The phenomenon had become so regular, so predictable over the last twenty years, that I’d given it a name: the September Slide. It would usually begin around the autumnal equinox as a mere rumor of sadness, an inner sigh as afternoons cooled, leaves began to fall, and summer fruits gave way to pumpkins and chrysanthemums in the market stalls. Some delicate psychic radar would detect this slight shift in planetary equilibrium, then signal my mood to strap on a pair of skates and ride the deepening incline all the way to the winter solstice. In my worst years, the weeks from early September to late December felt like an inexorable loss of emotional control, a white-knuckle slide into depression that I seemed powerless to deter or even to understand.

It didn’t make any sense, because I revel in autumn. Here in the Mid-Atlantic there are evanescent moments beginning in late August when, if you stand very still and tilt your chin slightly, you can catch a whiff of autumn just out of reach, hovering in the air of the next moment after this one—a combination of scent and sensation that recalls your favorite sweater. The earthy hues of autumn make me feel warm and cozy. I love the whoosh and crackle of leaves being raked into piles, and the impulse they trigger in me to bake too many loaves of pumpkin bread. When I was a kid I loved the attendant sensations of a new school year—the virgin luster of new pencils, the sheen of a new ring binder, the crumb-free interior of a new lunchbox.

I don’t recall any September trauma leaving a subconscious scar sufficient to tip me into seasonal despair. Yet year after year, even after I started using an artificial sunlight lamp, it would creep in on little rat feet and shove me down a dark inner chute—until last year, that is, when the old familiar slope seemed a little less slippery. As September eased into October 2010, I was still doing pretty well. I kept busy and filled my social calendar as a distraction from constantly checking my mood, on the theory that the monster lurking below the depths would starve from lack of attention. Around Halloween my head was still above sea level, but I was treading water for all I was worth. Every now and then I sensed the monster’s clammy tentacles grasping for my ankles, trying to pull me down below daylight, but somehow I fought it off and made it past the Super Bowl without a major psychic decline.

So this spring, when I started making plans for a week-long summer vacation, I decided to get out ahead of the monster, now that I knew from experience that it could be vanquished. I decided to forgo a July week at the seaside, nail my feet to the perch while friends and colleagues took off for Myrtle Beach and Martha’s Vineyard, and take my “summer” vacation in September. I scoured the Web and found a small-group tour within my budget, offering a week of “Vermont in the Fall.” Our group would take day trips in a limousine coach, returning each night to Stowe’s historic Green Mountain Inn. Such a clever plan! If anticipation alone didn’t circumvent the September Slide, then beautiful new scenery, a quaint hotel, and interesting new companions surely would put the brakes on it. I hadn’t taken a week off work for fifteen months. I was worn out, and my eyes were hungry for new vistas. Stepping outside my comfort zone by joining a tour group for the first time made me feel adventurous and brave. I bought new luggage and new walking shoes. I foresaw taking scores of photos of covered bridges and white steeples set against hills ablaze with color. I would come home stuffed with memories and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, relaxed, refreshed, and reeking with maple syrup. It would be an expensive vacation by my usual standards, but I’d economized by giving the offer of trip insurance a pass. A gamble, perhaps, but what could possibly go wrong?

* * *

I had an appointment with my optometrist on September 1 to have my prescription checked, but as I settled into the chair I warned the doctor that this might not be a good time to have my vision tested. “I’ve been fighting a migraine for the last few days,” I said, “and it’s made focusing my left eye a little iffy. Maybe I should come back when my brain settles down.” She had me read some letters projected on the wall, then said she needed to dilate my eye and examine the retina. She peered at the back of my eye for so long, I began to worry. Finally she sat back and said gravely, “Well, the problem isn’t in your brain, it’s in your eye, and I’m sending you to a retinal specialist immediately.”

When there’s the slightest suggestion of retinal involvement, eye doctors don’t mess around. Within minutes I was in a new chair with a new doctor inches from my face, silently scanning the delicate film at the back of my left eye. The good news was that my retina was fine. The bad news was that the vitreous, the jelly-like substance that fills the eyeball, had detached from the retina in one spot. This, I was tactfully informed, was not uncommon in “people your age.” What was uncommon was for a blood vessel to rupture at the site of the detachment, as had happened in my case. The torn vessel had released a shower of blood cells into the vitreous, where they formed a semi-opaque blob that floated around my field of vision. To get a sense of what this is like, hold your left hand three inches in front of your left eye and, with both eyes open, try walking around, driving, or reading. It’s neither painful nor lethal, but it’s damned annoying, and there’s nothing to do but wait for the blood cells to dissolve or settle to the bottom like crushed pineapple in a Jell-O mold.

“Oh well,” I thought, “it could be worse. I don’t meet up with my tour group until the 18^th—the blood floater could clear up by then. Even if it doesn’t, at least half of Vermont will be in focus, and when I get better my photos will show me what I missed.” Such stoicism! Such optimism! My better angels were purring with pride.

[Warning: The following may not be suitable for the squeamish or skeptical. Reader discretion is advised.] Exactly one week after I was diagnosed with a vitreous hemorrhage in my left eye, I awoke to find my right eye bloodshot, swollen, sore, and weepy. I hied off to my family doctor, who said it was probably bacterial conjunctivitis. She prescribed antibiotic drops and told me to stay home from work for two or three days until it cleared up. Two days later, Saturday the 10^th, when the infection was much worse, the doctor prescribed steroid drops and told me that if my eye wasn’t better by Monday I should see an ophthalmologist. On Monday the 12^th, a vivid description of my worsening condition once again got me ushered into the eye doctor’s office on an emergency basis. By then, the “white” of my eye was a lurid red, glaring through a narrow slit between swollen eyelids. As soon as the doctor examined me, he explained that the drops hadn’t done any good because the infection was viral, not bacterial. Viral conjunctivitis is more contagious and longer-lasting than the bacterial kind, he said, and I had a particularly bad case of it. Furthermore, because it was viral, there was no treatment for it—I just had to wait for the virus to run its course. When I asked him about the odds of being able to fly to Vermont on the 18^th, he patted my shoulder consolingly and said, “I think you’ll be fine. Enjoy your vacation!” I should have shot him where he stood.

The very next morning, September 13, I wondered why my bedroom was pitch dark even after I’d taken off my sleep mask. When I had to pry both eyes open with my fingers, I knew the infection had bloomed overnight in my left eye as well. I stumbled down to my study and Googled “viral conjunctivitis.” As I might have guessed, when one is not standing in front of them pleading pathetically for reassurance about one’s dream vacation, medical experts agree that viral conjunctivitis is contagious for at least 10 to 14 days. I called my boss at work to arrange for indefinite sick leave, then called the tour company and the airline to cancel my vacation, wondering at the irony of it all. Instead of widening my vistas and making new friends, I’d be spending the next week or two in total isolation, quarantined inside my own home. You can’t make this stuff up.

The next 12 days were a lacuna of boredom and pain. I quickly developed systemic symptoms—sore throat, fever, deep muscle aches. I didn’t know if I actually had the flu or if this brand of conjunctivitis came with bonus features. Whatever I had, it was nasty, painful, and ugly. My face was a spooky landscape of swollen lumps, my eyes bloody gashes in ashen flesh. Along with constant pain, the infection produced a fearsome itch that only ice packs could quell. I lost track of time and days, sleeping until afternoon, then rolling out of bed to bathe and forage for food. At first I tried to read a bit, but with hemorrhage and infection vying for blinding rights, that soon became too difficult. Finally, one evening when I couldn’t make out the instructions on a box of Cream of Wheat, I staggered back to bed and gave myself over to the forces of nature.

Coiled in a fetal position, I contemplated the September Slide. Enough had gone wrong in the last week and a half alone to give me vertigo as I teetered at the top of the incline, staring into the Sandpit of Doom down below. Then as if on cue, our balmy September weather turned cold and wet, daring me to take the plunge. It would have been so easy in the sunless gloom to brood over my lost vacation, cancelled too late for a refund, or to assume that God was punishing me for thinking I deserved a bit of pampering. I could have fretted over my rotten luck and dwindling stock of fresh food, or that instead of dissipating, the cloud in my left vitreous was growing denser. I could have moaned that the universe had me in its crosshairs, yet with all these excuses for sliding into a black hole of depression, to my endless relief and wonder, I didn’t. I even caught myself thinking what a luxury it was to have nothing to do but take care of myself and get well—no husband or child this time around, rousting me from my sickbed to see to their needs.

I’ve thought long and hard about why illness, disappointment, and loneliness didn’t overwhelm me last month. It may have had something to do with the fact that while September was knocking the wind out of me, it was inflicting serious damage on a number of people I care for. Every few days, it seemed, I heard from a friend who had lost a job, was battling divorce lawyers, or had been seriously injured. Compared to such genuine suffering, my lost vacation just didn’t rise to the level of tragedy.

But here’s what I’m choosing to believe made the biggest difference—practice. For people like me, with a natural bent toward melancholy, equilibrium takes hard, sustained work. It takes the good sense and humility to seek help from every available source, as often as necessary. It takes the discipline to consciously reframe bad situations, from “Life is shitty and God hates me” to “Hey, shit happens, but not all the time.” It even takes the courage to reframe good situations, from “Don’t get used to this” to “Thank you. Thank you so much.” My self-affirming reframe of September 2011 is that years of hard work and mindfulness helped me realize that slides go up as well as down. It’s hard to climb up a slide, but it can be done (despite the evidence of hilarious YouTube videos of babies and dogs). I believe that over time, the practice of reframing has formed new neural pathways in my brain that are fragile, but will grow stronger with use. And if none of this is true, but is just more reframing, then so be it.

In his poem “Vulture,” Robinson Jeffers describes lying on a bare hillside above the Pacific Ocean, watching a vulture wheeling in circles overhead. As the bird flew lower and lower, narrowing its orbit, the poet understood that he was “under inspection.”

“I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers

Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.

I could see the naked red head between the great wings

Bear downward staring. I said, 'My dear bird, we are wasting time here.

These old bones will still work; they are not for you.'”

            Last month, at least, I waved off the predator of depression in a deeply satisfying personal victory. I persuaded the beast that it was wasting time bearing down on my exposed psyche—that my spirit still worked and was “not for you.” I just wish I’d also been able to scare off the vicious microorganism that attacked my eyes at such an inopportune time. I really needed that vacation.