the sun makes us all a little mad

[threeplusfire]

Sometimes if you turn something over in your head long enough, it starts to make sense.

I hate sunsets. I hate the whole long process of the sun going down. It makes me think of death, makes me feel anxious and restless like I need to punch a wall or run or scream. I haven't quite found the start of it in my memory but it has been a thing for me for a long time. Most of my life most likely. It is an end, an irrevocable end that nothing will stop.

This is so much worse in the summer. You can feel the sun start sliding around 5pm, and then it doesn't finish until nearly 9pm. So hours of that changing, thick light and the grinding, painful feeling in the back of my head. But thinking about this over the past week, I finally connected it with my inevitable sense of depression in the summer. I think it is enduring those hours every day for months makes me a little more crazy than usual. When the world shifts and sunset isn't dragged out for hours I will have some relief.

There is some evidence in my family carries a strong risk for Parkinson's/dementia. I dread it. If that happens I have no doubt I'll be a sundowner who gets so much worse in the evening.

Sunrises don't provoke this feeling in me. I love the light between 10am and 2pm most. I'm actually really glad we are taking our All American Beach Vacation in Florida, because I'll be able to get up and watch the light come up over the ocean. I can skip the sunsets just fine.

Comments

[kythryne.livejournal.com]

I think I read somewhere once - and for all I know it was in a novel and not actually based on science, so take this with a grain of salt - that humans are to some extent hard-wired to dread nightfall and darkness, going back to when we didn't understand how it worked and didn't trust that the sun would come back the next day. That that's why we have so much mythology about the sun and why solstice celebrations permeate so many cultures. I don't know, it kind of makes sense. The sun goes away, bad things happen in the dark, who knows if the dark will ever end? It's not a thing for me personally, but I can totally see why it would be for some people.

And I can understand on a gut level too, I think, because I have an unholy terror of going to sleep. (OH HOLY SHIT I JUST REALIZED ANOTHER PIECE OF THAT PARTICULAR TRAUMA, WOAH.) I basically can't sleep without meds and/or in the arms of a couple of people who I trust with my life and then some. I will literally stay awake until dawn and then finally pass out once the sun is up. I don't WANT to be awake, I'm usually utterly exhausted sometimes to the point of hallucinations, but I just can't fall asleep. It's horrible. So I completely sympathize with hating nightfall.

Florida sunrises are spectacular. Where are you going - Gulf coast or Atlantic coast?

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

It's interesting. I too hate to sleep. I find it an unpleasant, awful experience in general.

Fort Lauderdale, Atlantic Coast. The hotel has an ice cream parlor. I'm very excited. I don't plan on doing anything but swimming, reading and eating.