Embracing Both Joy and Sorrow: Navigating a Difficult Holiday Season

We’re heading into the holiday season once again, and it’s got me thinking about expectations. Specifically, the expectations we place on ourselves, and then proceed to beat ourselves with when we don’t live up to the high standards we ourselves created.

Or is that just me?

Actually, I know for a fact that it isn’t just me, because I talk with clients every week who do the same thing to themselves. It’s part of human nature, part of having these minds that we carry around within ourselves. For those of us who are overachievers and perfectionists, like me, we have this tendency to feel we need to live up to this gold standard (and sometimes we are the ones who created the gold standard in the first place), and then we hold ourselves accountable to it, despite any unhappiness, stress, and anxiety it may bring us. We forget that we set the standard ourselves, and therefore we can change it, or let it go, anytime we want to.

This time between Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Years is my favorite time of the year. I love Christmas. I love the holidays. The older I get, the worse I’m getting. I’m decorating earlier and earlier, I’m playing holiday music more and more often. I watch holiday movies almost exclusively starting right about now, and going straight through to New Years. Eventually, I will just turn into Buddy the Elf, and my husband will have no choice but to ship me off to the North Pole where I can drink hot chocolate with candy canes year round and say things like “oh snowballs” without getting side-eyed.

But last year, our family got some disturbing news right before Christmas, and then our beloved and elderly cat took a dramatic turn for the worse, and we ended up spending Christmas day saying good-bye to him. And then a few weeks after that, we got the news that Leo’s mom was not going to be continuing her cancer treatments, and 18 days after that, she passed away. She was an active part of our lives, and the holidays were no exception. She has been woven into a lot of our traditions and memories.

So this year, the holiday season feels more than a little bittersweet, and I am working on finding my way through it. The truth is, I don’t really know how to navigate a difficult holiday season like this one. I have been dreading this entire season for months, but now that it’s here, I am finding that I am actually enjoying parts of it much more than I thought I would. And then I am randomly crying, seemingly out of nowhere. And then back to enjoying it again.

The only thing I can say for this experience so far is that it’s teaching me to throw my expectations out of the window. Expectations are kind of my enemy right now, because I never know when I will feel a very different way from what I was anticipating. And double goes for my husband, who has broken down into tears several times in the past week. In short, we are both kind of a mess, and also not, all at the same time.

I had assumed for months that this holiday season would be completely miserable. I have been dreading it since spring. And now that it’s here, it’s actually…not miserable at all. There’s sadness, of course, but it’s not as terrible as I thought it would be. The lights are still beautiful, the music still brings me joy, I am still looking forward to watching all of our usual Christmas movies. I am finding myself unexpectedly looking forward to most of Christmas again, and it’s a bit disconcerting.

See, the thing is, even low expectations are still expectations, and sometimes we can hold ourselves to a negative expectation just as much as a positive one. We can tell ourselves that we aren’t allowed to enjoy something, that a particular experience is supposed to feel a certain way, and that’s the only interpretation that we allow. In doing this, we inadvertently set ourselves up to not have pleasant surprises, because we close the door to unexpected joy and delight. We also are not typically real great at allowing for complex and changing emotions, so if something is feeling “good” or “bad”, we often tell ourselves that it can only be in one category, and we struggle with moving back and forth between happy, sad, joy, anger, and gratitude around the same experience.

And this is the challenge I’ve been grappling with this past week: learning to allow myself to dance between all the emotions, and not getting stuck in any particular one, or telling myself a story about how something is “supposed” to feel. Not chasing my joy away because I’ve told myself that surely it will not be visiting me right now, and instead allowing joy to be an unexpected visitor this month, quietly sitting down next to me and wiping my tears away. Realizing that this can be both a difficult holiday season, and a light one, in the same breath.

I mean, really, isn’t that what the holidays are all about? What is a string of lights in winter, if not a symbol of bringing light to the darkness? We do it precisely because they remind us that hope, joy, and love exist in even the darkest of moments. So what’s the use of stringing those lights at all, if we can’t bring the metaphor to life inside ourselves, and allow joy to light up our inner darkness? I realize that might be a little on the nose, but it’s also not wrong.

It also reminds me that the other half of the metaphor is the darkness. The darkness is not wrong, any more than night is wrong. The darkness just is, and it’s a part of life, just as much as the light is. Both are needed, both are allowed, and both are beautiful in their own way. In fact, both are beautiful because they both exist at the same time. It’s the contrast between them that catches our eye and brings us wonder.

If this holiday season is feeling complicated for you right now, too, I encourage you to join me in allowing for both the dark and the light to coexist inside you. Let the strings of lights you see around you remind you that there is always a little bit of joy available to you, to light up your darkest moments as well. I will do the same, and if you need help remembering this, let me know. I’m here.

I love you. I appreciate you. Thank you for being here.

Love, Amy