12 Days: The Spirit of Christmas, It Lies Within Your Heart.

Around this time last year, I was just over a month into therapy and really still uncertain how I felt about it. I knew what I was doing was good for me and was constantly reassured of that, to the pleasure of my 11 out of 12 scored love language. The fear that my friends and family would look at me in a negative light or look at my parents like they had ROYALLY fucked up was never lost on me, though I knew better in my deepest heart. I wrote briefly about an experience I had in which I found myself staring at a jumbo screen with the words "it doesn't matter where you're going, it's deciding to get on" hurdled at me in surround sound. Though I've never been a fan of The Polar Express, that experience has come to soften my opinion on the film and allowed me to coexist with it, at the very least. It really stuck with me, the travel quote, and I wouldn't necessarily say it was the quote itself, but at what time it came to me, that really made the impact. A year later I certainly didn't expect to be living in the world we're living in now. A worldwide pandemic is still undefeated in the United States, mask mandates, businesses closing, certain businesses thriving, people losing their jobs, and an innate amount of uncertainty on the parts of everyone involved. What I did expect, however, was the amount I showed up for myself in the end. Well..... hoped. I did hope I'd give myself this amount of grace.

At some point, we, as a society, made a collective decision to preliminarily decorate our homes and businesses like Whoville and with as much Christmas spirit as we possibly could. The decorating began prior to Thanksgiving and I, not a Thanksgiving purist, was elated with the sudden appearance of Christmas Trees in windows and twinkling lights strung across terraces and front porch beams. Shopping began early, wrapping continued throughout the season, and though this was by far the mentally hardest Christmas season I have ever worked, I found a lot more people with light in their hearts willing to shine a little bit for every person they encountered who needed it. This year, Christmas became the beacon of what Santa represents, shone through those willing to carry such a prestigious reputation.

There's a part of Christmas that requires everyone to be together in some capacity and I almost feel like, due to my lack of unadulterated joy for the season anymore, there's a part of me that believes in order to truly feel the spirit of Christmas, that's partly true. We're all experiencing a time with holes in our hearts for lost loved ones or those we're unable to see in this freakish era, but I've spent years going on Christmas adventures almost by myself. I clearly didn't need a pandemic to isolate. Nevermore than 3 people have attended said events with me, two of them at any time being my siblings. Company is company, no matter who it is. But I'm beginning to wonder if not for the mental health issues, would my only dismay for the season be my lack of equally as joyful people surrounding me? I understand these are not the only factors. I understand that working 6 Christmases in retail does not at all help the case. The public during the Christmas season is truly insufferable but somehow this isn't what plagues my love for the season the most. At some point I lost the innocence I spoke about months ago. I lost the shiny eyes, the complete belief and reliability in Santa and the reassurance that come January first of the new year, all of our problems would go away and the year would start with a clean slate. What a reflective time to experience learning of the non-linear kind. I still go back and forth with what a lot of this means and in what way I still have the innocence I once did.

I love gift-giving, that's my Santa quality. This idea still lives on in me. Christmas, birthdays, May Day, a random Thursday, because you complimented me, I'll play Santa and hear bells ring all day. My eyes still widen when I see strings of lights, Christmas Trees, or street lights dotting an otherwise dark highway. I've come to incorporate these special proses into my everyday life, the routine of them have made them less special but more so a part of my personality. A reflection of my inner child that's still in there somewhere. Completely by accident, this happened, but I see now that this is what "takes" the joy of Christmas away from me.... I need to continue to see changes in the seasons as they come and go to truly feel something about it, or it feels like just another part of the routine.

This routine hasn't totally changed, though the setting has. In lockdown this year I started inward, a journey you can read about here. I began working out regularly, lifting weights, running, doing yoga every. single. day., reading more than I ever have and taking notes on these things I was digesting, only to lose most of it when we returned back to a semi-regular world. What changed when Christmas came around? Everyone realized the severity of the situation at hand. Everyone realized that to keep their loved ones safe, there needed to be distance, there needed to be less travel, there needed to be less glitz and glam and all of the stuff that goes above and beyond, and the holiday had to be brought back to what it truly is about. I rejected this idea and by October had already begun to dread what was coming. What I had expected was an overwhelming amount of disrespect and capitalism I could no longer handle. It truly was a pleasant surprise to not totally break down, though I am fully expecting this to happen now that I'm not going to be working as much. I was really enlightened by the general public this time around.

None of us could have expected what was coming to us this year. But we decided to get on. We decided to abide because that's the safe and respectful thing to do. We decided to approach the problem at hand with as much level-headedness that we possibly could and still be able to live our lives. An unprecedented year later, this is not mentally where I expected to be when I set my goals for therapy. I expected a lot more, but given the circumstance, I couldn't have expected any less.