A bit over a week before writing this, I got a chunk of skin taken off by a thing I was working on at work. A ratchet slipped and my hand banged into a hard metal edge in a way that gouged me pretty deeply. The wound was about the size of a dime (which is a bit less concerning when I tell you that my fingers are at least as wide as a quarter) and I spent the three days after that taking special care of it. I wanted to keep the wound clean while I continued to work and to keep it from getting irritated by coming into contact with anything. Once I was through the work week, though, and just spending time in my apartment, I stopped covering it and let it air out a bit. Now, a bit over a week later, it mostly doesn’t hurt. There’s still some tightness when the heat of my office dries out my hands, there’s the occasional twinge of pain if I bump it into anything, and there’s the dull ache of it every time I was my hands. It’s healing well, it looks much less horrible than it was, but a closer inspection reveals the true depth of the wound, as does running my hand or fingertips over it. So while it mostly doesn’t hurt, every so often, I am reminded of the severity of this injury and am inflicted with the full pain of the injury all over again (I never realized how much I use that knuckle for tapping things until doing that shot a lance of pain deep into my finger and arm). Which is kind of like the experience of cutting off contact with my biological family, just compressed down into seven days instead of seven years.
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A New Type Of Going Home For The Holidays
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.
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