This is my fifth holiday season since I separated myself from my biological family. It is also the first one where it has started to feel like my two siblings and I have started to build some kind of tradition around our celebrations. Things haven’t changed much, between the family holidays of years gone with our larger biological family and how we celebrate them these days: we gather at someone’s residence, bring food to share, cook a bunch of food for the event, and then eventually separate. There’s usually more stuff in there that we’re still kind of working out, though. We try to gather for longer periods of time, spending at least one night wherever we’re celebrating, so we can spend time with each other outside of the harried cooking, eating, and then cleaning of the larger holiday meal. We also try to find other little things we enjoy to include, like watching movies or TV shows (which is our primary form of social contact for most of the year: gathering on discord to watch a movie or some episodes of a TV show), or bring forward other traditions from our mutual past that we want to be able to still enjoy, like taking the time to build Lego sets on Thanksgiving morning or eating sugary cereals on Christmas morning. We’re still very much figuring out those kinds of particulars, but we’ve hit the point where we’ve at least settled into a couple options at most and are, as far as I can tell, just waiting to see what sticks.
Continue readingEmotional Exhaustion
My Exhaustion And Depression Teamed Up On Me
Between therapy, not sleeping well last night (I was actually in bed on time for once, I just couldn’t fall asleep and then I kept waking up throughout the night), and the general events of the last two weeks, I just do not have the energy for much today. I finished Sea of Stars and want to write about it, but the thought of even starting on that post (by copying over the relevant bits of a discussion I had with someone about the game) have me feeling so exhausted that I’d rather lay down on the dirty floor of my office and not move for a week than try to parse through all the pieces of that largely one-sided discussion (my mistake for engaging with someone without checking if they were up for in-depth critical analysis). I mean, hell, I can’t decide what I’m doing to do for dinner and tonight’s grocery night, which means I could guiltlessly cop out by ordering Chinese food from the local place since I’ll be getting home late. Nothing like buying a bunch of food and then not eating any of it. Sure, it’s because I’m exhausted from a long day of work and then going grocery shopping afterwards, but it still feels weird to do. Plus, as much as I enjoy getting takeout from the local Chinese restaurant, I tend not sleep as well after eating it. Seems like eating something else might be the better choice in order to address my exhaustion, but that will take a degree of effort that picking up my dinner would not.
Continue readingA Faint Connection In The Isolating Distance That Is My Family
Ever since I separated myself from most of my biological family, I’ve only gotten news from two of my siblings. Which isn’t that different from before, since most of my family doesn’t really share news so much as need to have news dragged out of them. All they really share without extensive prompting is silence or gossip. I got all the silence I wanted by not talking to them and I have historically had zero interest in family gossip, so I never really got news about the extended family outside of holidays or the rare time something was important enough that my mother felt like she had to call people to tell them. Now, though, my siblings are my only sources and they can be unreliable about the family as a whole because one of them doesn’t really talk to the family either and the other just forgets to share stuff until I ask (which I almost never do as a rule) or until something major is happening. All of which is to say is that I learned that my grandmother had a health scare recently (that looked like it could be fatal when I got the initial news but turned out to be decidedly not even potentially fatal by the end of the following day) and that one of my aunts was homeless and in the process of falling out with most of the rest of the family for reasons that, as far as I’ve gathered, are entirely of her own making.
Continue reading