It’s after 9 am on December 8, 2020, and the sky is eclipsed with the still black of winter. Being the music and pop-culture geek I am, I woke up today thinking how today marks 40 years since John Lennon was shot dead outside his Dakota apartment. It’s also the day after the holidays were cancelled for us here in BC.
I spent last night huddled in bed with an ice pack around my neck, trying to be mindful of the sensation of the cold on warm skin. It wasn’t working.
The anxiety took a sledgehammer to walls of self-care, diligence, and resilience. It’s not hard to be homebound for a week, two weeks, or even a month; but the better part of nine months? It’s a covert, quiet kind of hard. And it will be hard to explain to successive generations why, exactly.
After an appointment with my family doctor last December, we got to chatting about this new virus. He said that if we were lucky—really lucky—we might be starting to get doses of a vaccine by the end of the year.
We got lucky: a woman in the UK just got the first vaccine today. We’re lucky to breathe where we breathe, and, if you’re anything like me, occasionally lose hope where we lose hope.
We’ve had hard holidays before; it’s the hardest time of year for many people. And we’ll have hard holidays again. But it’s just one year; one holiday season, one tough time. In the end, we’ll have a hard time remembering some of the specifics because the last nine months have, in our minds, been more or less all part of the same blurry clump of weirdness.
This holiday season will be different, but some of your holiday routines don’t have to be. For me, a Christmas routine that reminds me of a better time is reading The Catcher In the Rye (and that’s saying something, because I read Catcher in Grade 9, and you couldn’t pay me $10,000 to repeat that year). Regardless of what anyone says about it, it’s one of the most culturally formative stories to ever be told. That goes for Catcher and the reality we’re in.
No one except you can catch you when you’re falling. Catch yourself in the ways you know how, the ways that got you here today. If they’re not the healthiest of ways, go easy on yourself. There are no points for style.
It’s even more important than usual to carry out the things that bring you solace. It’s a dark time, a lonely time, so focus on those nuggets of simplistic contentment.
Happy holidays. Or maybe this year, it’s just… “holidays.” There’s not as much to be happy about this year. Acknowledge that. Marinate in that. But there’s a difference between acknowledging something and dwelling on it. Marinate in it like filthy bath water: as long as you need to, but not a moment longer.