Happy Holidays!

For me, Happy Holidays or Merry this or Joyous that has historically felt like too much pressure to achieve an elevated state of being that just wasn’t in the cards for me.  And for so long, in so many ways I’ve been told that my failure to achieve that holly jolly glad tidings state of being is an indication that I am messed up and need professional help or some other intervention to get my mood state to be more in line with what other people, well-intentioned, lovely people, thought my mood state should be.

What pressure!  All the world seeming merry, merry, merry, and me, just hoping it would pass quickly.  

So for a long time I hid in plain sight.  I pretended to be merry on the outside, did the red dress wearing thing, the grade-getting thing, the work-getting thing, the married-getting thing, even the kid-having thing.  

All the while, off-and-on, seeking various therapeutic modalities to keep me afloat, but never really seeing that some people really really were actually feeling good, not just the absence of bad, a lot of the time.  

And definitely never ever thinking I could be one of those merry people.  Never thinking that the end goal of doing all the therapy and yoga and mood stabilizing medications and diet and exercise and and and was to feel pretty good most of the time.  I thought it was to just keep me from being so miserable and angry because that was tough on the family.

I didn’t think it was for me, for my benefit, to keep going.  And then something happened, and things in my head got really really dark and messed up, and then something else happened, and I decided I was done being dark and messed up and would do whatever it took to not be.  I’d get serious about figuring out how to live effectively — sustainably — with this particular brain, in this particular body, rather than hoping the work would transform me. 

I did not think what was suggested would work.  But I did what I was told by other people who had similar experiences to what  I had experienced: The same kind of not good enough-itis, the same kind of unhelpful thought patterns, feelings, actions, the spinning.

I did what I was told, for the most part, despite not thinking it would work.  Every day.  And that was several years ago.

And my life feels much better than it ever has before — and I’ve had a really good life in the past, I just didn’t have the skills to fully enjoy it then. Now I do.  And I am.  I never thought this would happen to me.  I am looking forward to the holidays.  I’m gonna keep going.