A guide for supporting a bearable holiday season

I’ve been thinking a lot about eight-step handouts. About how often and common it is in the health and wellness field to see guides with bullet points that claim to offer ways to make people’s pain and discomfort go away. 

Though these guides, depending on the author and their intentionality in writing them, can be supportive and helpful, I also have been thinking lately about how they are lacking. How they perpetuate an idea of perfectionism, expert opinion, and lack the capacity to hold the nuance and complexity of an individual’s lived experience. They also perpetuate the delusion that humanity can be pain-free.

And, I can appreciate simple things to hold onto in a time and space of overwhelm. So I’ve attempted to offer that to you, sweet reader, in hopes that it can offer you something to hold onto amidst a complicated time. I can’t say it will make the pain go away, but my hope is something will provide relief somewhere. Take what works, leave the rest.

Honor your story.

Your story is yours. The work of recovery / healing involves removing the layers of gaslighting from people / systems who are not able or are not willing to look at your pain/ designed to erase your pain. You are the only one that knows the unique challenges you’ve faced, the invisible struggles your body holds. Honor what you know of your story, your pain, and approach whatever your holiday holds with kindness and compassion, as much as you are able. You are deserving of love and care and tending, and your story matters.

Honor your feelings

Though feelings do not always tell a true story, the experience of feeling them is real and sometimes that can be an overwhelming experience. You are a human that experiences feelings, and that is a totally normal human experience. If you are able, give yourself permission to feel those feelings and tend to them however feels best to you, even if they don’t make sense to the people around you. There are no wrong answers here, and you are the expert in your own caregiving. 

Choose how to cope, when to set boundaries and take space, when to do labor, and when to not. Honor and trust those decisions.

There is a lot of people yelling on the internet regarding the cure-all nature of boundaries. Boundaries are great, *and* I’d love it if more people would recognize that at least for the geriatric millennial population and older, the majority of us didn’t even learn the term boundary until we were well into adulthood and had been sufficiently abused by a boundary-less life. Boundaries can be life giving and the process of learning how to set them in a way that makes sense for you, knowing that they will change and be different from scenario to scenario, that they will bring up massive amounts of internal chaos that you then have to navigate (but that doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong!), well, it just takes a long damn time to figure it out for oneself. Add on having extreme difficulty recognizing your own needs much less communicating them to others, and the cure-all of boundaries becomes a lot more cumbersome. You get to choose your boundaries, whether you want to employ them (you are not wrong for choosing not to, boundaries are laborious and peoples reactions can sometimes demand more labour and you get to choose how and when to employ your own labour). Lastly, there is wisdom in your coping. Another darkness I see in the health and wellness field is a pathologizing of peoples coping. No one knows your pain like you do. There is no wrong way to cope. Healthism tells us there is good and bad coping. There is only you, your body, your story, and how you wind your way through it. Walk through the holiday season knowing that you are the expert in taking care of you.

Gain information for next time.

Remember, this is all a process! This holiday season you will learn more about yourself, the people you hang with if you are hanging with people, and what worked for you and what didn’t. It’s all just more information, it’s not right or wrong or your fault if it feels badly. It’s all informing your journey of how to take care of yourself through it all.