This holiday season, as I try to feel as much cheer and joy as I can at the end of a year that has brought so much more grief, stress, and abrasive reality than many thought imaginable, I have realized something. It is something I have been realizing for years, as I struggle through Christmas blues wondering why I am not as joyful as I should be, though I’m only now becoming aware of it. You see, as every Christmas day also brings my birthday, it brings a particularly special and, in recent years, complex set of feelings.
It began in my mid-twenties, as a common quarter life crisis. As I went to my family home and saw all high school friends progressing with careers, trying to recapture some youthful fascination with Christmas, I always felt the weight of another year slipping by without achieving the things I wanted. Then as I got older, the inevitable reality of time passing took its toll, and I had to face more Christmases without loved ones. One year in particular, when I found myself in an emergency room on Christmas Eve with a parent who wouldn’t make it to see the next one, brought a new wound to open up every December.
In the years that have followed, I have found joy and peace in the presence of my family, in making new memories, and finding new dynamics as we all grow into new, independent lives. This year, as I decorate my apartment and bake cookies, preparing for a Christmas away from that family, I believe I have finally realized not only why this time of year can be so conflicting, but how to cope with it. All over the country I see families coming together, sending out Christmas cards, shopping and decorating as if it is just another Christmas, or even better. We all just want a time of pure joy, to escape a year that has had too little of it. We are all playing out a reenactment of a normal holiday season, in desperate need of the most wonderful time of the year. In watching this mass delusion play out, and feeling the personal familiarity of it, I realize that in order to feel and appreciate that joy, we must also embrace the melancholy.
For years I have tried to ignore or escape that sense of loss and disappointment that comes with the holiday season, and replace it with unbridled happiness. This year has convinced me that is the wrong approach. We must accept the sadness, the depression and feeling downright terrible, as much as we embrace love and joy in our lives. All ends of the spectrum are feelings worth attention and value. Especially as we work to grieve the mass loss this year has brought, and fight to repair what we can and prevent all the pain and crises to come, we must let ourselves feel grief and depression. We must allow ourselves the space, and deal with it not to get past it, but to normalize it just as we do celebration and love and commercialism. In doing so we can appreciate all feelings more, because we can accept feeling them all at once.
Of course pain and loss are not new in 2020, but the scale is unique in our lifetimes. Many have felt the collective loss of children and family members who have been taken by gun violence and mass shootings, opioid overdose, climate tragedies like hurricane Rita or wildfires, or even incarcerated or deported. There is so much communal loss in this country and around the world. But that loss has been mourned in specific communities. The unprecedented loss of over three-hundred thousand friends, family, parents, grandparents and children, is felt among everybody throughout the country. That loss, those people who were part of our lives and who we are, must also be mourned and remembered collectively, even as we try to come together and celebrate however we can.
This year also brings a unique kind of loss, not greater than the loss of life but potentially equally traumatic. With what will likely be a full year or more of varying degrees of lockdown, social and physical isolation, and sheer fear, we must also cope with the loss of time, loss of experience with the world and opportunities to do something new. That loss may seem insignificant when compared with the eternal loss of life, a spouse or parent who is missing around the tree this year. But that loss is still valid, and grieving it is still necessary. As this year comes to a close, we should remember and mourn everything that happened. But people should allow themselves to mourn what didn’t, plans they missed out on that seemed important once. That world where a foreign trip or festival was the highlight of a year may be gone forever, and never existed for many. They are losses we must accept in order to move forward, but it is a loss all the same. And with it comes grief.
When we don’t confront that grief we don’t allow ourselves to feel sadness and frustration over losing the things we so desperately wanted, or needed, or loved. In many cases we avoid this grief because it feels admirable, when really it is convenient. Minimizing or avoiding personal loss, whether it is a relative you never got to say goodbye to, or a yearly vacation you had to skip, only makes it linger longer and hurt deeper. And it will inevitably hurt others as well. Ignoring personal grief, no matter how small, makes it harder to empathize with the deep grief of others. If we pretend we have never lost anything that matters to us, we desensitize ourselves to all loss, and have a harder time relating to those struggling to cope with loss.
This year in particular, in a time when we must accept losses in order to stay safe and not risk others, it is essential to acknowledge that loss. Pretending that it is nothing to skip a long-planned trip minimizes personal sacrifice, as well as personal strength. It is enough to make somebody feel entitled to travel when it feels less risky, because they can’t accept that loss. Or they may decide to travel to see family for the holidays, because it feels like too much of a loss to bear, when we all have the strength to take that loss if we let ourselves. In times when it is important to make communal sacrifices, to get everybody on board with an effort that so many scoff at, it is essential to recognize that it is a sacrifice. Somebody who doesn’t show that empathy for others, who chooses not to make a sacrifice for the safety of themselves and others, will not change their mind when told their sacrifice is insignificant. We must be honest about what we are losing, and asking others to give up. We must accept living with grief, because it is the only way to survive times of tragedy.
All of this loss comes to a head as the winter holidays rear their cheerful head. For years I wondered why this was the time of year the usual hum of background melancholy kicked into hyperdrive and came into the forefront of outright depression. I assumed it was because my birthday made me question my own life and accomplishments, doubly-compounded by the end of the year, which made me look back and see all the things I didn’t accomplish. But that does not explain why these holiday blues are seemingly ubiquitous. While it is a myth that suicide rates spike around Christmas time, a Christmas melancholy is certainly not unique to me. So many struggle through the holidays, whether it is annoyance at family you have avoided the rest of the year, or the loneliness of not being with family, or having family members missing.
While there has been a cultural shift towards acknowledging mental illness and understanding depression as an illness, rather than a character flaw, it is still a taboo in many social circles to discuss those feelings. Even in the worst of times, depression and negative feelings never get normalized. Anything difficult or negative is seen as a burden to overcome and get past, not an acceptable feeling to sit with, talk about and understand as part of ourselves. During the holiday season the immense pressure to feel joyful, to celebrate and spread nothing but joy to others, can be crushing for those of us that feel depressive moods even more that time of year. Throughout the season, as we see everyone else performing some form of joy and never displaying the grief that inextricably comes with it, we feel that something is wrong with us. If we see the holidays as a time of year for happiness and celebration, but still have that lingering melancholy, we begin to think it is truly inescapable. For so many, we are left to ask if we can’t be happy during the holidays, can we ever be happy?
The answer is, of course we can. We are all humans, and all have the capacity for joy just as we do sadness. The issue is not that we can’t feel that joy, but that we see sadness, whether it is intense grief or general gloominess, as mutually exclusive from joy. When we understand that sadness as a valid feeling, worthy of its own time and space, we find room for joy and celebration at the same time. To allow ourselves to really celebrate, in earnest, we must also allow space for sadness and grief for what has been lost. By embracing both feelings, we come to a more complete, fulfilling sense of personhood, seeing that there is just as much to celebrate that there is to grieve, and that we can do both. We must, or risk losing it all to a false presentation of unbothered happiness that we see as normal, though it is anything but.
Once we incorporate our own grief into our understanding of celebration, the holidays start to mean so much more. Our joy and time with family means so much more, when we accept the reality that we will lose them. Holding the fact of that loss in our hearts lets us keep those memories of loved ones, and find solace in them, because we accept the mourning that we must face in remembering. When we accept our negative feelings as natural, there is less pressure of disappointment in the holidays, because we know some sadness does not negate the places we find joy. It helps us to appreciate our own strength and success more, when we understand the burden we carry through those successes, and the losses it takes to get there. By accepting nothing is all good, we allow ourselves space for sadness in the joy, rather than throwing it all out as spoiled. We also allow space for joy in difficult times, which is the only way to make it through years like this one.
This year has actually been full of successes for me personally, as well as fear and anger and depression. But at the end of this year, I allowed myself to see the whole picture, my sadness as well as appreciate my own successes. Even in the disappointment of not being with family, I am finding joy in the time, and the memories, and the space, because I’m allowing myself to feel the pain of looking back. Perhaps it is because of my relative success in a year where so many have suffered and lost so much, that I am finally able to face my own struggles with depression and repressed grief. But I think the other way around is just as likely. Because I have finally acknowledged how much I have lost, accepted my depression as my own, and allowed space in my life rather than pushing it away, I am finally seeing and appreciating my own success, and finding joy bountiful where before it was scarce.
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