It feels insane to experience holiday cheer amidst the horrors

But here we are

In my early twenties I lived in the Bay Area, a place where people — whether you want them to or not — respond incredibly earnestly to the question “How are you?”

I learned to avoid it by just greeting acquaintances with, “Hey! Good to see you!” because at a certain point, one can only handle so many white, Buddhist trust fund babies putting their hands to their hearts, inhaling deeply through their noses, and sighing “I am…struggling, but trying to stay grateful,” before leaning in for a nine-second hug. These interactions were the closest I have come to understanding the legal category “voluntary manslaughter.” (The struggling was usually about his dad’s new wife needing the Tahoe house the same weekend he wanted to take psychedelics there.)

There is a time and a place for pleasant, surface-level social interactions (a shoeless potluck where everyone including the food is stoned) and there is a time and a place for openly weeping. Holiday parties in a time of war seem like a time for neither. It makes pleasantness feel nauseating and dystopian. Anyone who is too happy is suspicious.

How can one stomach pleasant social interactions when there are 9500 dead children in a tiny strip of land smaller than Delaware? How can we deck the halls tra la-la la-la when there are hostages in tunnels being tortured and abused and raped while half of Instagram doesn’t believe they exist. Madness.

There is a new social more: The mutual acknowledgment of horror. At a party recently, here is a rough transcript of a conversation I had:

ME: Hi! How are you?

FRIEND: Oh, you know.

ME: Yup.

FRIEND: I cry all the time.

ME: I cried before this!

FRIEND: On the train?

ME: Yep!

FRIEND: Me too! The F?

ME: Oh wow we have the same crying train!

CLINK

I do not believe, as a dancing-tinsel Paperless Post recently told me, it is more important than ever to be joyful. I believe it is more important than ever to be furious and intensely focused on the wellbeing of the people around us, whether they look like us or pray like us. To make phone calls and take meaningful stands against senseless killings and to throw a small fortune at the charities working to re-assemble life in Israel and Gaza. I believe it is more important than ever to cling to the people we love and to luxuriate in their safety with an awareness of how quickly it could all go away.

I can only stomach being around people who are also wrecked by the horrors, and I don’t think I am alone in that. This holiday season, when joy feels obliterated, I hope you can find community and camaraderie amongst people who are starting from the same baseline of devastation. Does Mariah have a song about that?

Meanwhile, I am also leaning into my kids in ways I’ll thank them for by paying for their therapy until they’re 40.

I am sniffing their heads every night like I’m Scarface.

I am staring at their monitors when they sleep until I close my eyes.

I am carrying them into bed with us when they wake up and hugging their sleepy bodies until they say, “Mamaaaaa!”

I am left feeling like the 23-year-old version of myself in a cramped apartment in San Francisco with contact dermatitis from our Craigslist furniture: Struggling, but trying to stay grateful.