What if "the most wonderful time of the year" is bringing you down?
Dear friends,
it's Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. We Canadians get the party season started early!
For many, the last 3 months of the year are special. It's the season for family gatherings, yummy food, for gift giving and receiving. When I was little, Christmas used to be my favourite holiday, and I believed in the magic and wonder of it all.
Then I turned into a teenager, and I slowly became disillusioned by it all. The commercialism, the underlying tension I had with my parents at the time, and the overall stress of the Christmas season took away the joy for me.
But it wasn't until I joined the circus that is social media that I began to despise the holiday season. I would scroll through Facebook, look at dozens of perfectly staged family photos, reading the proclamations of how #blessed and #lucky everybody was, feeling worse and more like a failure with every new photo I saw.
Why wasn't my life like that? Why had I been so stressed out about cooking a perfect dinner that I broke down in tears last night? Why did I have to do everything? Why did we have a fight and two of the kids weren't coming? Why did I feel like such a fucking failure??
I would go to work after the holidays, dreading the question that was sure to come: "How was your Thanksgiving/Christmas/(insert other holiday)?"
But I would force a smile and say in a fake cheerful voice: "It was good! How was yours?"
And I would feel like a fraud inside, and also guilty for not being able to be more grateful for all the #blessings in my life (of which there were many, I knew that), and instead of feeling content and grateful, I was feeling worse than I did all year.
Sounds familiar?
For years I was convinced I was the only one who felt hat way. Aside from people who had real reasons to be sad during the holidays (people who were sick, or poor, or had lost loved ones), I had absolutely no reason to feel that way. This only proved what a selfish, terrible person I was!
I thought it was my fault when our family wasn't as perfect as all the other families I saw online, and heard about at work, and imagined in my mind.
Because here's the thing: I made up perfect lives for our friends and acquaintances. I took their photos at face value, sure that it was a true representation of their everyday lives, instead of a snapshot of their highlight reel. I compared my messy, gloomy, emotional internal life with their glossy, staged, one-second photo that cropped out the mess in the kitchen and had a pretty filter on to camouflage the red nose from Penny who'd just had a meltdown at the dinner table.
How do I know this?
Because one day, in a moment of "oh, fuck it!", I answered honestly. When a friend from work asked me how my Thanksgiving went, I told her the truth: That I had cried after everyone left, because it was so much work for a dinner eaten in minutes, and the kids left to go out after our dinner, and I felt like they had just come because they had to. I told her that I felt like a loser, and that I should be better at this, and create a magic wonderland that would make them want to stay!
And then she looked at me kindly, put her hand on my arm, and said: "Me, too." And she told me about her staying up half the night to get it all juuust right, and about her daughter cancelling last minute because the baby was too fussy, and about brussel sprouts that were overcooked, and a turkey that was a bit dry, and about how sometimes, she would like to skip it, too.
And we laughed a little, and shook our heads in wonderment at the craziness of it all, the acts we play and the lengths we go through to appear normal.
I don't want to condemn the holidays, far from it. Giving thanks is important, and having holidays to celebrate all the good things we have going on in our lives is wonderful!
But if you ever feel like it's all a big competition, and you can't help but compare your insides to other people's outsides, remember this: You are not the only one feeling this way. We all feel like big, fat failures sometimes.
In a world where we feel pressured into showing our best selves online, many of us fib a little. And why not share a photo of the whole family assembled? There is nothing wrong with that.
Just remember to not take it at face value.
Remember that behind every perfectly staged photo hide tears, drama, chaos, and dysfunction.
No family is perfect.
If you have family stuff going on that gets you down and makes you feel guilty/sad/mad/like it's your fault, remember this: Sometimes, rifts happen. And sometimes, we can't change it, even if we want to.
While the upcoming holiday season may be the most wonderful time of the year for many, it's okay if you don't feel that way. There's nothing wrong with you if you feel down. Don't feel guilty or selfish for being sad!
Trust me, you're not the only one.
Be kind to yourself, stay away from social media if it depresses you, focus on one good thing about it (there's always the delicious food to enjoy!), and know that you're not alone. There are many of us out there!
We'll get through it.
xoxo Miriam
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Vol. 36