Sending love to every American with nowhere to be today or with trauma around family shit that makes today super difficult even if there’s a new place to be instead and sending love to the people who have to spend the day with shitty family anyway and the people who have to try and be closeted and to everyone who will have to get through awkward small talk next week trying to avoid being a bummer by being the only person in the office or wherever who doesn’t exactly have a good time with this holiday and doesn’t have people to visit or hates to visit them.
Sending love to everyone for whom this holiday represents generational trauma and a commemoration of atrocities to their people historical and ongoing. For whom it is painful to hear people speak of solidarity one day and yet feast on a day of mourning today. Because social pressures make everyone cave when their values are pushed.
Sending love to everyone working today whether they want to or not.
Sending love to everyone working retail tomorrow.
Sending love to everyone working in warehouses and delivery in the coming weeks given online shopping.
Sending love to everyone who gets infected with COVID today and tomorrow because they couldn’t say no now that “the pandemic is over.”
Today is a painful day for millions of people and we are all experiencing unique and different types of pain. But you are not alone in today being painful even if the general atmosphere makes it feels like everyone in the country is having a wonderful time and you’re the only one suffering. It’s not true. Your suffering is not a special curse inflicted only upon you and you alone. Take comfort in knowing that suffering is mundane, memories cannot harm you physically, and all this too shall pass.
If today is hard for you, chances are December is also hard for you. And again, I send you love. We create winter holidays to be a source of warmth and togetherness through the darkest months and yet from that we also create the deepest traumas arising again in the darkness.
But coziness and warmth and love are not the exclusive domains of people with loving biological heteronormative nuclear families. Light a fire in your heart. Reach out and feel for other stragglers. You do not have to be alone and just because you are alone this year during this season does not mean you will forever be alone every year for every season. Just because people go travel and visit their biological families does not mean they are actively choosing to abandon you or don’t love you.
Let yourself winter. Find peace in quiet and solitude. Be gentle with yourself. Hibernate. Wrap yourself in blankets. Allow the seasons to pass. The sun will return. The warmth will return. Everything passes. Everything cycles. Today is a day of pain, yes, but you have felt pain before and you survived. Other people can do their own things other places you can be wherever you are doing your own thing.
Turkey doesn’t taste that good anyway. It’s always cold and dry. Eat something today that tastes better than that. You can eat anything you want. You can choose better than the cold dry turkey society assigned. Enjoy your better choices. You don’t have to struggle. You don’t have to imbue meaning into anything at all.
Today was a day of nothing. And you got through it. And you were okay. The end.
