Pastels Are My Prozac

I’ll admit it, I was completely and utterly dreading the hour and a half (although it should, in reality, only take me an hour and fifteen minutes, but morning traffic in the city and the presence of less-than-qualified Indiana drivers who are eternally either:

1. Passing me only to swerve back in front of me and proceed to drive ten miles per hours slower than I had previously been driving,
2. Forgetting that there are other people driving besides just them and never moving out of the right-hand lane, causing me to almost miss my exit almost every time, or
3. Committing a combination of the aforementioned,

and who are always and without fail dominating the interstate, causing my level of irritability to increase exponentially and my travel time to increase by at least fifteen minutes.¹) drive home from my boyfriend’s apartment this morning. The universe was absolutely screaming at me to stay indoors,² and the fact that it had started raining motivated me even less.³ Finally, I somehow forced myself to get up and get ready. I grabbed an old hooded sweatshirt out of my bag to throw on for the trip back, when all of a sudden, a flash of color in the depths of my crimson-seamed, black and cream zebra-striped weekend bag peeked out at me. The heavens opened, the angels sang, the world turned to light⁴ as I pulled out the short-sleeved, powder blue, deep v-necked Henley shirt with soft ruffles coming down from the collar on each side that I had completely forgotten I’d purchased earlier in the week. I could feel my laziness subsiding and my pulse increasing as I paired the soft cotton shirt with my go-to ankle-length skinny jeans and a pair of tan Steve Madden gladiator sandals. In the few minutes it took me to get dressed, my energy was almost completely restored—not enough to make me actually want to leave, but at least enough to give me the “oomph” I needed to make it out the door.

I was driving back, happy that the rain had stopped long enough for the sun to crawl out from behind the clouds, and was just opening the sun roof in my car when it hit me—had I not found some as small and insignificant as a light blue shirt to pull me out of my rainy morning grogginess, I’d probably still be in bed counting the reasons I should stay there. I was recently talking with a coworker about how we could both feel a positive change in our attitudes now that spring has started to move its way across Indiana (commonly referred to as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD). In much the same way, I realized that I’d been suffering from DCCD (dark-colored clothes disorder)—and just like a little sunshine cures the “winter blues,” a hint of color cured my low feelings. In other words, I realized that pastels are my Prozac.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that there are many reasons a person may feel down or depressed that are not season- or apparel-related, but for those of you with similar struggles as me, there’s a good chance you just need something small—like a flash of blue in your duffel bag—to get you going again.⁵

So what’s your Prozac? What peps you up those days you struggle getting up from the couch or out the door? What cures your disorder?

¹ In situations involving construction sites, the irritation is multiplied by 17 and the travel time is multiplied by 24⁹⁶⁷, but thankfully today’s trip was construction-free so I don’t have to actually dig my calculator out of my 12^th grade backpack or my ability to do math out of the dark, swamp-like, math-storing abyss in the very, very back of my brain. AKA I used to be somewhat adept in the subject of mathematics and somehow even made it through Calculus 2 in high school, but the four years that have passed since I’ve had to do any calculations beyond balancing my checking account or adding up purchases before checking out to make sure I have enough in said checking account to cover said purchases (both of which I can complete only with the help of the calculator on my trusty Blackberry, of course) have proved to extinguish any and all memory of being able to do such things or desire to ever do them again should my memory miraculously restore itself. AKA I hate math.

² As you scholars out there may note, “the universe” was not literally screaming, per se, but I maintain that the basically lethal combination of:

1. The sound of the soft rain on the windows,
2. The massive gravitational pull of a cozy bed,
3. The hours of reruns of Reba, Frasier, and Will and Grace on Lifetime in the morning,
4. The presence of enough cans of Diet Coke in the fridge to last me at least two days,
5. The amount of which I wanted to spend more time with my boyfriend,
6. The amount of which I did not want to go back to my internship or my evening serving job or being productive during Spring Break, and, of course,
7. The level of which I wanted to avoid at all costs the obviously elongated aforementioned process of driving (see the first numbered list in the text above)

was thrown together in a decidedly not haphazard manner, ultimately signifying that some superior force was guiding the cosmos in an effort to detain me from departure. AKA it would take much more effort to fight against the universe to force myself to leave than it would to simply accept the fact that I should really just stay. AKA I was dreading the drive (see the first numbered list in the text above).

³ I have nothing against the rain when I am either inside and don’t have to deal with it or have nothing to do and can jump in puddles in my teal and purple polka-dotted rain boots for fun. But that never really happens, now does it? No. It only rains when I’m about to go somewhere or leave somewhere and would prefer to avoid the whole drowned rat look (so not in style right now) but don’t have enough free space in my bag(s) to carry a just-in-case hairdryer so I usually end up with the drowned rat look anyway. Also, I never have an umbrella. In a very Girl Scout-esq “be prepared” effort, I tried to keep one with me at all times for awhile, but I somehow managed to go through about four of them in a little over two months because any form of precipitation over a drizzle or a sprinkle would somehow manage to either:

1. Rip large holes in the fabric, effectively covering approximately two-thirds of my head but still causing water leakage onto the remaining third, thus being ineffective;
2. Cause the spoke-things to poke out of the fabric, thus causing my umbrella to not only scratch up and/or catch itself on other innocent miscellaneous items in my bag(s) but also to then act as an unsuspecting weapon to other innocent bystanders victimized by said spoke-things poking out of my umbrella’s fabric when it gouged out their eye(s) when all they were trying to do was walk past the annoying girl taking up the entire sidewalk with a broken umbrella who was still getting wet because when the spoke-things poke out of the fabric, there is nothing then holding the fabric in its umbrella-shaped form, thus being ineffective;
3. Mary Poppins the umbrella so that not only am I struggling to huddle all of my bags and myself under the umbrella but also am struggling to un-Mary Poppins it before said drowned rat look hits, which of course fails because once an umbrella has Mary P-ed, it feels as if it now has the right to do so whenever the hell it feels like it, which of course isn’t even fair because if my umbrella is going to Mary Poppins itself, it should at least have the decency to Mary Poppins me across campus or through a parking lot or wherever I’m needing to go and turn my bags into one easy-to-manage magical carpet bag, but of course since umbrellas are notorious for not having decency, the only thing it manages to do consistently is to not keep me dry, thus being ineffective; or
4. A combination of the aforementioned,

so naturally, I do my best to avoid umbrellas and usually end up looking like, you guessed it, a drowned rat. AKA I strongly dislike umbrellas.

⁴ This may be a bit of an exaggeration.

⁵ Note: For anyone taking anti-depressant/anti-anxiety/anti-anything medication that is doctor-ordered, court-ordered, spouse-ordered, parent-ordered, or anyone else with authority-ordered, I am not telling you to swap it for a pair of shoes or a toe nail polish that might make you smile. I am not a doctor. Do not rely on me for medical advice.