What does, and doesn’t, help when treating holiday depression
It’s a fraught time of year. Perennially: the holidays, even when they’re happy, are stressful. And especially this year: two wars going on and a scary election season ahead and a planet that’s telling us, with increasing urgency, “You can’t keep treating me this way.”
The feeling I want to write about can’t be completely divorced from those things, but it has a separate life of its own.
It’s depression. Not the kind that goes on for weeks or months but a leaden sense of dread that can descend without warning at this time of year and that comes and goes throughout the season.
I say “leaden” because to me that’s what it’s like: as if my head and chest are suddenly and helplessly weighted and sinking. It’s physical. And it’s spiritual, like my entire being has gone bleak.
When this feeling came on about a week ago, I thought, “What’s the matter with me?” But I keep a fiveyear diary, and that evening when I opened it to write the day’s brief entry I happened to look at what I’d written in the past on the same page and saw that during the Christmas week I’d recorded similar feelings in three of the past four years. I’d written happy stuff too, just as I would this year; but there it was, the startling proof that, for me, this weird intermittent despair seems to be woven into the season.
Seeing that it has been a pattern for me makes me aware of what does and doesn’t seem to help and what to be careful of.
First, what doesn’t help: articles and pep talks about how to feel better. You should go for walks, you should eat carefully, you should meditate and do yoga, you should volunteer. I already do these things and they’re good but they don’t touch the thing I’m talking about. And while it’s generally offered in a well-meaning way, the idea that there’s a simple fix out there can be both reductive and belittling.
What also doesn’t help: shame. The voice — someone else’s or my own — that reminds me in a preachy tone that feeling bad is selfindulgent. There are millions of people in the world who have real problems; you’re a relatively lucky person with a secure and comfortable life, for which you should be grateful. Maintaining a sense of perspective is actually important and not something I want to lose sight of; but implying that depression is caused by myopic self-centeredness and ingratitude piles a bunch of things on top of it that don’t belong there.
What to be careful of: not contaminating other people with these feelings, and yet not being so selfcontained that I become isolated.
It’s no one’s job to fix this for me, in fact it’s not something that needs to be fixed. It just needs to be weathered and my hope is to weather it gracefully.
Which brings me to what does help. What helps is to accept that this is how I’m feeling right now. I have felt good before and I will again. In fact I’m still having good moments and even hours — this particular kind of depression is permeable and leaves me open to experiences of delight in a way that an ongoing span of depression may not. I can read, I can admire the beauty of the city in winter, I can enjoy the conversations around the table, I can appreciate the thought and love that has gone into the presents.
I can tolerate the leadenness when it comes and know that it is normal and that it will lift.