I've found it best to hide away when the holiday season of late November hits. I drop facebook and shore up supplies in my bunkeresque home. I don't need anyone telling me "Happy Holidays" because it sucks. I don't need pictures of happy family gatherings or smiling faces around the big table heaped with food. I don't need to be reminded that folks find this the happiest time of year. It just serves to remind me how different and obscure I am.
I've never enjoyed family gatherings, go figure. Load noises, lots of strangely familiar people packed tightly into odd houses, steaming plates of too much foreign food that everyone thinks I should try and taste, people pretending to care for two days a year when the rest of the year they never call or care. I remember all those aunts who smiled to my face and dropped me the minute grandma died. Gram was the only one who loved me, I get that now, okay.
I don't know how other survivors do it, you know, being shoved into crowded rooms with relatives that have sexually abused or stood by and did nothing. Invalidation reigns high during the "holy" days of November, December.
Family, to me, has always been a sick joke of pretty looking papers dolls that have no feelings or smiles genuine. It's cheap dollar store gifts from one unknown to another. Strangers hug, smile and lie over turkey and pie. Thinking they care, ha. What a joke.
Glad to be rid of them.
To get invited or naught with these new strangers....they can't comprehend my anxiety at a setting with strangers. They don't know my aversions or fear of new food and how an hour of small talk can stress me out for three days. I turn them down. I run. I hide. I hole up so I don't need to explain the unexplainable, me.
Enough with the well wishing and gifts. Just go away. I'll get through this like I do every year. At least I have a really good bunker.
No comments:
Post a Comment