Holiday Blues

Tomorrow the relatives will all be at my parents’ house, and instead of avoiding the Christmas Eve charade as I’d planned, I’ll wear my fake smile and pretend I give a sh*t about all these people that have never given a damn about me.  Like Thanksgiving, my dad won’t be there, so reality’s creeping in.

I’m in a sour mood.  I didn’t anticipate this year being difficult as far as holidays go, because I’ve been feeling a little more even-keeled over all.  But then, I didn’t anticipate having to listen to my parents argue out the final details of the divorce settlement right before Christmas.  I thought this year I’d finally have a job and not have to feel like a failure once again when people ask what I’ve been up to.  I’m so sick of feeling like a loser.  Or else I’m sick of *being* a loser; one of the two.

Then there are the things you have no control over, like dreams about the past, and old memories creeping in.  Somehow the old pain flares up, like scar tissue that never quite healed right.  I try not to ponder too long on the happiness people from my past are experiencing in their lives; new babies and families that are celebrating instead of breaking apart.

Even still, the past hurts me.  The fact that my life fell apart over the holidays has hung over every Thanksgiving and Christmas since.  It’s easy to say that one shouldn’t allow things from so long ago to ruin the present, and I believe that if I were more satisfied with my current life I might have an easier time keeping the sadness out.  Instead, it’s one more unhappy year.  Maybe not quite as miserable as the few before, but gloomy nonetheless.

To top it off, my hip pain has really been flaring up, and I don’t know when I might be able to get insurance next.  Will life always be about coping with, and overcoming, and pulling through, and never about living?  I just want to be put into a drug-induced coma.  Srsly.

Merry Christmas: The Divorce is Final

With less than a week left ‘till Christmas, my parents are traipsing into their respective divorce lawyers’ offices today to make it official: their marriage is over.  After a year and 9 months of the back-and-forth, could it really not have waited a couple more days, I ask?  As much as I wanted the whole thing to be over with, having the reality slap you in the face in the midst of this “joyous” time of year is just too much for anyone involved....my parents, my sister and me, the grandkids. 

The timing makes the irony of our holiday plans all the more ironic: all of my dad's relatives will be at the house, but my dad won't.  This will be the first in a series of awkward holidays, tinged with the bitter sadness of what is missing.  

No one tells you how to deal with this as an adult.  There are a thousand books for little kids who have parents that are splitting up, and for grown-ups who survived divorce as kids.  But for those of us whose parents have been married for 20-, 30-, 40-odd years ... where’s the manual?  How do I keep this from feeding right into my cynical outlook on life and love?  Where do I look to see the plausibility of a happy ever after?

It’s gonna be a holly, jolly Christmas: that’s for sure.

Tidings of (no) comfort and (lack of) joy...

It’s been a hard day. A hard week. And it’s not over yet.


2 more days of Christmas. One more week of holidays. One more year to kiss goodbye in which I didn’t “pull myself up by the bootstraps” and “get back on the horse” and “take the bull by the horns” and all those other bullsh*t anti-motivators that mysteriously haven’t rescued me from my chosen (right?) anguish.


Yeah, it’s one of those days. There’s no place to go, no book to read, no show to watch, no project to undertake ... that could sufficiently distract me from the pain that I’m feeling.


If I were a drug addict, I’d be high as a kite right now, but I’m too chickensh*t to go that hardcore.


So I sit with it.


Despair creeps in through the cracks, the same ones hope is seeping out of.


It might have something to do with the seventy-ninth (if I want to exaggerate I’ll f***ing exaggerate) job I couldn’t make it at, and the ensuing disgust with myself for adding to my quit-list this week.


It might have something to do with my refusal to participate in family events this holiday season, and my rejection of *things* in place of love.


You aren’t supposed to be weary at 30, are you? I mean, really. I’m not talking about exhaustion; that was 5 years ago when I was 25 going on 40, dead weight dragging through the days.


I’m weary of 1-being me and 2-hating me.


I’m weary of life, and the suffocating alienation of being unseen. And yet, in premise, invisibility sounds so liberating...


I’m weary of reaching out to people who don’t reach back, though I know it is my very nature to give the most to people who are incapable of giving another human being what they need.


I’m tired of people who don’t try, who don’t change, who don’t care. They drain my soul.


I’M tired of trying, of changing mySELF, of caring. It drains my soul even more.


I’m tired of the questions-
The demands-
The requirements of life-
Where will I go and what will I do and who will I be and what is the point?


Yeah. Weary.


“Tonight at the end of light
Tonight I feel lonely
I thought I heard my heart stop beating
I long for you to hold me.”





An Alli Rogers song creeps in (and I’m not even a Christian for cripes sake). 
I could go cry in the back pew of a raggedy church. 
I could thrown myself down in the aisle and scream, “Why?” to a god I don’t believe in.


I guess we all have the same questions, and the lucky ones are able to find solace in someone else’s answers.


But when there’s no comfort in faith, in friends, in family, in love ... is there any true comfort to be found at all?


Or just emptiness...