Thu, 8 Dec 2022
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
Ah the holiday season. That lovely time of year full of joy and good will toward—yeah, no. What for many is the most wonderful time of year is, for me, a lower level of hell. Truly, no recurrent block of time could be worse for me in virtually every way, starting with the obvious: it's dark and cold; always dark, always cold. I go to work before the sun rises. I come home after the sun sets. The only time I get to see daylight is the weekend. And even then, it's usually cloudy.
Seasonal Affected Disorder (SAD) kicks in and my depression worsens more often than not. And because it's dark and cold, running (while still kinetically marvelous) becomes cumbersome from a wardrobe perspective and is visually underwhelming. I enter a Sisyphean hellscape where every run feels the same on every weekday because there's no dynamic change to any aspect of any part of any run.
Again, the weekend offers the only reprieve, and not because I find work to be drudgery, but because I get to actually experience natural light.
Every year the holiday season gets harder to the point where I'm starting to think I should move to San Diego or something. And yes, I've tried vitamin D supplements and SAD lights. The former is probably better than nothing, but the latter is terrible; I don't need or want harsh cold light that "mimics" sunlight—my brain is not fooled; that is not the sun.
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The less obvious aspect of my unyielding angst this time of year has to do with the nature of holidays themselves, but this did not become apparent to me until this year (for reasons I believe should become clear if they aren’t already).
Once I ceased believing in Santa as a child, I began to hate Christmas—in particular—more and more every year. In late high school, I always found my depression intensified during the Christmas season, seemingly inexplicably. Even just hearing Christmas music transformed a good mood into a confusing malaise of melancholic resentment.
These days, I generally find gifts (both giving and receiving) produce a lot of anxiety and stress. The tedium of putting up and tearing down holiday decorations is immensely unappealing. I hate that every advertisement is suddenly holiday themed, that every store plays only holiday music, that every social gathering is suddenly centered around some yuletide leitmotif. It’s jarring and I don’t appreciate any of it.
When I was young, all of this confused me. Everyone loves the holidays, it seemed at the time. Why am I the lone stick in the mud? I felt alone in my disillusionment. As I got older, I chalked it up to distaste of the commercialism of it all, but that still wasn't quite the full picture, although it was certainly a factor since Christmas is a wildly commercial holiday, which is really gross if you ask me.
But that, by itself, never fully explained why I hated the entirety of the season and everything that went along with it. This especially because I also dislike virtually every other holiday as well; it's just that only in the season surrounding Christmas and its ilk are six to eight weeks devoted to a variety of festivities. It is literally inescapable for a full month or more of the year. A conservative 1/12 of the year (though, sometimes closer to 1/6 of the year) is dedicated to these cultural celebrations that change everything about the social scene when compared to any other time of year.
Shortly after I learned I'm Autistic, I embarked on the process of relearning everything. I can no longer take anything for granted and I will leave no stone unturned. Of the myriad things I've discovered about the Autistic experience, one of the most poignant for me at the moment is that we often have a severe distaste of holidays. And though this is not true of all Autistics, given the nature of the neurotype, this distaste actually makes a ton of sense.
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As an Autistic individual, I thrive on routine and the holiday season is intensely disruptive to my routines. Suddenly every social gathering has the baggage of a theme that I dislike but that everyone else seems bizarrely into. On a good day, I find unpredictable social situations challenging and usually rely on various levels of "scripting" to get through social interactions with minimal cognitive expenditure. The holiday season flips those social scripts and, for a month or two, I can't rely on modes of social navigation that otherwise work just fine at every other point in the calendar year.
Tacky Christmas decorations are everywhere and people ring bells and try to make eye contact and/or small talk with you as you're trying to sneak past them unnoticed so you can brave the already poisonous sensory surroundings of the grocery store…that are now also injected with holiday music everywhere you’re in earshot of a speaker, which is everywhere.
I feel isolated and "other" most of the time, but during the holiday season those feelings get amplified and I am lonelier than I am most of the rest of the year (which is already a high baseline).
My extended family does a gift exchange every year where you draw a name out of a hat and get a gift for whomever you drew. One year, they offered folks the opportunity to opt out. I did so in a heartbeat. I don't know that they expected anyone to take them up on the offer because they seemed surprised when I asked to withdraw. Regardless, my life has been immensely better ever since. These days, I avoid almost all gifts this time of year.
Learning the above has been helpful. Each year I get more comfortable with not faking a holly jolly attitude—to the point where I am now considered a Grinch by most folks, which is a moniker I own with pride. I will never empathetically understand the cultural obsession we have with the holiday season in the exact same way that most folks will never understand why I hate it so much (albeit in inverted directions).
I think that's okay. I am wired differently and Christmas merriment is not found anywhere in that wiring. Whoever passes out holiday spirit when each child is born skipped me entirely. In years gone by, I found this unsettling; it was yet another perplexing marker of my difference. Now that I understand myself better, I'm not unsettled.
More than that, though, I wouldn't change a thing.