Winter is coming, scrap-pals. But before that, its ambassadors—the cold and the gray—are already here.

I don’t know how things are faring in each of your countries, of course, but cloud sheets are covering the skies of Northern Italy, temperatures have dropped overnight, and the chill’s leaked into my heart. Shortly put, I feel like crap. I’m taking this as a good sign, for it means that my emotional world is much more open to the environment than what it used to be a few years ago; but I’m still feeling like crap.

So last week I took off from the Virtual Beach, surfed the internet and racked my brain, looking for something that could help me overcome this seasonal depression, or at least cope with it. These are the three tips I’ve managed to cobble up.

1. Learn metaskills (and other new interests)

For one reason or another—the cold for some, the pandemic for others—our social life now is poorer than this summer. Still, we could invest this extra alone-time to learn new metaskills.

Shortly put, metaskills are those abilities that help us in every aspect of our lives. A few examples are:

• meditation
• reading
• creativity
• discipline
• writing (imho, at least, because good writing and good thinking are tightly intertwined)

By getting better at even one of these, you’ll get better at everything else. You’ll feel better too. Still, don’t get overexcited—start with one of these skills, get better at it, and only move to the next when you feel like you truly incorporated the first in your daily life.

In any case, any other new interest is good. Gardening? Decorating your house for the upcoming Halloween? Every little skill helps. First because you’re not wallowing in your self-deprecating thoughts, and second because most of the things you earn during the earning process—muscle memory, new perspectives, a bigger knowledge of yourself—will help you with everything else. Remember: you’re putting everything into one brain, and you’re taking that everywhere you go.

2. Remember that positivity and negativity are overrated

In a wave-cast from two weeks ago I spoke about how social media paints us a world of full blacks and whites. That vision is a lie we sometimes can’t help tell ourselves.

Don’t let positivity build envy in you, scrap-pals, and don’t let negativity drag you down either. Being a small mediocre human being isn’t just the norm; it’s what everybody is by default. Through hard work (and by that I mean vein-bursting-hard work) we might be able to forever escape that averageness. But trust me, when you’ll finally be on the other side of the fence you’re going to miss those small chit-chats you used to have with your parents, or those hours spent on the bed staring at the ceiling.

So be able to embrace your boring, average self. Even literally, if you want: just take a deep breath and wrap your arms around your shoulders and kiss yourself. It works for me.

3. Accept your doldrums

This ties in with the point I just finished making, but I still think it needs a paragraph by itself. If it’s hard to accept the boring parts of our lives, accepting our own loathing selves is even harder.

Sometimes we have bad days, or even bad weeks, when we would like to get things done, but some foul corner of our brain is polluting all of our thoughts, and this gets us frustrated, and the frustration builds negativity, and the negativity pollutes our thoughts even more…

Relax, guys. Most human beings have been, are, or will be in this very same predicament. Keep in mind that you’re always less alone than you think.

Also, meaning doesn’t come from productivity and positivity alone. Meaning comes from our ability to transform our negativity and our bad experiences into something useful and beautiful. Because it’s only by accepting the cold in our hearts that we can come out stronger than before in the spring.

In conclusion

There’s much you can do, but there is only so much you can do. No matter how hard you try, some leaves are going to fall off your crown. And, like they say, that is entirely and absolutely okay. Cherish the cold, rather than escaping it, because it’s thanks to that cold that your seeds start to prepare for the spring.