#38 - Christmas and Stress, Year's End Incoming - 19/12/2025
The more the days pass, the more I find myself just kind of existing. Usually, I'd say that I don't mind this, actually, in the most ideal circumstances, I'd find myself eager to just enjoy the slow moments. But it's different this time. Instead of enjoying the slowness of a time like this, I feel somewhat...well, trapped, to be honest. Not in a physical sense, but certainly a product of circumstance in this instance. I don't really know why it's been like this but since at least a year or two ago, every December, every Christmas, has just felt so miserably and meanderingly slow. You see, when I was a kid, I loved Christmas. I was born in the season, I'm a December baby, in that way. I loved the season and I loved how it made everything around me become so much more alive and joyous. Everywhere i'd go, there'd be christmas decorations everywhere, music playing in the season, frost coating the grass like sugar on frosted flakes - in my childhood home, there'd be tinsel and fairy lights everywhere, spiralling around banisters and door handles and stuck up to the walls with tacky sticky tape, my own little attempt to make even the walls I knew well by years of passing by them even livelier. And most importantly, in the living room there'd be a giant pine tree coated in it's own dedicated sect of tinsel and lights and ornaments and wrapped chocolates. Christmas felt so joyous, so real, and...I haven't really felt that christmas joy in the past two, maybe three years. Not properly, anyway. And when I say those years, I'm also referring to this year as well. I havent really felt merry this year. But why? Honestly, I can't even say, I legitimately do not know why SPECIFICALLY. Is it perhaps the fact that money is tight? The fact that people are obsessed with the value of their gifts more than their meaning? The fact that christmas advertising just completely reveals how the meaning of this season has been utterly butchered? I dont know, but in a way, all of these reasons contribute to something I feel that's either muting the joy I should feel at this season or replacing the joy that no longer seems to exist for me here. I dont feel merry, to be frank. I feel worn, drained, tired. And unfortunately, it doesnt stop there.
Something I believe I may have mentioned before is that I am this person who aims to create by my own standards, to work to a fault, to just focus on a schedule of my own and achieve things BY my own standards. And I honest to god despise how in this season, I've just been unable to do things by my own standards. I've been told, time and time again, that it's okay to not meet those standards and that I shouldnt be so hard on myself, but its my way of creating order for myself in a life i'm living that I can't really control on my own merits right now. Its frustrating - when I know I can create, when I know I can be paced and on-time with things, and yet, some factors like my own body or others or seasonal depression just prevent me from being able to do what I know i CAN do. It just is depressing, is all. It doesnt help that I am highly aware of the fact that seasonal depression and these feelings are only going to get worse as time passes, if I don't keep them at bay in some way. Combine it with the lack of christmas joy I feel and how...much I just want it to pass more than anything, and I have myself a cocktail of tiredness. I dont really know what to do but to keep going onward.
Currently, I can't start integrating my plans for what I want to do in 2026, until I...yknow, GET to 2026. There's stuff I want to do, there's stuff I want to try, there's stuff and objectives and things I want to achieve. I have come to understand that for all of the people that tell me that I cannot achieve what I want to do and that I can't thrive on my own, or anything to that extent and effect, I am the master of my own destiny and to be frank, I know who I am. I can do anything if I try.
I won't go into detail about the end of the year just yet. When the time is closer to the end of the year, ill reflect on things.