Merry Giftmas! Happy Holiday! Good morning! It’s possibly been a morning of early rising, paper tearing, excited exclamations, and eager anticipation becoming reality, already followed by a sugar crash. Even more likely if you have little ones at home. Too often we forget that the highs are often followed by the lows, that the excitement and joy and tasty holiday sweets are often followed by that annoying “sugar crash”.
I hope your morning is all bliss and joy and laughter… but… if you’re also serving up (or being served) a hearty helping of frayed nerves, cross words, or moments of stress and you find yourself struggling to manage…? You’re not alone. It’s a very human experience. I hope you find “all the right words” to sooth hurt feelings and set things right once more. I hope you take every apology offered as wholly sincere. I hope you cut yourself and your loved ones some slack; we’re all so very human.
People bring so much love and joy to their holidays, but they also bring their humanity, which is sometimes cobbled together from fragments of bullshit and baggage, chaos and damage, and maybe some actual physical pain. Give each other a minute. Let small things stay small. Try not to start shit. The love matters most. Take a breath, let it go, and begin again. 🙂
Mere hours later, I’m working through tears on a shitty gray rainy day wondering why the fuck I even bother to try. Emotional weather. Stormy. Rainy. Disappointing. Gray. On top of it, my coffee tastes like shit, and it’s hard to see my computer screen through all the fucking tears. Fucking humans, man. The pointless bullshit and struggling and chaos and damage are a big fucking buzzkill.
…None of this changes the meaning or value of the words I wrote earlier this morning, I just “can’t feel it” right now. It’ll pass. I remind myself that it’ll pass, through the tears, and in spite of the shitty cup of coffee. What went wrong? Doesn’t matter. Human bullshit, mostly my own. Not all of it, but mostly. Can’t do anything about anyone else’s crap – that’s their own to wade through and deal with. I’ve got mine. More than enough to have to manage. The fucking tears though – I did not need this. Fortunately, most of my meetings are virtual meetings through Zoom or Google, and I can turn my camera off, and did (although usually I don’t, so it still ends up being a potential “tell” of something being amiss).
I try not to over think things. I try to let small shit stay small. I try to let go of my bullshit and baggage. I drink my shitty cup of coffee and reflect on it as a metaphor for this shitty moment.
I woke to my silent alarm this morning feeling vaguely uneasy. It developed into a pretty notable moment of anxiety in the time between getting dressed and making my way to the living room, where my Traveling Partner was sitting, already awake, headphones on watching something or other on YouTube. I’d planned to work from home, although he had more than hinted that it would be a good day (for me) to go to the office (for him). I figured I’d just get a walk in, early, let him sleep awhile, then work from home, but… why the hell would I drag him along if my anxiety was going to flare up?
“Anxiety” 2011
I could hear the rain hitting the rooftop vent while I was in the bathroom getting ready for work. There’d be no walk this morning – that was when I decided to make the drive into the city after all. Maybe traffic would be light, being the day before a holiday? (It was.) Maybe the office would be quite comfortable since the HVAC was repaired yesterday? (It is.) Maybe I’d feel more focused, and less inclined toward being anxious if I were wrapped in the peculiarly routine mundanity of “the office”? (So far, so good.) So, off I went…
PDX on a rainy Autumn morning.
I sigh and sip my coffee. The day started with that moment of anxiety, but it hasn’t continued, and I feel okay. Absolutely ordinary self-doubt and second-guessing and bullshit that I can certainly get past, given some time and attention, and the appropriate self-care tools. Is it “holiday anxiety”? I mean, honestly, it could be… pretty ordinary human stuff right there. I’m prepared for the day (and the weekend), more or less. We’ve decided on a simple fairly traditional holiday meal to kick of the season, and it’s just the two of us this year, so the modest meal should be manageable for me to tackle on my own, which is necessary this year; I expect my Traveling Partner may spend much of the weekend actually working due to a fairly important project that dropped on him earlier this week (very exciting). Seems likely to be a lovely little holiday.
…I remind myself that his birthday is also coming up fast, and although I’ve already done something for that in a manner of speaking (“…Let’s call this your birthday/Giftmas present, then!”), I’m not the sort to let his birthday pass with not a single actual gift on the day, and I think I’d like to do something special for dinner and dessert… I amuse myself briefly considering the matter, and looking over his gift wish list and wondering how current it actually is. (I’ll have to ask.)
I make a mental note to remind my partner I’d like to get the holiday decoration stuff down out of the attic space, and find myself wondering if that stuff would be a better fit for the storage unit, where I could more easily retrieve it myself without help…? I generally spend the latter part of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend decorating for the Yule season and preparing the holiday “pudding”.
…I’m feeling very festive this year, but also feeling very much “behind on things” somehow…
Funny. When I paused to write, this morning, I had very different thoughts in my head. Something altogether else, that I found perhaps more suited to something I might write on Thanksgiving… something about gratitude, about friends cherished over years, about sharing recipes and memories. But these ended up being the words that tumbled out and landed on this page. I’m okay with that. I’m feeling festive and grateful, and I’m pleased that my anxiety has receded. I find myself hoping that my Traveling Partner went back to bed after I left, and wondering what woke him so early this morning (and hoping it wasn’t me, somehow).
I sip my coffee and “take inventory”. I’m in pain today. It’s the weather, and my arthritis, and the sort of “nothing to see here” bullshit to do with aging and old (physical) trauma. I take something for it, and move on with the moment – it’s already time to begin again, and I’ve got shit to do to get ready for the holiday cooking (tomorrow) and work (today).
I am sipping my morning coffee. It’s already mostly gone cold before I ever thought to put a sentence together, this morning. I started the morning thinking about far away friends, and the vagaries of the job market, and the likelihood of further lay-offs, and the nature of greed. That was pretty grim shit, and I shifted gears as a responsible adult, and did my payday budget and sent that to my Traveling Partner for his review and contribution to our planning and “household wellness”; his suggestions and planning are an important part of us getting where we are together. It’s a team effort. A partnership. Once that was done, I found myself still feeling restless and distracted, with elevated background anxiety lurking in the general “quality of the day”.
…It was as I typed those words that I noticed; I’m not “here and now”, just now – I’m “then”. Some of it is old baggage, and I’m snagged on some past moment. Other details are the pitfalls of worrying over a future that is not now. Doesn’t even matter whether it ever will be; I’m all over the worrying about it, already, well ahead of any need to do so. lol Fucking hell.
I take a breath. Then another. I let my shoulders relax. I drink some water. Another breath. I exhale, relax. I get up and stretch for a moment, breathing. I walk over to the windows and look out, down “main street”, taking in the sparkle of the lights that festoon the trees, and the way they are reflected off the wet pavement. The morning is relatively mild, for February. The snow is gone. I step outside, breathe the fresh cold morning air, and feel the hint of a chill that immediately begins to soak into me. I breathe. Exhale. See the fog of my breath expand and dissipate. I relax, again. I repeat the experience, before I return to my desk. Better.
It’s evening. Quiet. Chill. My Traveling Partner is working on a project in another room. I’m listening to tunes and relaxing. Nothing much going on. The stress of the morning seems long ago. Distant emotionally. I’m okay. I knew then that I would be although I couldn’t really “feel it” in any sort of immediate way. It took a while.
Listen, this is not that unusual; it can take time to get past a difficult emotional moment. More so if you’ve got that feeling paired to some trauma in your past, or if you’re an “emotional wreck” still trying to sort out who you really are, or if you’ve survived some types of head trauma, or if you’re sick… we don’t all bounce back fast. We don’t all bounce back easily. That’s just real. Cut yourself (and each other) some slack. We’re human. Each having our own experience. It’s gotta at least be emotionally safe to be your own best friend, to “be there” for yourself. It has to be okay to give yourself time to course-correct, and get past that moment and on to the next. It’ll pass. Let it.
…If it’s “not you”? I still say it’ll pass. I still plead with you to let it. Just that. Yield to the passage of time and let your own bullshit – and theirs – go. Let it go. Breathe. Exhale. Relax.
Still sucks to deal with though, right? I know. Get used to that shit. Welcome to humanity. Welcome to adulthood. This journey is the most “important” one of your life… and there’s no fucking map. lol. I’d maybe be careful about calling any one point a destination, too. Easiest to let the journey be the destination, and accept that “the way out is through” – more often than not. Pick a theme song, turn that sucker up loud, and enjoy the ride.
Evening Light 