I intended to close out 2021 by sending you some kind of end-of-year list of trivial accomplishments. Maybe it would have been funny and sardonic. (Washed my hair at least once a week, made out with a hot stranger in the back kitchen of a Brooklyn dive, etc.)
But to be honest, I’m writing this on my iPhone on Christmas day; “The Muppet Christmas Carol” is playing on TV in the 150-year-old Victorian home my family has rented for the week in rainy Portland, Oregon, and I’ve been crying on and off for hours.
I’m experiencing that heavy, inexplicable shade of sadness that has no specific origin. A brick in the stomach. A shard of glass in the throat. It stems from everything — loss, loneliness, homesickness, lovesickness — but also it stems from nothing. When my mother asks, “What’s wrong? I don’t understand.” I dismiss her angrily. I wish I knew. Does anybody know what’s wrong with me?
Perhaps this is the worst kind of sadness, the kind you can’t pinpoint but lives deep inside of you, like the remnants of a nightmare that you can’t quite remember. It’s an ugly, self-indulgent pain that fills me with shame. People have it a lot worse than you. Get over yourself.
I lock myself in the bathroom and sink to the tiled floor, resting my head on the cold, hard toilet seat, which comforts me as dutifully as it did after nights of binge drinking in college. Like with alcohol, you have to let the sadness flow through you, trusting that you’ll feel better if you vomit it all out. In the meantime, it feels like it will never end. It feels like you’re dying. I sob and sob and sob.
The pain is not unfamiliar. In a perfect world, the year would end on Thanksgiving and resume on January 15, the day after my birthday. The time in between — with its unrelenting expectations of cheer, depictions of the large, happy families that I’ve never been a part of, and reminders of the goals I didn’t reach — always lead to dread.
Perhaps the familiarity of this feeling — my one Christmas tradition — explains why I cling to it. I’d like to tell you that I could not snap out of it if I tried, but what’s closer to the truth is that I don’t want to. I’ve never ran a marathon, but I imagine the payoff is similar: You are so exhausted that by the time you crawl into bed, you slip into comatose — a milk-drunk baby passed out on her mother’s breast. This is what hours of crying will do to you, too. You feel everything until you feel nothing at all. You become only a body. Heavy, yes, but empty.
Is winter over yet? Sending love to all of you who are longing for spring.