Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Facebook tells me that three years ago today I said "I hate Thanksgiving but it turns out that having to treat it like a normal day and actually function is not something I am very good at either."

I distinctly remember writing this: three years ago today was Thanksgiving. I'd been to work and probably lectures, I was trying to write an essay, I was trying to have the ordinary day everyone around me was having and I was just so miserable instead.

I think it's good to do normal stuff but it's no good for me to pretend to myself that it will ever be a normal time for me. (Thanksgiving is a moveable feast so sometimes the date and the holiday align, sometimes they don't. Both are good and bad in their different ways. This year they're a day apart.) I used to say I never minded the date, that he was no more gone then than any other day. But the more years it's been, somehow the more I feel it.

Thanksgiving is a national day of mourning for a loss of life so great I can barely wrap my head around it, but it's also a day of personal mourning for me, no matter how many years it has been since my brother died in the early hours of a Thanksgiving that's almost 16 years ago now.

I think I've done okay this year, but I'm saying that despite hardly having slept no matter how tired I am (and I constantly am) through the month of November, and having random anxiety attacks, and having rare (for extrovert me, anyway) urges to isolate myself and then being sad no one is talking to me. Yes this is relatively good compared to some years, but it's not actually great.

I'm glad I wrote this, a few years ago. I default to pretending everything's fine when it isn't, and it's good to have these reminders of how to best look after myself this time of year by not pretending everything is fine, even though I would really like it to be.