well, i survived my least favorite day of the year. new year’s eve has been difficult for me ever since i stopped drinking. it always reminds me of the times i did drink (2015: nearly broke my nose by walking face-first into a sliding glass door), the times i almost drank (2018: the closest i’ve come to relapsing and the first time i went to an AA meeting), and the times i didn’t drink (2020: listened to podcasts, did a jigsaw puzzle, and went to bed at 9pm).
i should feel a sense of growth when i look back on those anecdotes, but in reality, i just want to go get drunk about it. the same thing happens on birthdays and sobriety anniversaries. the reminders that time is passing are also reminders that i have much more life to slog through and at no point will i get to indulge in a chemically-induced break from the tedium sigh 🙁
then there’s the extra weight of this year’s NYE. i know dates are meaningless when it comes to grief and loss and emotions and whatnot, but that doesn’t change the fact that now i can’t say, “my ex died last year.” and it seems silly that i would mourn a phrase like that, but i felt like it gave me an excuse of sorts, a license to (still) be devastated.
and while i know now that when the grief attacks come they will feel just as fresh as they did two septembers ago, i also know the mundane things are slipping away. why can’t i remember if we brought home leftovers after we went to that somalian restaurant? why can’t i remember if i ever won when we played civ? why can’t i remember if his dumb koi tattoo faced left or right?
pair the fading memories with the changing years and you get one sad, powerless, and (still) devastated weepdealer.
i will say, though, that i’m getting better at accepting the powerlessness of grief. death is the cruelest fact of the universe, but it is, in fact, universal. we can’t avoid, change, or reverse it. we will watch it happen over and over and we will go through the cycle of unbelievable pain to believable pain to just pain over and over.
and so when i get frustrated that i can’t remember what my cat said to him when she first met him, i take comfort in knowing that losing that memory is part of the natural, universal process. we are constantly forgetting things, whether those things are about the people we lost or not. that’s what’s supposed to happen.
i imagine the little pixar-animated sentient blobs living in my brain saying, “ok, she definitely doesn’t need this memory of him forgetting to take the trash out before they went away for the weekend. let’s delete it and double the brightness on the memory of the first time he said, ‘i love you.’” and that’s fine with me. i trust those little blobs.
now for the real new-years-y stuff. for much of 2021, i proved to myself that i can actually stick to a weekly routine on self-motivation alone. i always bake challah on friday, and i always take a shabbat-style break from social media from friday evening to saturday evening. i’m now going to try to add in one more thing. i’d like to spend at least 30 minutes every saturday morning writing for this blog. this post took me about two hours to complete (counting plenty of breaks and distractions), so it’s not like i will actually produce readable content every week, but at least i will have gotten into a routine. i can do 30 minutes, right? i spend like three hours on instagram daily sunday through friday, so i can spend 30 minutes on wordpress every saturday. i think. idk. we’ll see. pray for me lol
Dude NYE sux. I want to start a new tradition of it being a day of mourning.