Underneath my yellow skin

Too sensitive or just sensitive enough?

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So. I’ve been big into D&D lately–trying to find good groups to watch. It started with the Oxventure crew with Johnny Chiodini as their DM, and it’s expanded since then. I have at least two issues with this, and I’ll start with the more general problem and then go to the more specific one.

There are not enough women of color in these groups. And there are definitely not enough women DM’ing.

Side Note:  This is a problem in general with gaming, but especially in the UK. They are really good with having women on their teams, but people of color, especially women? Not so much. It’s really annoying and discouraging because I prefer their style in general, but it’s started to bug me more and more.

I found one group that is all women and more than one woman of color, but unfortunately, I could not gel with the group. The DMs are also players, which made it very confusing, and one of the other women played a lecherous man who was really fucking annoying. Like, I wanted to punch him (the character) in the face annoying. So I fell off that pretty quickly. I gave it another shot, but I just couldn’t with the asshole character.

Which leads me to my problem with the D&D groups in general. I tried to watch the Dicebreaker one, but I absolutely loathed one of the characters. It didn’t help that I don’t care for the person in general, but his character is such a relenting asshole and a big bully. The way he was browbeating a woman (NPC) was really uncomfortable to me, and even though it also has one of the most adorable characters ever (Tim the Gobbo), I won’t be watching again. Not only because of this one character, but because of how the group treated the ‘animals’ (dinosaurs) in the two episodes. Especially the character I hate.

This actually ties into my issues with the Oxventure group, which I’ve started to dread more and more. Why? Because they seem to take more and more glee in being cruel to animals. Merilwen is an elf druid who specifically loves the animals. The others have treated it as a pain in their collective behinds since the beginning, but it was ok because it seemed like an inside joke. In the last four or five adventures, however, it seems much more malicious. Like they take glee in it. And while they’re always ribbing each other, it seems meaner than the way they treat the other members.

In the last adventure, Merilwen’s beloved (and passed) wild cat friend, Simon, showed up again as a hat on a hunter who used dark magic to make the animals go to him rather than have to go collect them. It was really disturbing, and while it was awesome to see Merilwen get scary mad, it really turned me off. In the comments, several people issued similar sentiments. One person even asked if Ellen (the person) had pissed off Johnny (the DM). Someone else noted that in the year, Dob found his sister; Corazon got some closure with his father and got the family mansion; Prudence got Frisky and The Darkness, pet grimoires; and Eggbert got a measure of atonement. Granted, he also lost a kidney, but still. What did Merilwen get? Her dearest friend being disrespected in such a horribly cruel way.


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Revisiting old favorites…and knocking out new ones

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I’m ready to take on the world.

My gaming is at a stall. While I continually want to find the hot new thing (for me), I keep going back to games I already enjoyed. Ian asked me on Twitter (a thread thing) for my four favorite games. I was going to cheat and count each Dark Souls as a separate game, but I didn’t. I said Dark Souls (series), Night in the Woods, Cook, Serve, Delicious (series), and Torchlight for nostalgia reasons. I didn’t include Binding of Isaac: Rebirth because it’s not exactly a favorite, though I’ve played it more than all the Souls games put together. Probably all the FromSoft games. But it’s not a favorite in the sense of I really enjoy playing it. It’s a habit more than anything. I’m not saying it’s not a good game–it’s a very good game. It’s just not a favorite.

I’ve been playing Dark Souls II. I installed the original thinking it was SotFS, and then I decided to try the original because I haven’t played it. I also installed SotFS because SSD with 2 Terrabytes, bitches! I can install ALL. THE. GAMES. *evil laugh* Anyhow, I have seen a Let’s Play of the original game, and I knew that it was somewhat different, but not that much different. Oh wait. I started SotFS first as a Cleric. I forgot how much I hated not having a ranged option. Especially in this game where there are so many mobs. It’s one of my gripes that they come in groups, and being able to spell them from a distance makes a difference.

I fired up Dark Souls II, vanilla addition, and went back to my roots–I started as a Sorcerer. For whatever reason, you cannot start as a Pyromancer, which still makes me very bitter. In addition, it’s hard to get the Pyro shit, and it confirms my belief that casters get shit on in the games. Anyway, my sorcerer cruised through the first bit, and I did not die until after fighting the first boss, and it was a stupid death. Then again, my first death in SotFS was also dumb because it was in the tutorial at the point where they teach jumping, and it’s a tricky over a gap jump. I’ve died there several times, much to my annoyance.

One of the problems with playing the original DS II is that there aren’t many people playing. I did find one summons, but that’s not much. In SotFS, on the other hand, there are plenty of people playing. Both as a plus and a minus. I was in Heide’s Tower of Flame, and I was able to summon two people to run through it with me. Unfortunately, I got invaded, and he vanquished both my summons. So, I jumped into the ocean in order to avoid being killed.

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In sickness and in sickness

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It’s time for my annual check up on my thyroid, and I should probably get a physical as well. I need to get another doctor because my old one left the network, so I’m not looking forward to that. I’ve had my issues with doctors, and I have a string of problems that have seem to stump the best of them. It’s one thing I want to figure out by my 50th birthday–what the fuck is wrong with me. Physically, I mean. I already know what the fuck is wrong with me emotionally, even if I haven’t fixed it yet.

Side Note: I’ve realized that I will not be able to fix everything that’s wrong with me (emotionally in this case) by the time I died, and what’s more to the point, there were things that I considered flaws in myself that I didn’t care to change. What, how can that be? Because they’re either not worth the effort to change or I’ve learned to live with them. One example is that I work to the back of a deadline. This use to cause trouble between my mother and me because she would send me something she wanted me to edit and give me a timeline, say, a month from the time she sent it to me. Cool, fine, I think to myself. I’ll start it in three weeks, and it’ll be fine.

Except. She’ll start emailing me a week later or maybe two to ask about it. I would say I hadn’t started, and I could feel the disapproval and stress radiating through the ether. I finally had to bring it up with her because it was driving me crazy, and I’m sure it wasn’t doing anything good for her, either. It turned out that she was giving me a deadline that was the last possible time she could get it back–and with agony. In my mind, she was giving me the reasonable deadline. I told her that if she wanted it comfortably in two weeks, she had to tell me so. She thought she was being thoughtful by giving me two extra weeks. I took her at her word that I had the whole month.

It actually worked out because I did move up my own schedule a bit and she gave me something closer to an actual deadline. I know there are people who do the things the second they get the assignment, and while I admire them, it’s not me. I do my best work with my back to the wall, and I’ve actually figured out a way to do it with a small amount of comfort. Once I let go of the idea that I would be the kind of person to do it from the start, I was able to manage my time better. In other words, I wasn’t blowing sunshine up my ass and was better able to assess my actual ability.

I’m really tired of being sick. And exhausted. And feeling like my physical health is out of control. My thyroid has been stable for the past few years, so I don’t expect that to be the issue. It might have something to do with my digestive problems and the FODMAP elimination diet. Which, by the way, I’m still stalled on the adding things back part of the diet. After going two months being 90% better, the idea of willingly poisoning myself again is repulsive to me. The first time I added garlic to something, I had a middling response. It wasn’t running to the bathroom, but it was a bloated uncomfortable feeling. I haven’t tried it again, but I don’t want to lose garlic. It’s in almost everything I eat for one thing, and it’s just goddamn tasty on the other.


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Facing half a century with bewilderment

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I’m turning fifty in a year and a few months.

Let me repeat. I’m turning 50 in a year and a few months.

Sorry, but my brain won’t get past that.

Where the hell did my late thirties and forties go? I know it’s trite to say that time flies and bemoan the loss of years, but it’s hard to believe that I’ve been on this earth for nearly half a century.

Honestly, I thought I would be dead by this age. I didn’t think I would make it out of my thirties, and for a while, I was fixated on the idea that I would die at age 55. My mom was 55 at the time, and it just seemed like that would be my time to go. I was…26 at the time? I think that’s right. Anyway, 55 seemed like a lifetime away, and now, of course, it seems disturbingly close.

I rarely look in the mirror, and when I do, I’m like, “Who the hell is this?” I’ve already had one person ask me with great trepidation if I were a senior (at a co-op on the day they gave senior discounts), but I’ve also had someone who thought I was at least ten years younger than I was. And, with my hair reversing the gray, maybe I’m a weird version of Benjamin Button.

It’s weird when I look back on my life and what I thought it would be like. Well, to be honest, I didn’t think it’d be like anything because I could not imagine a future. When I was a teen, I assumed I’d get married and have kids because that’s what you were supposed to do. I also assumed I’d have some kind of office job because that, too, was what I was supposed to do. Furthermore, I would go to church every Sunday even though I didn’t believe, and I would live a quiet and desperate life.


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FromSoft games on my mind

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While I’m not feeling my best (and in this case, have no idea what the hell is going on with me), I like to return to my comfort gaming. For me, there are a few games that reach that level. It’s not necessarily ‘easy’ games, either, as they are all games I struggled with when I first played them. But, they’re games I’ve played so much, I have a groove on when I get in the zone. I blame it all on Dark Souls being one of the first ‘hardcore’ games I’ve played. It broke me, remade me, then broke me again. I hated it with all my heart by the time I was done with it (having played the whole game plus DLC), and I was relieved to see the backside of it. Then, Dark Souls II was released, and, damn it, my interest was piqued. I wasn’t going to jump right in because I was cheap and never bought games full price. While I was gunning up for it to go on sale, I decided that the best way to prep for it was to play the first game again. Why? I don’t know. Time eases the pain or some such. I was and am a masochist. I don’t know what it is. I also don’t know why I finished the game the first time as I HATED it by the time I went to *spoiler, I guess, for a 9-year-old game* take on Gwyn, the final boss.

Honestly, I was done with the game after beating Biggie & Small. That took so much out of me, although for the longest time, it was the highlight of my gaming career. The fact that I died to them sixty to seventy times and then finally, finally, beat them on my own. I felt like a GOD, and you couldn’t say shit to me for, oh, three minutes. Until I probably promptly got killed in the next new area. That’s how these games work. With one hand, Miyazaki giveth, and with the other, he slaps you across the face repeatedly and as hard as he can.

You want to know what took the place of defeating Biggie & Small as my proudest gaming moment? Two things happened in Sekiro that tested my mettle and found me almost wanting. And by things, I mean bosses, of course, because those are the linchpins of the game. We can talk about the gorgeous environments and the interconnectivity all we want, but we all know that the pinnacle of the games is when you walk through the white fog and face that boss. Or don’t walk through the white fog in some cases, which is trollery at its finest.

Genichiro was the first boss to make me question why the fuck I was playing Sekiro and maybe I was out of my league. Ian likes to say that I get that way with every big boss in a Souls game, and he’s right, but there’s something different about Genichiro. You get a tease of him because he’s the tutorial boss against whom you are supposed to die. You *can* beat him, which I did in NG+, but that was when I had all my gear. The three times I’ve faced him in NG, well, let’s just say he got the best of me. I will say I did much better the second and third time than the first, but I still didn’t even manage to get one of his life pips.

Coming across him up on the Ashina Castle roof was epic, and it was the hard check that every FromSoft game has. It’s the boss that takes your measure and sees if you have what it takes to finish the rest of the game. Some games journalists say if you can take Genichiro, then you can take any of the bosses later in the game. I don’t think that’s true, but I’m truly mediocre at the game. I’m decent at Souls games by now, but Sekiro took everything I had to give and then some. I reached the third phase of Genichiro for the first time after being ecstatic thinking I beat him, and then he immediately grabbed me and killed me.


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The next step is the hardest one

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I have good news. The Low FODMAP elimination diet I’ve been doing for….two months? Is that right? Well, that’s when I started planning it, at any rate. I know I was on it by Christmas, so at least a month and a half. Anyway, the good news is that with this diet, 90% of my digestive issues, including the worst, are gone. And, by the worst, I mean shitting my brains out for half an hour at a time. Oh, TMI, I guess, but I can’t really talk about my digestive issues without explaining what exactly is happening inside my body. Besides the ‘shitting my brain out’ aspect of it, there’s the bloated stomach feel and the flaming butthole feel. I still have a bit of the latter two, but it’s drastically reduced. I can’t tell you how happy I am that I can walk around without worrying about where the nearest bathroom is. I have only had to walk briskly to the bathroom two or three times in the past month and a half. Not run, and it didn’t last for half an hour.

By the way, when I say half an hour, I mean that I’m in the bathroom for a half hour to an hour–not that I’m shitting for the entire time.  It’s like five minutes of shitting, then five minutes of sitting and fuming, and then rinse, lather, and repeat. I  know it should be lather, rinse, and repeat, but it’s rinse, lather, and repeat in my brain, and I’m fine with that. Now, it’s walk briskly to the bathroom and sit for five minutes, then I’m done with it. It’s such a change, and I’m very happy.

So. The goal of the Low FODMAP elimination diet is not to be on it indefinitely. You can, but it’s really hard to get all the nutrients you need, and it’s very limiting. I have said that I don’t mind eating the same thing every day, but it’s getting a bit old now. I had been trying to open up my meals before trying this diet, but now it’s just a sad, sad world. I tweeted last night about how I was choking down a just barely ripe banana, which I hate, because a really ripe banana is High FODMAP whereas an unripe/barely ripe banana is Low FODMAP.

It was mushed up/sliced up and on top of my cereal, and I was just a sad, sad person choking it down. Weird fact about me. I can put foods on other foods, but then I eat the topping first. Such as, I’ll put spinach on top of pasta, fake cheeze, and sauce, then I eat the spinach before eating the rest. So, I was having cereal with mashed bananas and almond milk. I was forcing the bananas down mostly because I was trying to broadening my palate a bit, but it was not a good choice. I also chose it for the fiber-like aspects of it–for obvious reasons.

Back to the point of my post. The elimination diet is not meant to be forever. The next step is to add one ‘forbidden’ food at a time back into my diet. Here’s the thing. I’m unwilling to do it because I don’t want to spend more time in the bathroom again. It was not fun, and it really messed up my insides. And my asshole. I don’t want to go through that again, and I know that I’ll have to in order to figure out what is the actual trigger.

I am fortunate in that I work from home and can plan my day around the need to camp out in the bathroom. It doesn’t mean I want to do it, though. I remember how painful it was, and I do not want to go through it again. In addition, I know I’ll have to note my reactions (in writing), and I don’t want to do that, either. I write so much on a daily basis; I don’t like making it a chore. That’s why I resist when I read about journaling emotions or other such shit. But, in this case, while I can probably keep it in my head, I don’t want to count on it.

I have to do it, though. I want to be able to eat more and to know what exactly is irritating my bowels. My plan is to start with garlic, then onion, then honey. By the way, you’re suppose to add one a week. I suppose you could add everything from the same family (five different categories), and then figure out if that category is one that hurts me. That’s more a brute force way to deal with it, but the downside is that when there is the shittening, I’d still have to do each of those foods individually. The time saver is that if I don’t have a response to the category, then I can just skip to the next category rather than add one by one. Garlic and onion are often both present in the same foods, so I may just try both while controlling for other ingredients.

The other thing is whether I want to try adding back dairy and gluten. I’ve done without them for more than two-and-a-half years, and my digestive problems vastly improved. Do I want to risk it again? I’m pretty sure I have a lactose intolerance because I’m Asian. As for the gluten, it might be specific types of gluten.

If I do try to add back dairy and/or gluten, I’m going to take it very specific because I know there is something within each group that irritates my bowels. It would be amazing to be able to have real cheese again. Honestly, that is the one that I miss the most. I can do without many of the things I’ve eliminated, but goddamn I miss cheese. The reason I don’t care as much about the others is because there are several tasty substitutes. When I gave up gluten, dairy, and sugar twenty-plus years ago, the alternatives were made of tapioca root and arrow root, mostly. It was sad, and by the fourth month, I was literally dreaming of pizza.

I know I’m going to be happier at the end of this journey, but it’s the taking of said journey that is going to be a pain in my ass. And in my asshole. Which is not going to be a good time.

The way forward is obscure

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I’m depressed. I have to come out and say it because I’ve been downplaying it for over a year. Maybe two? I remember when it hit me, and I thought, “I’ll just wait it out. It won’t be that long.” My days of crippling chronic depression were behind me, or so I thought. I haven’t felt anything as mind-crushing as the depression I felt in my twenties, but that’s a pretty low bar to clear. I was passively suicidal in that I wasn’t trying to kill myself, but I wasn’t trying to prevent it, either. I would drive without my seat belt on short trips just to tempt fate, for example. It was a bad period of my life, and I tend to compare any current depression to that one to gauge how bad it is. That’s good on one hand because it reminds me of how bad it has been in the past and hasn’t been since. It’s bad on the other because then it’s easy for me to dismiss whatever I’m feeling now because it’s not like it used to be.

Side note: I have so many things I need to do that I have been putting off. Have a dead tooth taken care of. Find a new doctor because my old one left the network. Find a therapist because I know that I’m struggling. The downside of depression is that it makes reasonable tasks seem insurmountable.

Side note to the side note: I’m not doing well physically, either. I got a raging cold Christmas Eve, and I’ve been more sick than not since then. I had a week and a half of being relatively healthy, and then three or four days ago, I got slammed with a host of issues. The first being me sleeping eight or nine hours a night. I normally sleep six to seven hours a night, and one way I know I’m getting sick is when I hit eight or more hours. I’ve also had random chills, and I do not get cold. The only time I get chills is when I’m sick. The last three days (including today), I’ve woken up with a burgeoning migraine, and I’ve slammed two generic migraine Excedrin tablets the last two days, but I recently read that you can build up a tolerance to the meds and should not use more than ten doses (2 caplets in a 24-hour period) in a month, so I’m trying to ration them out. Today was not quite as bad as yesterday, so I did not take the Excedrin. I’m regretting it right now, though.

Side note III: Comorbidity is a thing, and I’m pretty sure my physical and mental health issues are interacting. Or rather, they’re making each other worse. One part of my depression is castigating myself for not doing whatever it is I need to do. My family is very industrious, and it’s hard for me to not see how I’m failing, even if I physically can’t do more than I am. I remember the last time I was in Taiwan, everyone wanted to walk to the top of a mountain. I knew I wasn’t going to make it, but I kept pushing on. I got hot and sweaty, and my heart started pounding. I didn’t want to say anything, and I suffered for longer than I should have. I was nearly in tears by the time I said I had to stop, and I felt so ashamed. And, I knew my parents put it down to me being fat (which they wrote to me about later in excruciating detail), but it wasn’t. Yes, I was fat. I still am. But even when I was at my fittest and walking four and a half miles a day, I still felt like shit while doing it, and I always ran out of breath going uphill.

Side note IV: I have the lungs of an eighty-year old. My last doctor told me that, and it was a relief to hear. I’ve always had a problem with breathing–I mean, I breathe, therefore, I am–and it was good to know that it wasn’t just my imagination. I’ve gotten better with the aid of taiji, but I’m still short of breath more often than not.

I have to push myself to do anything other than my normal day routine. Even then, I have to push a bit. I don’t want to do anything but just sit and stare blankly at the ceiling. There is little joy to be had in Whoville, and I pretty much just want to let everything go. Again, I’m not suicidal, though I have flashes of it, but I’m tired of trying to live.


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Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!–just as addictive as ever

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The food of my people returns!

One of my fondest gaming memories is 100%ing the original Cook, Serve, Delicious!* even though I don’t care about achievements at all.  I’ve explained before that my OCD traits mean that I went for perfect days no matter what in the first game and gold medals in the second. It’s carried over into the third game, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!, which is what this post is about. It’s the third in the series, all done by one guy, David Galindo, also known by his Twitter name, chubigans. The game is in Early Access, but it’s already polished and very playable.

I’ve been playing it for a week, and I just can’t put it down. In the beginning, I played one or two days at a time because that was all I could handle. As I got back in the groove of the frantic keyboard pounding, I found myself chanting the letters over and over. For example, cannoli. I use it a lot because it’s a 4-point dish (out of 5), and I did it plenty of times in the last game. In the holding sta–

Ok. Let me back up. The last game introduced the idea of Holding Stations at the top of the screen where you can prep dishes ahead of time so they’re ready to go when customers arrive. You make them in bulk, so it saves on having to make them individually. Some of them require additional steps when the customer comes. Take, for example, hamburgers (another 4-point dish). You cook the meat (M) ahead of time in the Holding Station, then when the customer comes, you have to doctor the burger to their taste. It’s not uncommon to hear me chant, “M, M, B, C, S, R,” and sometimes I’ll add a, “SEND” at the end of it. I don’t think I could play this game in front of other people because it would be really disturbing to them. Not disturbing as in horrifying, but as in literally disturbing.

When I first tried the Holding Stations in the last game, I was against it because it was just one more thing to have to deal with. Now, however, I don’t know how I ever lived without them. It’s a godsend to be able to fill five or six orders at once rather than each individually, and then just have to fill it out once when they’re all gone.

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I just upgraded to my 2.0 version

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I’ve been having a rough time lately with, well, lots of things. The low grade depression I’ve been experiencing for over a year–it might be two at this point–is more noticeable and yet….It’s hard to explain. I’m not outwardly depressed, but my body has been wrecked for a while now. The last week, I’ve been sleeping seven to nine hours a night except for two nights, and that’s a lot of sleep for me if I’m not sick. Am I? I don’t know. My nose is a bit prickly and my throat is a bit gummy, but nothing more than that. Oh, and I’m exhausted, but that’s par the course for me.

In addition, we’re renovating the house, which means I have to clean the bedrooms. I’m a slob. This is not an easy task. Well, one of the three rooms is clean, so that one is fine. My bedroom is a disaster area, and my computer room is worse. I’ve been working on my bedroom employing different strategies. The first was to do something every time I got up to do something else. Throw the clothes on the floor down the chute. Pick up papers from the floor. Or, in the case of my computer room, gather up all the stuffed animals. Then, I started to be more specific and take on larger chunks. Fill up this storage box with books from the bookshelf in my room. It’s a small bookshelf, but it’s already filled two medium-ish size storage containers. Today, I’m going to focus on cleaning out the top row and making sure everything is off the floor. Tomorrow, I’m going to tackled my desk. Which means getting more storage containers. Which means going to Target. I also need to get masks because there is a lot of dust I’m stirring around. A LOT.

I’ve heard of the Pomodoro method which is setting a timer for fifteen minutes and then doing whatever for that amount of time. The theory being that once you start, you’ll keep going. Or, if you don’t, at least you got fifteen minutes done. It’s a good method, but it still felt overwhelming enough that I chose to do it my own way. The bottom line is that if I put any kind of stricture on it, I wouldn’t have done anything. Now, I’m nearly done with my bedroom, and it’s more work than I’ve done on that room in over a year. The trouble is that I can only do so much in a given day, and it’s not because I’m lazy. It’s because of all my health issues. Which I’m still having a difficult time grasping as ok. Or rather, I’m having a hard time not thinking it’s all in my mind.

My family is very pro-work yourself into a grave. Both my parents work way more than they should, and when my father was forced to retire, he withered until he started an association into which he pours all his time, energy, and heart. My mom will never retire and if she does, she’ll volunteer most of the time, anyway. My brother works fifty to sixty hours a week and seems to have all his spare time crammed with interesting activities. Me, on the other hand, spends most of my time plunked on my couch. The work I’ve been doing on my rooms has been difficult, and it doesn’t help that I’m chastising myself for not doing more.


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Letting go and moving on organically

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I have difficulties letting go of how I see myself. I think of myself in terms of absolutes such as, “I am a negative person”, and “I am lazy”. Once I get an idea about myself, I can’t move past it. It’s fine with such things as, “My favorite color is black” because it doesn’t really matter if I change that or not. It’s not so fine when it impedes me, such as, “I hate  people.” I mean, it’s ok that I hate people, but it’s not realistic to think I’m going to go through my life never talking to people at all. Also, it’s not completely true. I don’t hate all people or even most people. Just certain ones, and if I have to be around lots and lots of people, then I hate the idea of it and not necessarily the people themselves.

I keep thinking about how I didn’t care about Christmas this year, in a positive way. Short explanation: I hate Christmas. Or rather, I did. For many reasons, I became grumpy about it right after Thanksgiving, and it lasted until New Year’s Day. I would notice all the Christmas bullshit around me, and I would gnash my teeth at my hatred of all things Saint Nick. This year, I didn’t even really notice it was Christmas until a few days before when my brother invited me over for dinner Christmas Eve. I wasn’t going to go, but then, to my surprise, I thought, “Why not?” I went and had a good time, and that was the end of Christmas for me.

I know it doesn’t sound thrilling, and in some ways, it scans as a subtle neg. “I didn’t even realize it was Christmas until it was over–that’s how little it means to me!” But, you have to take me at my word when I say it really is a positive thing because it freed up so much of my mind and heart in the months leading up to Christmas. I say it started the day after Thanksgiving, but oftentimes, it was earlier than that because Christmas commercials start earlier and earlier every year. I don’t watch any TV and rarely listen to the radio, but that doesn’t mean the collective unconsciousness doesn’t seep into my brain as well.

My point is that I didn’t force myself to be chipper and cheerful and to pretend that I love Christmas while internally seething. I didn’t grit my teeth and endure it while resenting it with every fiber of my being–which I’ve done in the past–I just didn’t care about it. It was so freeing, and it wasn’t something I could make myself do it. Which is one of my issues with how obsessed with positivity this country is. Don’t worry. That isn’t the main point of this post, but I had to throw it out there.

It was strange for me not to choke with burning resentment against Christmas this year, and I was at a lost as to what to do with it. I mean, being anti-Christmas had been a part of me for such a long time, I felt as if I lost a part of myself. It’s not a bad thing, but it is an adjustment. An absence of a negative is still an absence, and I still think about it from time to time. Fortunately, it’s not something I have to replace with something else, but it’s still something I have to adjust to.


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