darkness

Holiday Blues

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s Christmas, but it doesn’t really feel like it.

It’s too warm and rainy, for one thing. I could maybe cope with the warm, but the lack of sunlight is definitely getting to me.

I’ve been struggling the past couple of weeks. Maybe it’s the weather – I think I’ve seen the sun once in two weeks. Maybe it’s the fact that my back has spent the past week giving me grief (for the second time in a month). Maybe it’s continued frustration with my family, or the fact that a lot of people I care deeply about are having an especially rough time right now. Maybe it’s just that I’m on the depressed end of a Bipolar cycle. It’s probably a combination of all of the above.

The chronic-ness of my longstanding back issues has been hitting close to home in ways it hasn’t in a while. I am acutely aware of the fact that I am facing a drastic decline in mobility if things don’t change, and am struggling with a lot of emotions surrounding that – I have this horrible fear that if I lose my ability to be a strong physical presence (helping friends move, shielding friends from harassment, things that have apparently become more ingrained in my identity than my gender ever was, because they’re proving harder to let go), I will stop being useful…and maybe, in some way, stop being me. I recognize that this is a problematic, able-ist mindset (even if it is almost entirely self-directed), which adds a whole extra layer of complexity to what’s going on in my head right now. I am not coping at all gracefully. I have been feeling angry and whiny and ungrateful and overwhelmed and selfish. There is a very large part of me that has spent a large portion of the last week wanting to throw a major temper tantrum (complete with screaming and throwing myself on the floor, which I would pound with fists and feet).

Still, despite my tendency to be particularly cynical and growly these days, there is a part of me that is evidently an eternal optimist, and that part insists that I find something less sad to end this post with. So here are three things I want everyone I know who is struggling to make it through this holiday season to hear:

  1. Regardless of whether you, your coworkers, your family, or strangers on the street can see it right now, I want you to know that I believe you have value. Even if you think that’s not possible, that you’re too broken to be worth anything to anyone, please try to at least entertain the thought for a moment that the simple fact of your humanity, in all of its complexity and confusion and rough edges, makes you beautiful and gives your life value. My life would be less without you in it.
  2. I was reading Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay this week, and at the end of the book, one of the characters declares, “Either all days are holy, or none of them are. I haven’t decided yet.” I found this idea immensely comforting. In the end, a holiday is just another day. It doesn’t have to be any more or less than that for you unless you want it to be. No, that doesn’t remove societal pressure, but perhaps it will alleviate some of the pressure in your own mind.
  3. I can’t see the future, so I can’t promise when (or if) things will get better. I do know, though, that holidays can be a special sort of hell, and that it can be much easier to breathe on the far side of them. I came across the sound advice a few days ago that one should never make important decisions during the holidays. Hang on for the clarity on the other side.

On Darkness and Inner Demons

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a long, hard, scary week in the world, and it’s only half over. There have been so many awful things happening that, when I sat down to think about this week’s blog, I wasn’t really sure where to begin. But I’m going to try to address two of the big things.

First things first: on Saturday, a black teenager was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, MO. It’s an appalling and altogether horrible situation, and is just one in a long line of similar murders in recent history. I’m still trying to educate myself on the situation (despite the overwhelming urge to bury my head in the sand), but this is the best article I’ve seen on the whole situation so far, and while I had a lot of thoughts similar to this bouncing around my head, I would never have been able to express them so powerfully. When my partner posted this article on Facebook, ze posted it with the comment that, “If you are a white person in America, you need to read this. (Everyone else in America already knows and lives it.)” which sums up the truth of it pretty damn well. Read it. If it’s a choice between reading that article or finishing this blog post, go there, now.

One of the other things that’s been blowing up all over the news this week is the death of Robin Williams, which, it’s thought, was a suicide. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this. The fact that the suicide of a rich white man has gotten more media attention than the murder of a young black man is profound evidence of a number of deeply-rooted issues in our society. And Robin Williams wasn’t a hero. He, like many comedians, sometimes went for the cheap joke at the expense of people who absolutely do not need any more of that from the world (for example, the transmisogyny-perpetuating man-in-a-dress trope of Mrs. Doubtfire). At the same time, he was undeniably talented, and undeniably troubled by inner demons the rest of the world didn’t always see. Suicide, like any loss of human life, is always a tragedy.

These two news items have served as powerful reminders that this world is a dark, scary, overwhelming place a lot of the time. And not just the world around us, but the worlds we inhabit internally. We all have our demons. Darkness seems to be everywhere these days.

I find “it gets better” tropes to be pretty useless. Sometimes, it doesn’t really get better. It definitely won’t get better on its own. Things only change when we make them change. But we don’t always have the resources available to us to make things better for ourselves.

Which is why it’s so important that we, as human beings, take care of each other.

We can take care of each other by listening to one another, whether it’s to educate ourselves about the experiences of people who are different from us, or simply being aware of when the people around us need some extra gentleness. We’re all in this together. At the end of the day, we’re all human. If we could learn to value the humanity in ourselves and to recognize it reflected in others…maybe the world wouldn’t turn out to be such a dark place after all.