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Hey, everybody. It's Mariel. Seasonal effective disorder may not be your typical inspiration for a song, but when Maya was a teenager,

she was trying to understand her feelings.

Seasonal depression's got me sleeping off the days, and we've wasted all our time feeling great.

That's Maya, who also goes by the name MXM Tune. She's a singer-songwriter

from California. She doesn't use her last name publicly to protect the privacy of her family.

And I was feeling sad, looking outside, seeing that the weather was really bad and that it was

dark outside, like just lying there for hours and

hours, not knowing how to get out of bed and move or do anything. And it just makes it really

difficult to do basic normal things, like getting up and going to eat a meal or going to drink water

or even using the bathroom. And she wrote that song when she was a teenager, trying to understand her dark feelings during the winter. Being 16 at the time, Maya turned to social media. I went on Twitter and I was like, am I crazy? Because I feel really sad right now and the weather is really horrible and I don't like it. And people are like, that sounds like you have seasonal affective disorder.

It's like sad and you should look into it.

So I talked to my parents and they're like, yeah, that's also something that I experience

and go through.

And I talk to my friends and they're like, yeah, it's also something that I go through.

And I just realized that everybody feels horrible weather outside also makes you feel

horrible inside.

And so that's how I kind of discovered it.

On this episode of Life Kit, we are talking about seasonal affective disorder or sad. It's a type of

depression that's related to the change in seasons. Maybe you've never put a name to why,

come winter, you just wanted to stay under the covers all day, or you didn't want to meet friends,

...