Spring is sprung and you need boundaries
Why suicides increase in spring
Spring has arrived, friends! She’s giving main character energy and hot AF. Two months ago, the days were dark, and the sun set at 3:30, but spring cranks up the sun-o-meter, and now it’s slapping until 9:00 at night. Woohoo!
Everyone loves hot-girl spring. How can you say no? Piles of laundry can wait. Nutritious meals, meh—hotdogs will suffice. Dirty house, who cares? Hot-girl spring will pull you onto the dance floor and spill her drink on you, then later tonight, she’ll cry and ask you to fetch her some pirogies.
You might have heard the sobering statistic that suicides spike in the spring1. The higher north you climb, the more they increase. Alaska’s suicide rate is twice that of the national average, and Greenland’s is even higher. While suicide among Native populations can be largely attributed to factors brought on by colonization,2 experts don’t really know why suicide increases among non-Indigenous communities.
Allergies are a common scapegoat.3 Also, spring heightens energy, and people more predisposed to depression are more likely to feel energized to take their lives.4 Spring is particularly tough for people with depression because, after a largely solitary winter, they emerge into a world full of rebirth, rejuvenation, and revelry. In contrast, they feel dark and sad.
But I have another theory. And she looks like this:
In the spring, the light, activities, school field trips, socializing, and sun pull me in all sorts of directions. The mania is fueled by the awareness that this sunshine only lasts a finite amount of time. It would be blasphemy to say I do not welcome the sun and all its energy and activities. Yet, I still feel off and exhausted because I am no longer in control.
I don’t know about you, but being blown about by external factors makes me feel weak and powerless and sad. It makes me feel like a child again without agency, a Yes Girl, a girl who wanted to hurry and grow up so she could take back control of her life.
This time last year, I was burnt out from nonstop extroverted socializing without time to rest and recuperate. This is especially taxing for introverted parents with disabled kids who need to spend extra time shuttling and accompanying their kids to activities and making small talk with parents of other children. Plus, we live in a day and age of FOMO, where one peep onto social media tells us everything we might feel guilty about missing.
Last week, my yoga teacher offered a gardening metaphor that overtook me with grief, weirdly. She explained how she lets the seeds of her vegetable seeds germinate and grow long roots in the dark before she plants them in the soil. Letting the seeds root in the dark before planting is important so the plant can flourish and, in turn, feed and nourish others. It was a metaphor for why we still need to find ways to reground even during hot-girl spring mania.
Why did this make me so sad? Is it because our culture tends to value what we can see—the flowers and fruit—without tending to the roots? Is it because I often feel like I’m being forced to bloom before I am ready?
Spring in Alaska comes on so suddenly and so drastically that my tiny baby seed self is yanked out of the soil before I am ready. I, too, need to germinate. I also need to find quiet, stillness, aloneness, and self-check-in before I can start growing roots before I am ready to be planted, grown, fed, and nurtured.
The truth is I’m also scared of hot-girl spring and attaching my joy to her light. And I’m afraid of that kind of joy, that joy is fleeting and not to be trusted.
Perhaps 1.5 years post-pandy, I should be able to shake this feeling of needing to hide, to protect. You’d think I’d be ready to emerge from the dark soil.
One might argue I should just get over it. But the way I see it, misery comes from lack of agency. Lack of agency comes from not setting and maintaining boundaries.
Boundaries are a badass form of self-care. Spring wants to overstep my boundaries, but I don’t have to let her. To some extent, I can protect my time, control where I go, what I do, and who I surround myself with, and say no to things. This time of year, I just have to get really good at saying no. Saying no means saying yes to my truth, spirit, and energy.
If I say no, it means I’m saying yes to growing roots. I might need to keep growing them alone in the dark. And no, you won't see me growing these roots. The world might think, hmm, not very productive, but this unseen work is the most important work—the work of rooting, settling, grounding, and resting.
(Side note: If we call it “work,” does that make it more legit?)
And speaking of rooting, my family and I have been stuck at home with the flu all week. Even more brutal because the weather has been amazeballs, but hey, we’re growing roots. And my kids are playing so nicely together! 🥰
Are you taking the time to root down? How do you grow roots during this manic time of year? Give a shout in the comments!
Thank you for reading, for practicing spring self-care, and for taking the time to ground and root down!
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“In April, May and June, the suicide rate goes up and is the highest,” Adam Kaplin, Johns Hopkins assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, says. “Those numbers can be two to three times higher than in December, when suicide rates are the lowest.”
In the U.S, the suicide rate among men is about three times higher than among women. According to lots of studies, the most of recent of which came out this month from the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], women experience suicidal thoughts at least as frequently as men do, and perhaps even more so.
From https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/04/21/474847921/the-arctic-suicides-its-not-the-dark-that-kills-you:
“Like native people all around the Arctic — and all over the world — Greenlanders were seeing the deadly effects of rapid modernization and unprecedented cultural interference… When communities are disrupted … families start to collapse. There's an increase in alcoholism, child neglect and physical abuse, all of which are risk factors for suicide. Later, people who didn't get the love and support they needed as children find it difficult to cope with the routine heartbreak of dating, and a breakup becomes the final insult in a lifetime of hurt.
“There's also something broader — a loss of identity that happens when a culture, in this case Inuit culture, is demonized and broken down. When a culture is largely erased over less than a generation, as it was in Greenland, a lot of young people feel cut off from the older generations, but not really part of the new one. It's especially difficult for young men, whose fathers and grandfathers were hunters, and who struggle to understand what it means to be an urban Inuit man. Without strong families and communities to help them cope, some of them are so overwhelmed and lost, they take their own lives.”
Overwhelming evidence suggests that inflammation from various sources, including allergic reactions, can cause or worsen depression. People who have depression from unknown causes without an autoimmune disease have elevated levels of inflammation compared with people who don’t have depression, but the levels are not nearly as high as those with an autoimmune disease.
Experts believe it could be the increase in manic behavior in the springtime triggered by warmer weather that brings about the development of more self-destructive behavior. Bipolar disorder also increases in spring.
Are you taking the time to root down? How do you grow roots during this manic time of year?
As someone I respect once said: "A boundary is the distance at which I can love both myself and you." Thank you as ever, Summer.