The grayness of Winter is beginning to take a toll.

As I look out the window from my workspace, I am once again greeting by the same bleak shades of gray that have occupied my life for the past few months. Everyday blends into the next, making it difficult to discern when one ends and another begins. This lack of color hasn’t always bothered me, but lately, it’s taking a toll.

I know that seasonal depression is a thing that people go through. I’ve never put much stock in it because I’m a 24/7 kinda depressed person. There’s no offseason for me. But lately, I’m starting to buy into it.

We’ve been conditioned to buy into the idea that sadness or depression is represented by the color blue. There’s an entire genre of music dedicated to just that: the Blues. There’s also bluegrass, but that’s just for people who like terrible music and think a wash basin is an instrument.

Depression and sadness isn’t blue, though. Blue is a nice color that people often paint rooms with. Blue is a calming color. If blue wasn’t, paint companies couldn’t use that as a selling point to get you to buy “Super Calming Robin’s Egg and North Carolina Baby Blue.”

Sadness and depression has also been represented as black or described as darkness. Despite what Hot Topic goths are trying to convey, I don’t think this works either. At least black has a commitment to something. Black is all of the colors. Depending on the angle you view it, some light may peek through and showcase a color.

Depression for me has always been gray. It represents the unknown and lack of ambition to know all at the same time. Gray is a shitty middle-ground that we accept because at least it’s not the middle of the night or the blazing hot sun. Gray is the feeling when you realize you’re still in bed at noon but don’t have the energy to move.

I’m tired of gray. I’m tired of any color that tries to get through being absorbed by the all-encompassing sadness that gray brings. I feel like I’m making a painting and just when I’m starting to see a bright and bold picture come together, someone comes by and drops the same bleak tones of gray across the canvas.

The gray isn’t going to destroy me though. I still have hope that things are going to come together and we’ll all be complaining about how hot it is before we even realize that it happened. But until that happens, keep trying to be the color that we need in each other’s lives. We’re all the warmth we have until the sun comes back.