Am I SAD?

I had a nice Shabbat, very quiet with lots of rest and sleep. I feel a little more human as a result but I know that I'll be zapped again by Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest. Most of it is likely caused by too little sleep and too much running around.

But I'm also wondering if Seasonal Affective Disorder isn't raising it's grim head. First we had all that snow, so most days were fully overcast. Then the past few days have been very foggy. We haven't seen much of the sun for over a month! And we live on the garden level of a house with smallish windows that only face the sides of the lot. That means we look out at our neighbour's fence on one side and at the side of our other neighbour's stucco house on the opposite side. As a result, very little natural light and almost no direct sunlight get into my house. That would be great if I happened to be a vampire, but I'm not.

It's so dull in here that I have the greatest difficulty in keeping plants alive and most of them succumb eventually. Right now I have an Xmas cactus that lost all its blooms within a week of moving in but seems to be alive otherwise. I think. And my mint almost died. It's down to one tiny, spindly stalk with about 6 leaves. Mint is really hard to kill. Mint doesn't just survive; it takes over. For this plant to look the way it does really says something about how much light it's (not) getting.

So maybe that's my problem. Or maybe, as Mrs. Accountability suggested the other day, I might have adrenal fatigue. All of these possibilities are nicer than saying that I'm just not as young as I used to be and should probably scale back. But really, if I had any brains that's what I'd do.

Of course, where do I cut back? If I don't drive the girls to and from school how will they get there? Nobody else in the family can take them and they can't very well bus by themselves (at ages 6 and almost 4). I have to go to work for a minimum of 20 hours per week but I need the extra money. I worked something like 51.5 hours this past (2 week) pay period. That 11.5 hours are going to pay some bills. Should I stop working extra (once I finish with year end, which should be sometime this week)? Or quit my one 2.5 hour class each week? And so on.

If I knew of a good place to cut back, I'd already be doing it. I'm working extra and trying to take on some additional work because we've had such a bad year and I'm tired of us being in the red each month. And everything else I'm pretty much committed to.

So maybe I'd better hope that it's SAD and that a week or two of sunshine will turn things around! What do you do when things are like this? Do you just push through in the belief that sooner or later you'll get to the other side? Or do you cut back? Or take supplements? Get a light box?