The Christmas I went insane. 

A short piece I wrote Thursday night:


I was home. Somewhat lonely, I talked to my boyfriend on the phone a few times a week but otherwise for a lot of break not a lot was going on. Most of my high school friends had moved on. I saw some, once, later that break, and it was good, but also empty in a way that’s hard to describe, nothing tangible.

 I suggested we go to the same sushi restaurant we had gone to celebrate the end of high school, two celebrations almost four years apart, but we ended up down the road because the wait was too long. Maybe it just felt empty because more people were missing then there were there.

Maybe I just couldn’t appreciate that it was really great, that we had a nice dinner, we had a blast watching Sonic 3, that it was nice to catch up. Maybe it is insane for me to feel unfulfilled by it when I have nothing tangible to blame that feeling on. 

The few actual holidays were extremely busy. My family is married to tradition when it comes to the holidays.  I think it gives us something to ground us, a blueprint for how to succeed so that one year is much like any other, a frozen interchangeable mess of what is supposed to be the happiest time of the year, to the point where my 15 year old sister still insists we play along with Santa long after she has been matter of factly told the truth. The artifice of it all drives me a bit insane. 

This year the world feels like it’s getting meaner. I don’t remember past Christmas homilies particularly well but I remember them being kind and gentle, focusing on Jesus as someone who was poor, his parents forced out of their home land by the whims of an empire. Reminding us to care for those in need. This year the homily was just cruel. It celebrated the conquest of the godless Romans by the righteous Christians, it compared those who don’t believe out of fear of the mysterious and all knowing power of God to birds slowly freezing to death in the snow. Maybe that’s a fitting homily for this world, or maybe I missed the point because I’m insane, everyone else in my family seemed impressed by the shallow and mean spirited metaphor between the dead birds and the non-believer. 

At dinner my uncle talked loudly and callowly about AI. All he does is chase stupid trends, from natural gas, to environmentalism, to huge data centers killing the planet, he will go wherever there is money. I found him loud, and irritating. No talk of the ethics of training sets, or safety rails, or any reflection on the nuances and limitations of these new tools. 

But my dad was very impressed by it all, maybe I’m just insane. 

Now a month out from this Christmas the world has only gotten more mean. Friends talk of buying guns to fight off future militia in the streets like it’s a normal thing to do. On some level I know it’s just them struggling to feel like they have some means of recourse and sense of control but it doesn’t make me feel any less insane listening to it all. 

Meanwhile I sit here and I hope things get better some day because that’s all I can do, but everyday that hope feels more and more insane. 





Context:
I have always been interested in the relationship between intent, perception, and reality and have tried to capture the complex relationship between those in semi fictional writing before in a creative writing class to limited success;
I think this does a better job of capturing the feeling of the gulf between those things and how distressing it is. This is the level of distress I felt Thursday night as a wrote this, trying to articulate what has been increasingly bothering me for months. I didn’t include all the examples here because some are hard to articulate or too much to share, but the level of distress is not constant, and I have a support network in my friends, boyfriend, and family.