I haven’t had much impetus to be creative lately. The holidays are always a lonely time for me. My family has always been small and difficult to wrangle. This means that I typically don’t participate in a lot of the traditions that others do. The wreckage of every holiday season involves me answering intrusive questions from acquaintances.

“What do you mean you’re not visiting family for Christmas? So, you’re really not going to see them? Are you going to do anything for Christmas? Its going to be like…just another day for you?”

It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I assert, gently and with a smile, that the holidays are not particularly important to me, that I don’t have that kind of family, and that a day off to myself actually sounds luxurious. None of the answers I offer ever seem to land and the questions keep coming. When I don’t give them what they expect, their faces contort into unkind expressions. They either melt into an expression of pity as though I were a caged stray available for adoption. Or the corners of their mouth twist into a smug smile. These are the kinds of people I assume who watch other’s teary meltdowns on TV to feel good about their own stagnant lives.

Coming out of the holidays and withstanding another round of intrusive questions and pitiful gazes, my self esteem felt raw. It felt like I had been compared to others and found lacking, repeatedly, by friends, coworkers and acquaintances. It made me feel sad that what I was being judged on was something that felt so out of my control. I can’t retroactively go back and implant my infant self into a big, close, traditional family. I have no control of that. It almost felt like I had been brandished with an invisible, original sin. It felt like I had been marked as insufficient from the get go.

Unfortunately, I let the half-baked assumptions and knee-jerk reactions of others seep into me. I went through a period where I felt really low about myself. During that period writing about my own thoughts felt grotesque and almost vulgar. I felt defective and I felt like my internal experiences were unwanted. Being under the influence of these feelings made it seem as though writing about myself and posting it online was as inappropriate as taking filtered photo of diarrhea and putting it on Instagram.

I spent some time stuck and riding waves of distraction. I found myself drinking more when I went out with friends. They thought I was being fun, but inside I felt numb. I treated weekends as a wait to get through before I was needed again on Monday. One weekend I made a cake from a boxed mix and I kept it in the fridge unfrosted. I ended up eating the whole cake piece by piece solo, slowly, like an animal savoring a kill. I shuffled back and forth between my darkened kitchen and my screens in an unwashed stupor.

As I sit here writing this, I wouldn’t say that I am past this feeling. It’s there, sitting in the corner of the room and staring me down. But I am choosing not to look at her and her sour face right now. For now, I am writing this in spite of that feeling. It’s not easy, but it’s feels so much better than giving into it.