Holiday-induced delusions of grandeur
Is everyone hanging out without me?
If my loneliness was a really organized person with a color-coded calendar, the holidays would be circled in red pen.
I really love Halloween. I love horror movies, I love kitschy and campy costumes, I love being scared. I love black cats. I cried tears of joy and sadness for the monster-mom-woman in Barbarian. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are from watching horror movies entirely too young, leaving me to genuinely believe Pennywise was going to crawl through my shower drain and kill me.
Because I’ve loved—well, the “love” started out as a deep fear and anxiety around anything that could jump out and scare me that eventually morphed into love and appreciation—horror films for as long as I can remember, I’ve always believed something exciting or frightening was always around the corner—like I’d look in the mirror on Halloween night and see Freddy Krueger behind me, or Ghostface would call my landline and ask about my favorite scary movie. I naively thought real life would mimic the thrill of an exciting Final Girl moment, but instead, the real horror looks more like me, hastily taping together a shitty costume at home while everyone else is at a perfect Halloween party in their perfect costumes that would make Wes Craven proud.
So, every year, without fail, the same feeling lingers in me: I’m just not quite doing The Holidays right.
On Thanksgiving, I’m scrolling through everyone’s forced expressions of gratitude. I know in my heart that what people post on social media is not real, but I lose all critical thinking skills on a holiday where every. single. person. is posting about how much they love their lives, how grateful they are, how beautiful everything is, “look at my perfectly color coordinated family,” how much they love their lives. I know it’s performative. I know it’s just as curated as any influencer’s Instagram feed, but somehow I find myself spiraling into this ridiculous gratitude-envy. It’s sickening.
I, too, love my life most of the time, and still I feel a disgusting sense of “I’m lying to everyone” when I post even the most basic expression of gratitude online when I can’t follow it up with a caveat like, “I love my life, I’m grateful for everything I have, I love my family, but sometimes I do want to jump off of a bridge, but I’m not going to, I just have to say that because I’m allergic to being sincere online, like I’m literally breaking out in hives right now just typing this. I’m so grateful though. Really. Happy Thanksgiving!”
I love Christmas and somehow, still, 28 years into my life, the joy of the season escapes me almost as quickly as it arrived. I’m left cold and sad and full of complicated feelings about family and gratitude and gifts. I never feel like I’ve done enough, or prepared correctly, or bought the right gifts. My presents look like I wrapped them using one arm and my teeth. That alone makes me feel like a Christmas Failure. I love the holiday spirit, I love Christmas decorations, I love A Charlie Brown Christmas, I love Christmas songs, and yet, somehow, it is with complete seriousness that I say that December 26 is the worst day of the year. That day is so deeply unforgiving, like the worst comedown off of the best high of your life, every year without fail. The heaviness of the day feels like the festive build-up of the entire month just…fizzles out with no warning.
New Year’s Eve is truly the worst of them all. You’re supposed to have it all figured out on New Year’s Eve—what you did wrong in the last 365 days, what you did right, how you changed, what you’ll change next year, how it’ll all change you. I’m painfully self-aware, but I’m chronically late to “figuring it out.” I don’t need a holiday whose entire purpose to force introspection and rumination over everything that happened to me in the last year.
High School Musical raised me to believe it should be this transformative night where you meet the love of your life while doing karaoke. In About Time, a less-than-stellar New Year’s Eve party changes Domhnall Gleeson’s life forever. Sure, he can time travel so it’s not entirely realistic, but it’s still a remarkable change. When Harry Met Sally holds one of the most iconic New Year’s Eve scenes in cinematic history, when Harry confesses his love to Sally right at the stroke of midnight. Cinema has planted a bug in my brain that has forced me to have these grandiose delusions of how a perfect holiday would change my life. Pop culture planted a seed in me that it’s a night of big confessions, love at first sight, the click of a life-changing epiphany. I can’t shake that feeling when I’m sitting alone at home while everyone else is out to play, or even when I’m at a perfect New Year’s party and I get a single moment alone to wonder if there’s somewhere better I could be.
I’ve begun to wonder if these feelings are a side effect of being single for most of my adult life. I look at my friends in relationships—happy, in love, smooching at midnight, wearing matching pajamas with their families on Christmas, donning clever couples costumes at the hottest Halloween parties—and instead of being happy for them and celebrating their togetherness, I’m mostly left with a grim feeling of not-enough-ness. I feel like everyone was let in on a secret that I haven’t figured out yet. So maybe it all boils down to that: I’m single and I’m bitter? I guess? That feels like an incredibly elementary reduction of what is definitely a larger issue, but I’ll foolishly believe that maybe all of these complicated feelings would be resolved if I wasn’t just a little lonelier than everyone else all the time.
I don’t know what the solution is to any of this, unless someone is able to cut open my skull and rewire my brain. (If that’s you, please email me. I’m serious.) I wish I could end this with a whole paragraph about how I’m committing to changing my perspective and my outlook on life and I’m going to have the BEST New Year’s Eve of my entire life this year, and I’m going to confess my love to someone and have a life-changing midnight kiss, but that’s just not true. But I do know that the first step to ending bad behavior patterns is to be aware of them, so I’d hope that I’m at least on the right track.
Tonight, on Halloween, I’ll probably end up watching a spooky movie with some friends, and I’ll try my best not to doom-scroll my way into feeling lonely in a room full of people, looking for the exact right balance of festive and nonchalant. I’ll report back on my findings.