Winter Solstice Isn’t a Magic Cure — It’s a Threshold
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I keep seeing posts that say the solstice is when “the light returns” and that seasonal depression is just your soul asking for initiation. I get it. It’s poetic. But for me, living in a small Midwest town where the sky goes gray by 3 p.m., I’d be cautious about turning a real neurochemical slump into a spiritual lesson.
I’m a 41-year-old they/them electrician, so my first instinct is to check the wiring before I start chanting at the breaker box. If you’re dealing with seasonal depression, please don’t skip the basics: light exposure, sleep, movement, and, if it’s bad enough, a professional. I’ve read enough about seasonal affective disorder to know it isn’t just “bad vibes.”
That said, the winter solstice has meaning for me now, especially after years in an evangelical framework where I was taught to perform joy even when I felt hollow. I’m in the deconstruction phase, and I’m trying to find language for stuff that used to get called “dark times” but now feels more like necessary darkness.
Tarot helped me here. Not in a “the cards told me my future” way, but in the way the imagery names things. The Wheel, Death, the Moon, the Hermit — all of them sit with me because they don’t promise immediate rescue. They say: this is a cycle. This is a threshold. You don’t have to force the sun back by willpower alone. I even tried an AI oracle about this last year; it gave me The Wheel and some generic sun-return language
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