Yuletide Musings: Frigid, Lonely, Grateful
I wrote this in my journal after spending the September long weekend in Ottawa this year:
My old self — I’ve found her.
In the cracks of city buildings and the smoke of strangers’ cigarettes.
There she is. My beautiful oneness.
Welcome home.
These last two years have truly given me an opportunity to experience the extreme highs and lows of life. I’ve always been a resilient person, but as this cycle ends and I lean into more stability, I’m starting to find my footing again. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t somewhat destabilized by the events that occurred.
It is safe to say that my previously stated goal for October to “get more content on this blog and try to find some consistency” has failed spectacularly. Considering I’ve been working 60-ish hours a week between my corporate 9 to 5 and my TAship at Dalhousie, even if I had the time to sit down and write something for The Blog, I did not have the mental capacity to do it.
I’m just now starting to get through my ambitious October reading list, with a plan to publish the results of that venture throughout the month of January.
Hitting a deadline three months late, I maintain, just means that I’m a natural-born writer.
To quote Douglas Adams:
I love deadlines.
I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
But, the TAship has finished and the new job is not quite so new anymore, so I’m starting to find a better rhythm for myself in this recurrently post- and mid-pandemic life.
This has been a harrowing year. Even more so than 2020 — which for me saw life-changing relationship dissolution, the completion of my undergraduate education, a major car accident, a 5,000 kilometer cross-country solo move, and the commencement of a graduate program — 2021 brought with it its own set of horrors and subsequent catharsis.
Several deaths in my family, the successful completion of my master’s degree, more relationship dissolution, and launching a new career in these short twelve months has been an exercise in the oscillation between numbness and grief.
I feel that joy is finally on the horizon.
I write this piece from my parent’s living room on Christmas Day as the storm kicks up outside and layers the evergreens with a softness that renders the whole world quiet.
I am grateful to be here.
Winter in the Maritimes has its own understanding of the sublime, but it feels harsh and oppressive compared to the winters I grew up with on the West Coast. The greyness of the skies is somewhat lessened by the deep greenness of the forests, and the towering mountains give a depth to the landscape that I no longer take for granted.
It is a small Christmas this year — just me and my parents. The various and sundry cousins are all scattered across the continent, celebrating with their partners and families — in part due to the recent rise in Omicron cases and in part due to personal circumstances.
Family matters are never easy, are they?
This Christmas I am spending true quality time with my parents. Telling stories of the hijinx that always seem to ensue when I’m involved, selling secrets for an extra tipple of wine here-and-there, and starting arguments that I know will end in laughter are part-and-parcel for visits these days. My parents and I have both adjusted to my adulthood, and it seems we’ve fallen into a healthy understanding of how to adapt our holiday traditions to this fledgling relationship between adult and adult-child.
You might be wondering where this is going. After all, this is a horror blog, and nothing about this seems overly horrifying. But there’s a connection here — patience, reader. You’ll find it if you persevere.
As my parents go through their regular routine after the relative brevity of a small Christmas dinner, I come back to the couch to read my book. It will be the first one I write about for the blog in January. I come from a literary family (why all of us are nearly blind, I’m sure), and eventually, my father and then my mother make their way to the living room to read in silence with me.
“Can I read you a passage of this book?” my father asks?
Dutifully, my mother and I put our books down and listen. I am reminded for a moment of my early childhood, characterized by my dutiful parents taking turns reading aloud to their voracious, story-hungry toddler.
Dad’s book is political satire, and crass at that. Not my style.
After a brief discussion of my dad’s book, my mother takes her turn and reads from her book. A mystery novel. Closer to what I’m used to, and I appreciate the delicacy with which she treats the hard-hewn details the other has placed into their scene. She helps a listener mind-paint better than I can.
Finally, my turn comes. It is clear that I am the most practiced of the three in cold-reading. I take no pride in this - 2 literature degrees finished in 2 years mean I’m adept at reading on my feet. This is a skill I’ve perfected to survive in the cutthroat environment of a graduate seminar.
I read a small excerpt from Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad. The writing is “literary” in comparison to the other two, for lack of a better descriptor. It’s Careful. Precise. The subject matter is gruesome, but the characters feel tangible, lingering. Like I am reading of a person all of us know well instead of a character in a book.
“Why do you insist on reading such graphic material?” my mom asks. She’s has been asking me the same question since I was 4 and my discovery of (and subsequent addiction to) R. L. Stein’s Goosebumps series began to seriously impact my quality of sleep.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: the root of all good horror is empathy.
This is why I return to the genre again and again, particularly in these last two unstable and devastating years.
Horror invites you to fully embody and express your grief. It does not attempt to distract, or pacify, or soften the blow of sorrow.
Horror instead offers you a bat and an old teapot and says: “Go on, break it. Scream while you do it. It isn’t healthy for you to hold that all in.”
That deeply intimate invitation to bring your darkness to the surface of your soul and gaze upon it — unflinchingly and with grace — is invaluable for a true integration of our own shadow.
In many ways, horror is more “real” to me than “realism” for that reason. There is safety in metaphor: comfort in the monster.
Did you know that the Victorians used to swap ghost stories around Christmas to keep the party going? I’ve inadvertently carried that tradition on myself, but it’s something I’d like to bring back to the larger Christmas gatherings I envision in the future. Perhaps I’ll be bringing a partner home next year, or my cousins will be able to come and bring theirs. I have a collection of old Victorian ghost stories for when that time comes, given to me last year by a very dear friend of mine, and I do look forward to that transpicuous future gathering for that reason.
May the darkness of future Yuletides be lighter than the darkness of this one.
dheagh shlàinte
