Handling the Holidays

So... I actually wonder to myself how I'm getting through this... this season. I'm not even sure I know... Holidays are hard. Holidays alone are really hard. Holidays alone when you thought you would never have to have a holiday alone again are really really hard.

I think the way I'm getting through it is by making things as different as possible. For the first time in ....maybe ever? I haven't put up a tree. There will be one at Mom & Dad's but I didn't put mine up here... because..that was one of our things... Nathan thought he couldn't decorate a tree very well for some reason, but every year I got him to help me a little bit more... and then we wouldn't take it down forever... literally one year we took it down on Valentines... not because we were just that full of Christmas spirit, but because we moved it out of the way and we just didn't really feel like putting it away. So I don't want to put up my tree alone... and I definitely don't want to take it down alone.

And I'm avoiding holiday parties... I really did have a headache the other day, but I was ok with the excuse to not be by myself at a holiday party full of couples... People try, but you can't help that when something funny happens you have a person you look at first to share the joke... only not if you are an odd (wo)man out. Someone commented recently that I was laughing really hard... It's actually a defense mechanism. Because if you are laughing really hard and throwing back your head then you don't see all the quick exchanges that people don't even know they do.

We are coming up on a year and it's looming in my head.

Christmas, a year, his 27th birthday...

But in some ways it's good... getting rid of one of the worst years of my life. 2011 was spent in agony.. his physical and my emotional... and saying goodbye to some of that pain... even symbolically... it's a good thing.

Just wish it wasn't so lonely.