the trick is to keep breathing

I have really mixed feelings about the holidays. I generally enjoy them - somebody who likes sparkly lights, glittery shit, and slightly gaudy decorations as much as I do will always be partial to secular Christmas - hols with my family are a crazy, fun, over-the-top drunken bacchanalia of good feelings like love and nostalgia and being completely hammered. Overall it's a positive experience -- we've figured out a good balance between the gracious, graceful, good-feelings side of gift-giving without straying too much into commercial consumerism or ungrateful demanding, and we have fun with it, which is valuable, and pretty awesome.

But it's also just hard for me. Any season this intense is going to be difficult on my introverted, homebody self: traveling, socializing, family events, people everywhere when all you want to do is go to the grocery and buy some fucking milk, parking lots full and idiots behind the wheel, crowds, noise: overstimulation, excess, a feeling of community that's forced and frustrating. It wears me down. Doesn't help that it's another thing my family gets very into, and while I get into it as much as I can, I often don't have the reserves to engage at the level they do for the length of time and the extent they do, and it's another example of just not being able to keep up with my family on a purely social level. I need breaks from it all. Overstimulation is exhausting and it's bad for me.

Plus traveling and extended family and stuff that should be fun but ends up feeling like a chore: story of the season.

This has been a hard run for me, the end of this year. I'm just exhausted. I've taken a couple days to just be at home in my apartment alone with my cats and the snow, so that I can hopefully recharge my batteries enough to make it through the upcoming bits in a good way rather than a bad way. It's snowing and I have almost all my gifts ready to go and I'm lounging around with coffee and in a bathrobe trying to relax and find some kind of christmas spirit.

Happy hols, everybody.

- with a delightfully complimentary assortment of the family I love, the family they've chosen (my sister-in-law and her parents), and the family I've chosen (my close friends)

- making everyone - extended family and friends included - take the Myers-Briggs test and getting to pontificate wildly and very nerdily about what everyone's results mean all night long

- continuously eating and drinking far too much, including the green bean casserole I made from scratch after a shame grocery pilgrimage that's really its own sordid tale

- playing two very, very drunk games of Settlers of Catan

- doing three Tarot readings that were so scarily accurate and meaningful that everyone in the room was substantially freaked out and I'm actually a little afraid to touch my deck right now

- sitting outside in a graveyard looking at the sky and drinking Dark & Stormy from a flask while being snowed on and shooting the shit with an important friend, until we couldn't feel our butts, before coming home at 5am to cuddle for warmth with my roomie

- meeting my parents at Taco Bell before we all went our separate ways because holiday traditions are important, yo

- coming home through the snow and cold to the most gratuitous bagel-egg-cheese sandwich in the world, a warm bath, and a bed covered in blankets and cats who missed me and can't wait to sit on my feet




I'm not always the happiest / most optimistic / most upbeat person, especially recently. But even with everything else going on, I'm officially thankful that this is my life.