Adam Oster, Novelist

For those of you unaware, Superman gets his amazing powers of superhuman strength and everything else from the Earth’s yellow sun.

As it turns out, I, too, am similarly powered by the sun. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say, I find myself particularly unpowered with a lack of sun.

In other words, I struggle with a little thing folks in the know like to call Seasonal Affective Disorder.

And it comes directly from a lack of the sun in my life, which means, like Superman, if I’m left away from the sun for too long, I find myself incapable of functioning at my normal incredible levels. And so it is that every year by about February or March, I find myself in a particularly strong case of the SADs, and find it that much more difficult to do anything at all.

Which happens to be going on right now.

I’m in a funk. A funk where I simply feel unable to do any of the things that I normally actually enjoy doing. I can’t even go outside, because even a glimpse of the dreary gray days we have going on right now can send me spiraling even deeper into my ineffective state.

I’ve always considered Superman my favorite superhero. This outsider who spent his younger years feeling different, feeling like he didn’t belong, being made to feel that he was less than by his peers, still loved his fellow man enough to dedicate his life to making theirs better. Even from a young age, I’ve identified with this. However, ever since I became aware of how strongly the sun impacts my emotional mood and therefore my physical activity, I’ve found that maybe I’m not all that far different from the Man of Steel at all.

I am pretty strong after all.

Of course, I don’t have those baby blues of his, or his towering height…or his abdominal muscles, or…

Okay, so maybe we really just share the sun thing and the want for people to have better lives, but still, I like Superman, and that’s really what matters here, right?

And so, because of my current bout with the SAD, this is one of the many reasons I managed to actually miss a day last week. And that also happens to make me a little sad…