I am no Scrooge but I am so fucking sick of Christmas right now.

Last month my Thanksgiving was cancelled due to my friend who intended to host having COVID-19. Totally grateful to him for being forthcoming so we didn’t attend, but ever since that day everything has caused me to want to pull my hair out. I missed my favorite holiday, the last vestigial respite before all hell breaks loose, & I am so goddamn tired.

I had a conversation w/ a customer today whose lack of foresight is somehow my problem. See, he’s a customer who has customers, whose customers buy a lot of nifty gifties for Christmas, but he doesn’t produce shit. My company produces what his company sells, & he keeps sending me Purchase Orders that literally say “Entered: December 6th, 2022”, “Expected: December 6th, 2022”. Nevermind that his company is across the country – not across the street – & he has to send us his branded packing materials for us to pack his branded products into before I can get even a single line item off the ground. It’s infuriating.

I finally have an incredible staff @ work, but my boss has asked everyone to work a 6th day the 1st 2 weeks of this month. Last year the employees I had barely worked 6 days a week COMBINED, but we didn’t have a corporate order campaign going that required constant backstock. Working a 6th day each week means I have not had time to go shop for my own family, because I’m too busy making sure that everybody else’s family gets what they asked for (hint: it’s flavored salt – that most of them won’t even use).

& it’s not just the work demands that I find demanding. I have friends I haven’t seen in a month, & other friends who can’t make our plans, & other friends whose messages I can’t respond to for days on end. I have a mother who asked me what Victor & I wanted for Christmas when we don’t want anything she can afford (we want a house! She is not responsible for contributing to that desire!) I have a father who’s been in the hospital since the weekend before Thanksgiving, who hasn’t even listened to the audiobooks I got him for his September birthday, even though all I’m trying to do by sending him books is literally save his life. I am cold all the time, I’m tired all the time, it’s dark all the time (fuck you, Daylight Savings Time, I thought we passed a law to stop doing that), & I’m still grieving what my best friend did 3 months ago.

I know that as a person ages their perception of time speeds up. & I do feel like this is all happening really fast. 3 months ago I was desperately clawing my way through the workday in the face of the worst employee who has ever lived, ignorant of the fact that I was about to uproot about like, a quarter of my support system by responding poorly to bad news, unattached to any kind of goal-setting behaviors, & completely w/o responsibility to myself. But now I’m trying to be responsible, I never have enough time.

I started tonight trying to write out a list of my goals & how achieving them/not achieving them makes me feel, because I finally have identifiable goals again, but I quickly got lost in the perfectionism sauce. I can’t explain how it’s going to feel when I don’t check off literally every thing every day, because I can remember how it feels TO check off every thing every day. Maybe that’s correspondent w/ having enough daylight hours, or maybe it’s just correspondent w/ doing less. But I wasn’t happy enough when I was doing less.

I wasn’t happy enough when all I had to do was a good job @ work then a mediocre job of being a girlfriend @ home. I wasn’t happy when I wasn’t singing, dancing, writing, learning Spanish & taking care of cats. So then why is it that now I’m singing, dancing, writing, learning Spanish & taking care of cats I still feel an utter sense of defeat?

I’m trying to do the holiday spirit, I really am. I baked a pumpkin pecan pie for Thanksgiving. I bought an $8 secondhand artificial Christmas tree. We hung the lights, the stockings, we bought eggnog & went to go see a Christmas movie in the theatre. But a huge difference between who I am now & who I was 2 Christmases ago is that my entire life’s essence seems to be driven by this job. If I don’t have a sense of fulfillment @ the end of the workday, it’s hard to muster up a sense of accomplishment after that.

I used to work 2 jobs, necessitating some of that work be second shift. It was amazing to have an entire “day off” before I went in, removing the need to get anything & everything done @ work once I arrived since I almost always already had a sense of achievement before I got in each day. I want that back. I want that back w/o being the kind of person who gets up @ 6 AM.

Because damnit, half the year it’s still dark @ 6 AM! WHY CAN’T WE MOVE CHRISTMAS TO JULY.