By Russ Stoddard in melancholy — 18 Aug 2026

What Do You Do When You Feel This Way?

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 / Unsplash

I do not have a clue what to write today. Absolutely none. And here I have a deadline to write and publish this newsletter TOMORROW.

I don’t feel as if I’m stuck by writer’s block – I just can’t think of anything worth writing about.

Can’t think of anything worth anything at all.

Maybe it’s because I’m feeling a touch of the melancholia today – don’t know why – just am.

A bit off topic from the usual fare, but then I’m feeling a bit off.

It IS a Monday after all.

(Though this feeling may have been occasioned by a migraine that was foreshadowed first thing this morning by an archangel aura with fractals and geometric shapes parading across my field of vision, as fair warning of what was to come. That always tends to lend the sadness of grayscale to a day.)

I’ve always loved the sound of the word itself – melancholia, the noun, or more so its adjunct, melancholy, a noun as well and yet also an adjective, the latter conjuring the feeling I’m experiencing today.

Melancholy, aka “the dumps,” “the blues,” or as the author Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1945, “Certainly have the Black Ass today.”

Black Ass! Now there’s a descriptor.

Melancholy. Funny, that such a sweet-sounding word could serve as harbinger for a drop in your mental barometric pressure that will lay you low.

It’s rhythmic, born of soft parallel syllabic construction: melan-choly.

If I were in a restaurant in a foreign country and didn’t know any better, I’d order it from the menu. “I’ll have an order of melancholy to start.”

The word itself ventures into the way-wayback machine: an ancient term for an ancient affliction, it sounds much better than “black bile,” from which it derives its name, as Hippocrates surmised the cause of a depressive state to an excess of black bile, one of the four basic bodily fluids, or “humours.”

An excess of black bile. Aye, if anything could cause an excess of black bile these days it would be innocently booting up your computer to read the world’s news, fake and real. Perhaps that was my error this morning.

Thinking back now to the pandemic, when I took several self-acknowledged “mental health days off” – and shared the reason to my staff, because:

a. I needed these days off.

b. As the owner of the business, I wanted to normalize this practice for others.

(Those early pandemic days, they were horror shows, weren’t they? The work image that comes for me is of a Zoom screen with every fearful face of every team member, each working remotely and captive in their homes, wanting me – or so I felt – to say that it was going to be all right, and I could not summon the power to do so because nobody had a clue as to what was in store.)

It’s in this spirit of normalizing that I’m sharing this with you today.

I once had a good bout of depression and know this isn’t it – my feeling of melancholy today shall pass. Writing generally makes things better, elevating my mood from whatever benchmark it occupied prior. Even now as I write this, I’m beginning to feel a bit lighter.

I see that it’s starting to sprinkle outside. It’s August, sizzle-hot and dry, and we haven’t had rain in a long while. So, I think I’ll go for a long walk, get a little wet, and breathe in the petrichor – petrichor, it always moves me closer toward a state of wonder, and that should help.