Originally published at crisis magazine
I turned 45 this year, just a few days after Ash Wednesday. Here in the Northeast, it had been an especially grueling winter for me: taxing on the mental health front, forlorn feelings of monotony and seemingly never-ending days of cold winds and gray skies. Celebrative holidays had come and gone, and I was perversely looking forward to the start of Lent to help kick things in gear.
Ascetic practices are nothing new for me. I have been taking cold showers every morning for the past few years, both for the penance and the benefits of cold exposure, and doing periodic extended fasts. This past summer, I quit a pernicious 25-year nicotine habit cold turkey, mostly because I was sick and tired of being a slave. As if that wasn’t punishment enough, I also quit caffeine cold turkey a few months later—to try to get my blood pressure down but also to eschew the dependency I had developed on the drug.
Cutting out those two things has brought benefits but not without some cost either. In the absence of those two stimulants, I found my mood depressed and that I would sleep much more than usual. My writing suffered, since
