happy christmastime
I have really mixed feelings about the holidays. I generally enjoy them - somebody who likes sparkly lights, glittery shit, and slightly gaudy decorations as much as I do will always be partial to secular Christmas - hols with my family are a crazy, fun, over-the-top drunken bacchanalia of good feelings like love and nostalgia and being completely hammered. Overall it's a positive experience -- we've figured out a good balance between the gracious, graceful, good-feelings side of gift-giving without straying too much into commercial consumerism or ungrateful demanding, and we have fun with it, which is valuable, and pretty awesome.
But it's also just hard for me. Any season this intense is going to be difficult on my introverted, homebody self: traveling, socializing, family events, people everywhere when all you want to do is go to the grocery and buy some fucking milk, parking lots full and idiots behind the wheel, crowds, noise: overstimulation, excess, a feeling of community that's forced and frustrating. It wears me down. Doesn't help that it's another thing my family gets very into, and while I get into it as much as I can, I often don't have the reserves to engage at the level they do for the length of time and the extent they do, and it's another example of just not being able to keep up with my family on a purely social level. I need breaks from it all. Overstimulation is exhausting and it's bad for me.
Plus traveling and extended family and stuff that should be fun but ends up feeling like a chore: story of the season.
This has been a hard run for me, the end of this year. I'm just exhausted. I've taken a couple days to just be at home in my apartment alone with my cats and the snow, so that I can hopefully recharge my batteries enough to make it through the upcoming bits in a good way rather than a bad way. It's snowing and I have almost all my gifts ready to go and I'm lounging around with coffee and in a bathrobe trying to relax and find some kind of christmas spirit.
Happy hols, everybody.
This entry was originally posted at http://seventhe.dreamwidth.org/335121.html, which has
comments. Comment there (with OpenID) or here, it's all good.
But it's also just hard for me. Any season this intense is going to be difficult on my introverted, homebody self: traveling, socializing, family events, people everywhere when all you want to do is go to the grocery and buy some fucking milk, parking lots full and idiots behind the wheel, crowds, noise: overstimulation, excess, a feeling of community that's forced and frustrating. It wears me down. Doesn't help that it's another thing my family gets very into, and while I get into it as much as I can, I often don't have the reserves to engage at the level they do for the length of time and the extent they do, and it's another example of just not being able to keep up with my family on a purely social level. I need breaks from it all. Overstimulation is exhausting and it's bad for me.
Plus traveling and extended family and stuff that should be fun but ends up feeling like a chore: story of the season.
This has been a hard run for me, the end of this year. I'm just exhausted. I've taken a couple days to just be at home in my apartment alone with my cats and the snow, so that I can hopefully recharge my batteries enough to make it through the upcoming bits in a good way rather than a bad way. It's snowing and I have almost all my gifts ready to go and I'm lounging around with coffee and in a bathrobe trying to relax and find some kind of christmas spirit.
Happy hols, everybody.
This entry was originally posted at http://seventhe.dreamwidth.org/335121.html, which has
comments. Comment there (with OpenID) or here, it's all good.