Thank God Christmas is Over, But It Seems Like My Winter Blues Are Still Here to Stay...?
It's funny how a single day can have so much power over us and the way we feel. Yesterday was some blip in my system, an anomaly in my daily general good feelings mode. I'm glad that Christmas is finally over with though, and I can move on with my life now.
Christmas this year was the single most depressing experience of my life. Literally none of my usual Christmas traditions happened, and if I hadn't discovered that a nearby Carl's Jr had opened for business later that night, I would have gone my whole Christmas Day without eating anything.
My Christmas wasn't completely a bad experience, though. My best friend was kind enough to swing by and hang out with me for a couple of hours before going back home from his family's Christmas celebrations, and I really appreciated him coming to make sure that I wasn't completely alone on Christmas Day. I felt really bad about it, though, because I was still very deep in my Christmas blues mode, so when he came over I wasn't even able to brighten up that much to keep him entertained and engaged.
I think that's part of the reason why I'm still feeling kind of shitty today, because I feel now more than ever that I really was a burden on him since he made the effort to swing by to check up on me and I didn't match his efforts by trying to be a bit more visibly happy about his visit. I felt really bad that we ended up just sitting around asking each other what we wanted to do for most of the time that he was here.
I don't know if this is just holiday blues or if maybe, some deeper inner depression I've been feeling has just been pushed down and covered up by all my Steem success lately. Maybe it took the holidays to finally resurface those feelings that I have been pushing down? I don't know. All I know is that even today I'm feeling pretty damn lonely. I'm in one of those moods where I want nothing more than to be with my best friends right now, but at the same time I just want to be left alone to wallow in my sorrow on my own because I don't want to bring anyone down or waste their time like I wasted my best friend's time yesterday.
It's even taking me a lot of effort to push out this post today, honestly. I'm trying to get back into the Steem grind and trying to go back to my normal routines, but it's hard for me right now because this ridiculous feeling still plagues my mind. I feel like I'm regressing back into my depressed, lonely, anxiety-ridden paranoia where I am constantly second-guessing everything and overanalyzing the whole world down to everyone's smallest interactions with me. It's a very unhealthy way of living and I really hate that I'm feeling this way again.
I don't know how to fix it, and there's a part of me that members how comfortable it was to just dwell in these feelings...so I think a part of me actually wants to sit in this muck for a while. But the larger part of me wants to get over it and start feeling "normal" again. sigh I really just don't know anymore. This post and my post from yesterday are such a huge departure from what I usually post about, too...so I'm sorry if you guys are expecting my normal content and instead finding this really personal, really emotional post today.
I guess this is just my personal way of processing my emotions when I feel like I can't talk to anyone esle about them, I write them down and share them online in the hopes of making connections virtually when i can't seem to make them in person. Thanks for reading, if you chose to do so all the way. I don't know what else to do now, but I am here to stay.
Check out some of my other posts!
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How to Use Tags to Maximize Visibility for Your Posts and Gain More Upvotes
How The Minnow Support Project Helps You Achieve Your Dreams on Steemit
How I Achieved 200 Followers in My First Month on Steemit
Why I Chose to Invest $100 in Steem
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I'm Just an Island Boy Living in Utah who Loves EDM
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Comment by @killerwhale. This is a opt-in bot.
I am right there beside you with the feeling about the holidays.
Not everyone has a good time with family; some don't even see family or have loved ones to share the holidays with.
So much emphasis is put onto this holiday season every year and people need to take a step back sometimes and realize not everyone looks forward to the celebrations.
I know this feel hardcore. It's hard to get out of that funk once you're in it too- I usually find someone who makes me laugh and harass them. Sending you lots of love right now- feel free to dm me if you need to chat ❤
Unfortunately the holidays have the exact opposite of the desired effect for a lot of people. It can be a super depressing time of year, made all the worse by everybody acting all happy and talking about the excitement of xmas.
I really do think that the act of being open and blogging about your experience is a healthy step in the right direction. It might not feel like much now, but blogging here is a lot like group therapy except you get paid for it :-)
Maybe you can set a short term goal for yourself, specifically to improve your mood in the coming weeks? Not to try to go from 0/10 to 10/10 - but maybe just aim to from depressed to a like 6/10 decent mood, and then from there. That seems to be how it works for me, its always small steps to get out of a slump. And you could blog about it to have a way to talk about your emotional states and work through some of the depression.
Whatever you do don't stop posting. We appreciate having you here. I'll try and keep an eye out for your posts in the near future to see if I can help out or at least be a listening ear for you.
Cheers and decent holidays to you @rodeo670
You're not alone! My wife and I were feeling this too! We spent Christmas (which, unfortunately, is also my birthday...) at a friends house. The commercialization of the holidays would have you believe that everything is great and swell and the holidays is all about giving, blah, blah, blah. That all family's are hunky-dory and we all want to go into debt... for a single day. I agree with @heymattsokol. Being open about it is the best thing to do. Hope the rest of your year fares better.
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I totally understand where you are at. Wanting the ideal of what society presents as the epitome of giving, and living the dream, is often a pale shadow of reality. Christmas has become so commercialized and insanely expensive that few can afford it. It's also the time when a vast number of people die from holiday stress.
My memories of Christmas are edged with the recollection of my moms manic drama, of trying to make things perfect. This comes with the baggage of my teenage years, when one year i got mono and was left at home alone while my family went out to party, of the years one of my grandparents died and the house was filled with gloom, of the year our house burnt down, of the subsequent decline of my mom into extreme right wing christian ideology which she then tried to impose on her children until they left home.
These days I spend Christmas alone, and try to be thankful that i'm not so broke that I can't afford to eat, that my house didnt burn down again, that no drama took place, that i'm not forced to listen to my mom read from the Bible, that I can choose what to believe without fear of reprisal.
Perspective is everything
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