Let me tell you what it’s like to have seasonal affective disorder on top of an underlying bed of depression and anxiety.
The depression tells you that you’re unworthy and every positive interaction you have is the result of the fundamental lie that you’re an acceptable human being when the truth is you bring misery and pain into every life you touch. The anxiety makes you worry constantly that you will be exposed to all as the awful excuse you are.
Good dreams are pure unconsciousness and happen rarely. Bad dreams are indistinguishable from real life only you can’t scream.
And this is in the summer when the Sun is high and the days are long. In the winter the light cuts through your curtains and night comes early. It’s also generally cold and miserable, things work reluctantly if at all, the only benefit is the whole outdoors becomes your refrigerator which is fine if you don’t suffer from Ursaphobia (which is totally rational, Bears can be nasty animals).
So it makes perfect sense that during this time of year the clocks are adjusted to make it darker sooner. Not that I mind the extra sleep, it makes up (for a while) the endless hours of tossing and turning.
Of course you give that all up tonight, tomorrow will be sooner than you think and groggy and bleary eyed you’ll greet it and cats and dogs will dance around your feet at unexpected times.
I never change my clocks, at least those that don’t change automatically. They are arbitrarily set 2 hours ahead of daylight savings and when standard comes around it simply means I have an extra hour to screw with. I find this leads to a more relaxing existence. I struggle against a reputation of constant lateness which is the result of over commitment, not tardiness or lack of effort. Since most of my deadlines are now self imposed I strive to keep them flexible.
Many of the States in my Acela Initiative are considering moving permanently into the Atlantic Time Zone (1 hour ahead) given that for 3 months a year it is full on permanent dark around 4 pm or so. Eastern Time is the largest Zone geographically and thus has the greatest mismatch between daylight and clock at both ends.
Like “One Nation Under God” and “In God We Trust” this revolting development is more recent than most care to acknowledge, having been experimented with during The Great War (thus the plethora of stories proclaiming that this custom is 100 years old), abandoned, and re-adopted during World War II. It was not enshrined in Federal law until 1966.
The solution is not to return to “standard” time (standard only for Oligarchic 19th Century Railroads) since that results in a sunrise at 4 am, a useless time of day except to remind you that you’ve pissed away another sleepless night (did I mention my SAD?), it is instead to adopt the Atlantic standard which, having traveled in Canada, takes about one day to get used to and is never ever a problem again.
I of course urge you to become mindless single issue NRA drone voters on this essential demand and relentlessly punish Representatives who do not comply with 100% obedience as well as contribute all your money to my PAC- Rational Sunrise Voters Federation (since it is not at all real I didn’t bother coming up with a clever acronym) which will support my trips to visit my cousin our lobbying efforts in Washington and my trips to Nova Scotia for $7 a gram weed fact finding missions conducting vital research in other Time Zones to examine the beneficial effects of this critically needed change in National Policy.
Thank you in advance for your support.