T'is The Season...?

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I'm BACK, britches. Yes, I just called you pants, get over it.

Hey everyone, before I get into this, I want to preface it by saying that I am biased and completely prejudiced against the great evil that is The Holiday Season. 

Also for context my stupid birth name that I was "blessed" with after I was born on December 7th instead of February 28th (I would've been Pheobe and I'm still trying to figure out if Friends jokes would've been easier, probably...) is...

NOELLE

You see, that may be a result of being named after the damn thing and enduring 24 years of poorly thought out jokes and, as the penguins from the cinematic masterpiece called Madagascar (2005) so aptly put it: "Smile and wave boys, smile and wave..." or my interpretation of "grinning-and-bearing-it" while people laugh at my namesake.

....I'm not bitter.

Now that we have that disclaimer out of the way we can get into the juicy bits -- why I really dislike the holidays despite the arguments that the manic pixie dream girls will give about it being "a truly magical time of year!!1!"

Well, strap in homefries, because this starts way back. The second grade to be exact when I first heard the song that will haunt me for the rest of my life. The First Noel. Now this may not seem like much to you Regular Name People out there, right? (However, if a song were to be my legacy can it please be Teenage Dirtbag by Weezer, please?) But just think of any time that you have been in a public place and someone has said your name and you instinctively turn, except they weren't calling you. That is my life every holiday season, except it is broadcast. Loudly. In. Every. Single. Public. Space. My own personal hell. Joyeux Noelle, amiright?

Second reason? Corporate greed, cream puffs. I love giving alright, makes me very happy. But I also hate random people in concentrated numbers trying to score sick deals, dude perpetrated by corporate greed. The deals are not real!! Wake up sheeple! For real though, they jack up the prices right before the holidays and then drop them a little to make it seem like a good deal. It is not. Fuck the patriarchy!

My third reason is quite selfish but hear me out okay? My therapist said I have to be selfish to be selfless so this is justified (let me have this, I need it). Joint Christmas/Birthday gifts for December birthdays have a special place in hell. If you do that, you are probably an asshole to the person in your life with a December birthday. It is a cop-out and an afterthought. Both of my siblings had Not-December birthdays and from my relatives they would get a card on their birthday with a crisp $20 in it and then one for Christmas with another crisp $20 in it. YOU KNOW WHAT I GOT? A single Christmas card with "Also happy birthday" scrawled underneath with a single crisp $20 for both my birthday and Christmas. It's not about the money, it's the principle of the thing!

Again I want to reiterate that I am not bitter.

The final reason is that the holiday season was never a happy occasion in my household, my mum was always crying while listening to silver bells for reasons that are far more in depth than her bipolar diagnosis, there was always screaming (death threats, mostly), my step-dad's holiday gift he always asked for was a day with no fighting and that never came true (mostly because of him), one year I genuinely wanted to not be alive anymore and thought that things could not get any worse (they got better, don't worry). It's always been super stressful and now that I've cut off contact with my family, I'm still trying to figure out how to exist in a time of year which is symbolic of endings but never felt like it reached a conclusion.

So there it is, it's not glamorous and I ended on a sad note which is typical of me but this time of year is hard for me, and that is okay. Right now my first year of school is drawing to a close and I feel like I'm finally getting a hold on some of my health problems. 

But my brain is not doing well, I'm suffering a lot from Imposter Syndrome.

I feel overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time and I'm trying really hard to balance that. 

Sometimes I feel like a tumble weed just drifting with nothing to hold me and I have to remind myself that I don't need roots to be stable, transition periods where I'm putting down roots and trying to establish myself is perfectly fine too.


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