Winter Solstice Prayer

As the sun set over the shortest day of the year, beckoning the longest night, I prayed to Mother Mary to let the rays of light of the birth of the Sun shed new light onto struggles I've been dealing with. Amen and Blessed Be.

Holiday Card

 

This is my favorite picture I've taken all year. I took it in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury last spring. This Winter Solstice, don't forget to Let Your Freak Flag Fly!

Schizoaffective Disorder and the Holidays

 

The Christmas when I was 11, I decided it sucked that every Christmas you were practically legally required to be happy. So, I was a Scrooge at age 11! A few years later, it didn’t help my Christmas spirit that my schizoaffective psychotic break happened around the holidays.

In my 20s and 30s, Christmas used to bother me because of all the people who would come over to my parents’ house, where the whole family celebrated Christmas. I felt bad about this. I really wanted to enjoy Christmas. One year after I was married, Tom and I adopted our very own Christmas elf who we named Crumpet after a short story by David Sedaris (Crumpet is pictured above). He’s sitting under the Christmas tree my mom got us last year. But after he arrived, I declared I was in the holidays for the elves! I have a soft spot for mythical creatures like elves, mermaids, and faeries. In my psychotic break during the holiday season of 1998-1999, I even thought the schizoaffective voices I heard were faeries at first.

I love all the people who come over for the holidays—I just don’t like large groups of people. But I didn’t realize how much I loved them until they couldn’t come over because of the year of the COVID pandemic in 2020. I didn’t realize how much I wanted everyone to be together until they weren’t. So, now that COVID-19 is under control, I try hard to appreciate all the family that comes over. I did a pretty good job this past Thanksgiving. I did have to leave before pie (I know, sacrilege!), but Tom and I exchanged presents with our nephew and his wife, which makes her our niece. They aren’t coming in for Christmas so we had to celebrate early. It also helped that the gifts from my niece and nephew are awesome! They got me a book of poetry by Rupi Kaur, and two crystals, one of which I wear all the time in a crocheted lavalier that carries any stone I want. And they also gave us a picture from their recent wedding, which we attended.

It puzzles me that the crowd at Christmas bothers me now, because it didn’t for the first few years after I became ill. But for almost the past two decades, I haven’t been able to stand large groups of people. Tom and I even had to leave our wedding reception early because of the chaos of the crowd. And the pressure of being the bride at my own wedding was overwhelming. But I guess it didn’t matter because we’re still going strong after over 16 years of marriage! I used to love people coming over for Christmas, even for a period after my first psychotic episode. A friend who came over one Christmas said I was “bubbly.” I know my schizoaffective anxiety got a lot worse over the course of my 20s. It is true that any time I’m around a lot of people, I start to feel I have to get away. It’s not just during the holidays. And I don’t think the anniversary of my illness has that big of an effect on how I experience Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year. So, it’s not that I don’t like the holidays specifically. And it’s certainly not that I don’t like people. I love my family. I don’t like crowds and now accept that perhaps I never will.