As scattered and ever-too-short as it was, it was nice to spend the holidays with family this year. I think, between finally making peace with my decision to separate from most of my biological family, processing all the emotions from that, and doing the work to start creating new habits and routines in my own life, this was the first time the holidays have felt “good” since… I genuinely don’t even know. And they weren’t even all good! I burned the shit out of my hand on Christmas Day! I overextended myself cleaning and cooking for my two siblings’ visit the weekend after Christmas! I even had to deal with the dwindling pain of a medication course that seems to have taken almost fourteen months for me to discover that it wouldn’t have any lasting effect beyond what happened in the first two months. It wasn’t a great holiday, but I’m already looking back on it fondly, which is a significant change from literally every other holiday season I’ve ever experienced where I immediately tried to forget it. I really enjoyed seeing my chosen family–the couple whose wedding I was in back in 2023–and my two remaining biological family members. I got to see friends on New Year’s Eve, meet some people I’d only ever talked to online, attend my first New Year’s Eve party in half a decade (I hadn’t gone to one since 2018 since I was feeling ill and emotionally exhausted after my first holidays away from my biological family in 2019 and then, well, because Covid for the rest of them), and got to have a great hour and a half chat with a friend after I picked her up from the airport. It was a great time, even if I’m incredibly bummed out that the demands of my work life and my careful recovery from the aforementioned medication I’m no longer taking mean that I won’t be spending much time physically around people until sometime in March at the earliest. I’m just glad I got to see so many people I care about.

It was just so nice to spend the holidays with my family this year. My own, chosen, specially-defined family. I’ve had a difficult relationship with the word and it took quite a few years for me to figure out how I felt about it and then quite a few more years to figure it all out again once I’d separated from my biological family, but all I’ve ever really wanted was some kind of family unit. Which I’ve now got. My siblings on one side and my chosen family on the other. The idea of bringing them together feels strange, in an oil-and-water kind of way, but not because of the different types of family. It would just feel so weird to have these two groups of people together. Though, I will say, when I imagine myself and a potential partner making family holiday plans, I can easily imagine a scenario involving both groups of people separately. Just not together. Which is weird now that I’m thinking about and it probably something I should examine in more detail when I’ve got the time. Right now, though, I’m content to look back at my holiday events and just wrap the whole thing up in my head with “spending the holidays with my family.” It’s a small thing, but sometimes the small things can matter a lot. Especially when it has been so long since you’ve been able to enjoy them.

I, of course, wish I’d had more time with my family. I wish I could have spent more time with my chosen family than the day we got, but I was still too tired to do all that driving again. I wish my siblings could have stuck around a bit longer, but we all had our busy lives to return to and will hopefully get together again for another vacation sometime later this year. I wish I had more than an hour and a half with my friend, but we can always chat on the phone and have our various tabletop games. I wish I’d had more time and energy to spend on the people around me, or that they’d come to seek me out. Alas, I did not have any of that. Wanting more doesn’t diminish what I did get, though, and while I wish I could say that I’m resolved to spend more time visiting the people I care about, I’m not sure about the practicality of that. Most of them are fairly far away and, as I’ve already mentioned, I need to be careful with my own energy and need for rest. I can’t afford to fall apart and I need to keep my attention focused on the marathon two-month period I’ll be having at work as I try to wrap up this project and start working on its second version, whatever that will wind up being. I need to work on restoring my physical health after a year and a quarter of feeling like my body is slowly failing me. I need to get my financial situation on firmer footing than it has been for a while, thanks to the lack of energy for cooking, holiday expenses, and inability to work my usual overtime due to my complete and utter physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. So for now, all I can do is wish.

And, you know, think about how nice it was to see all those people over the holidays. How that feeling of care and being loved and community is what I’ve been missing in my life. How all I really lack is more time with those people and maybe that’s a problem I’ll be able to solve in just a few more months somehow. It could just be what feels like the slow start to my recovery after a year of feeling miserable pretty much constantly, but this problem, amongst all my problems, feels surmountable. I think that, with the right planning and work and so on, I can figure out a way to spend more time around the people I care about. It might require me to do some things I’ve tried to avoid if at all possible these last few years (like fly on airplanes), but I think I can do it. It is within my skillset to solve this problem and get myself more of this enjoyable being-around-people-again experience. We’ll see how long this particular feeling lasts and we’ll see if I can square my Covid-19 precautions against the risks inherent in being present within enclosed spaces like airplanes, restaurants, and the homes of people who aren’t being as Covid-cautious as I am, but I think this is a nut I can crack if my current feeling of returning energy can last through my first week back at work.