesn’t mean I’m just sad. The cocktail of emotions and mood states that come with SAD are complicated, and they differ from person to person.

Too many people suffer for years the way I did, ignorant to what’s happening in their brains and believing that they have to get through it alone, chalking it up to a case of “winter doldrums.” But once you understand, things start to get better.

As with all mental illnesses, the more we talk about seasonal depression, the more people will understand and accept it. It’s treatable in a number of ways, including light therapy, medication, vitamin supplements, and talk therapy. For me, talking to a therapist has made the biggest difference. And though light therapy and medication are too expensive for me, my therapist suggested some more cost-effective solutions, like sticking to a steady sleep schedule and regular exercise, both of which have helped a lot.

The one good thing to come out of my seasonal depression has been my profound love of spring. It goes beyond the stereotypical appreciation of blooming flowers and warmer weather. It almost reaches back to ancient religious celebrations of rebirth; I’m finally alive again, having escaped a seemingly inescapable darkness, turning my face upwards to soak up the sun.