The Holidays

The holidays aren’t easy for everyone. I speak from personal experience because I’ve never liked them. So much in fact that I always thought they were way longer than they needed to be. Sure, not having to think about school and work is nice. I get to eat more regularly and I might be able to sleep more than usual. But the holidays also mean having to spend time at home, and oftentimes, home means confronting myself.

My family doesn’t celebrate the holidays like most. We don’t decorate our house with festive lights nor do we have a beautiful Christmas tree glowing in our living room. I’ve never received a Christmas present from anyone in my family, and we never stay up to see the midnight stroke of the new year. We don’t host holiday parties, and we rarely attend them either. I’ve wrapped maybe two presents in my whole life and we avoid the holiday shopping crowd as much as possible. We don’t really get together with our extended family members for large dinners and chaotic reunions. 

Instead, we stay home, out of the cold. Sometimes, we might watch TV  together and call it family time. We eat leftovers for dinner and sleep before 11pm most nights. I spend a lot of time by myself because my parents still have to work. In the rare years we get to travel and visit Taiwan, I follow the whim of everyone else, and I usually don’t even find out until a week prior or less. I don’t really have a say in the plans. 

Growing up, I resented all of this. I vowed that when I started my own family, everything would be different. I’d buy the brightest lights and decorations and find the largest tree to fit under my roof. If we were lucky enough to travel, I’d actively make plans and keep my kids in the loop. They’d also wake up to stacks of presents under the tree, painstakingly wrapped to remind them how much I loved each one of them. The holidays will be a cozy and happy time for all. 

I rarely feel happy during the holidays. Most of the time, it feels like I’m getting by, just willing each day to pass until the break is over. I check the clock frequently, willing the hour hand to tick faster so that night could come faster, I could sleep, and a new day would come sooner. I watch everyone around me swept up in the holiday frenzy–the excitement over the season of giving, celebration and good cheer. Usually, I feel like a stranger looking from the outside in. I am filled with an infinite sadness. 

The holidays are also a time for criticism and lack of privacy.  My family hasn’t seen me in a while so they immediately pick me apart. I’m too fat, my skin is pockmarked, I have bad posture, my life habits are atrocious. They go through my bags and try to look through my phone. The people most likely to accept my flaws and shortcomings don’t. My heart sinks with every jab. My brain shuts down. I retreat into my room, navigating the haze clouding my mind, shrouding me from the bleak reality that is “the holidays.” Even though I am constantly being pestered, I can’t help but feel alone. 

To me, the holidays are nothing different from any other day in the year. I don’t wake up in the morning especially looking forward to anything specific. My time is not taken up with festivities and plans with other people. I realize that this is the first time of the year I get to slow down. Slow down in the sense that I’m not caught up with all my responsibilities because everyone else is preoccupied with their personal celebrations. And so my brain short-circuits and panics when it realizes that it has no tasks to complete and no deadlines to meet.  

Amidst this panic, my brain is racing because I no longer have excuses to put anything off. Everything I’ve told myself I’ll do later comes back to haunt me. All the articles I said I’d write, the events I told myself I’d plan, the exercise I was going to get to, the research project I had barely started but never could find the time to do, the books I said I’d read. Not all of them are difficult tasks either but suddenly I’ve run out of time again and I’m too overwhelmed to start anything. A pit lodges inside my chest as I berate myself. 

How are you always so irresponsible you push everything off until it builds up to this degree and now you can’t even start anything because you’re too anxious and you just sit there at your desk all day doing nothing like a sad person because you actually are a sad person that has no life when you’re back at home and you’re better off just dropping out of school because you probably can’t even disappoint mom and dad more at this point with how lousy the state your life is in and you’re clingy because you want attention because all you are during the holidays is depressed alone and unwanted so forget it you’re hopeless just go cry all day because it’s what you do anyway and complain about what a wreck you are to people who have better things to do in their lives than listen to you but have to because they’re too nice to tell you to shut up. 

That’s right run away and cry and resent everyone around you for not caring even though you aren’t worth the pity and honestly you’re probably just ungrateful and selfish which is why you hate the holidays so much you let everything pile up and then you have stupid panic attacks that waste more time so you’re not even going to amount to anything so why bother doing anything anyway. 

Because nothing matters and the holidays will never care about you or your well-being or your thoughts or your feelings because you don’t matter. 

This brutal, twisted self-honesty usually causes my depression to spiral a little out of control during this time of the year. I can feel the irritation gnawing when my parents say something to me. I lose my appetite and toss and turn at night because the thoughts just won’t stop. So being alone with your thoughts is true, I just didn’t know that they’d never leave. 

The first few days are the hardest. It’s impossible to stop self talk—it’s just there and it will always lurk. I go through the motions, I eat a little, surf the internet, glance over at my piano when I go refill my water cup, gaze longingly out my sliding doors, then it’s night and time for sleep to find me. It usually takes a while. 

After a few days, I slowly tire of the same daily non-routine. Not that I wasn’t tired of it before but even expending the energy to get out of bed and eat and surf the internet and fill my water cup and gaze out the window is exhausting and seems pointless. An odd feeling flickers inside me. I muster the strength to stumble to my piano.

I place my hands on the keys for the first time since I have been home and will my fingers to move. I play a lot of notes wrong and my dynamics are all off. I remember that my piano has also not been tuned for a long time. I am frustrated because I don’t play as well as I used to. I have difficulty playing most of my older, more challenging pieces. Another odd feeling flickers inside me, and I am surprised. I feel a little pleased that I did something different today. 

I grow a little more curious about what else I might enjoy outside of the daily non-routine. I don’t force it. I know if I try to, I’ll lose any progress I make. So I ride the momentum and wait for something else to catch my eye. The process is slow. I can only maybe try one thing each day so I don’t wear myself out. 

Yesterday I folded origami with my dad for a charity fundraiser. Today I caught up on current events for the first time in months. I scoured several media outlets to read up on global politics and occurrences. It was exhilarating–I chose to do all of these things out of my own free will. I chose to do them for myself. It felt much less like going through the motions and much more like self-ownership. And I felt alright doing all of these things on my own without people around me.

I am slowly breaking the non-routine. 

Reflecting now, I see that those first few days are my grieving period. I see others celebrating in a way society has deemed traditional and acceptable. I envy what they have because it is what I don’t. It’s never occurred to me that my family doesn’t celebrate in such a way because they’ve never had the means to. Neither of my parents came from a background with the money or customs to celebrate the holidays the way I’ve always wanted. When I was young, we also didn’t have such means–we were primarily focused on saving money,  keeping a roof over our heads, and feeding ourselves. I am lucky enough to even have a home to come back to every year for the holidays. The way I choose to spend them might differ from someone else’s but that doesn’t make this time of year worth less to me anymore. 

I’m usually pretty burnt out by the time the holidays roll around. Because of the poor state of my mental health, I don’t often fully appreciate the opportunity to practice self-care right away. Self-preservation is important for me to make it through the end of the year into the next. It definitely takes a little bit to get used to being around my family and its habits when I first get back. I am, however, starting to find a delicate balance in which I am able to enjoy spending time with them but also have time to step back for myself. 

It takes a lot of self-transparency to distinguish between things I want to do and things I should do. I’ve since decided that the holidays will be reserved for the former, regardless of the thoughts swirling around inside my head. I realize it’s more about acknowledging the thoughts and sifting through the rational and irrational. I have more irrational thoughts than I can count, and the hard part is recognizing what is actually irrational rather than difficult to accept. And instead of letting these thoughts paralyze me, I am learning to understand that they will always be a part of me, but they don’t have to control everything I do. I don’t always have to listen to them, because they just aren’t always true. 

I don’t hate the holidays as much as I used to anymore. I’ve kind of found my own little bubble, and it’s taken a lot of rationalization to know that this isn’t necessarily a selfish thing. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to focus on myself and the things that bring me joy. I recognize that if I’m not in a healthy state of mind, I’ll likely also make the holidays unbearable for everyone else. 

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe that the holidays are about family, love, celebration and giving. But giving to self, taking care of self, loving oneself shouldn’t be faulted because it’s part of the process of finding happiness during this time of year. 

The holidays aren’t easy for everyone. Some suffer heartbreak. Some don’t have loved ones to return to. Some struggle with mental illness. For me, it has become a time of self-recovery, and sometimes, even self-discovery. The holidays are as much a time for self as it is for others. 

My holidays aren’t as extravagant or festive or traditional or American or Asian or anything really compared to other people’s. The greatest gift I receive every year is time. For myself. For my family. For the things that make me happy that I might not get to other times in the year. 

My holidays are pretty simple, actually. And you know what?

I’m perfectly okay with that now.