After months of waiting, it was confirmed today that Your Winter Depression has just been renewed for another season. This marks an impressive twelfth straight year for the recurrent mood disorder and finally puts to bed rumors that you were actually going to get your shit together this time around.
Details are scarce at the moment, but sources say that early attempts to cancel Your Winter Depression, by trying to cut down your alcohol consumption and downloading that expensive meditation app, have once again failed. In fact, things are picking up right where left off last season, with the cold weather and lack of sunlight already leaving you feeling tired, unmotivated and generally kind of blah.
The announcement does come as something of a surprise considering Your Winter Depression has failed to connect with critics in recent years. Your father has routinely dismissed your annual descent into melancholy as “a phase,” while close friend Tina once slammed your clinical diagnoses as “a pretty lame excuse for not responding to my texts.” Perhaps most damning of all, Your Winter Depression has never seemed to find an audience with your coworkers, most of whom choose to ignore the sluggish attitude and basic lack of hygiene that define you in these colder months.
While reviews have been unkind, Your Winter Depression still has many keen watchers who’ve been waiting for word of a renewal. Reports of a return started as early as Thanksgiving, when you were spotted at a bar wearing your signature, winter costume of pajama pants and a tattered Columbia University sweater. But it wasn’t until last weekend, when your roommate found you in bed, listlessly re-watching old episodes 30 Rock while eating a bag of stale Cool Ranch Doritos, when it was definitively confirmed that Your Winter Depression was gearing up for another run.
There’s still not word yet on which symptoms and coping mechanisms can you expect to see this time around, but early signs indicate that your non-existent libido and that weird mix of drowsiness and insomnia will both be back again. A cameo from your hairline stress-acne is also reportedly in the works. Of course, there are going to be some shake-ups to the cast as well. Your expensive light therapy lamp will not be making an appearance after you spilled red wine on it in last year’s explosive finale (“You’re right, I should probably talk to someone.”).
By far the most exciting rumor is that you are going to have a new focus for your obsessive, negative thoughts. According to your therapist, a fixation on past, failed personal relationships appears to be giving way to a more general sense of hopelessness about humanity’s future. This is a clever twist, which could make your condition much more relatable to friends and family coping with a similar sense of despair about the current state of the world.
News of the return also bodes well for the controversial spin-off, Your Crippling Anxiety Disorder. Though this has not been officially confirmed, you can now expect it to be making life unbearable for you by the end of the month. Of course, given its historical unpredictability, Your Crippling Anxiety Disorder might be debuting sooner. Don’t be surprised to see it come screaming back during a tense performance review at work next week or maybe even on the bus one morning, for no discernible reason.
In the meantime, you can catch the first, full episode of Your Winter Depression (“I am fine, just really tired”) starting immediately. Your Winter Depression will continue streaming directly into your brain every day until mid-April, or whenever you reluctantly agree to start taking Wellbutrin again.