So, the phrase “Christmas wierdness” was coined by Lee yet it rang such a chord with me, no other phrase would do as a title for this post. I remember when Lee first shared this post last year and his description stopped me in my tracks because his words could be mine, they are so acurate. I distinctly remember feeling this aloneness and weirdness on Christmas Day even as a young child and it would spook me; then, when I was a little older (being a highly analytical child), I would sit alone in my room and try to isolate it in order to understand it but I never could. I would often feel intensely alone by the end of that day…as though everyone else had left me to go to somehwhere else called “Planet Christmas”…even though I was surrounded by the coming and goings of noisy people whom I loved and who wanted to include me in all their celebrations.

Later in life, it became muddled with the feeling of drinking alcohol in the middle of the day (now, I don’t) or even missing childhood Christmases and those who were no longer there to spend them with and yet, even with a family of my own and a different way of life to the old one that pivoted around material things or over-indulgence, the feeling persisted. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being with loved ones and the glow of love around the hearth…but…it can feel so cathartic to admit to this feeling and, as Lee found, discover you are far from the only one experiencing it. No, its not depression; I always knew that it was nothing to do with that but it was a profound sense of feeling disjointed with the Christmas culture and thus, I suppose, a little bit alienated.

For me, I have also identified it as part of being very highly sensitive and empathic to a fault, which means I pick up on all the disparate feelings of people all around me, neighbours and further afield, but also my own from all those other years, even from other lifetimes….with Christmas Day acting like a calendar anchor to pinpoint them all on the same focal point, across time. Then, as I’ve become more conscious over the years, I’ve felt the out-of-syncness of so much behaviour programing and so many ingrained habits with which I don’t resonate and so its as though the magic of the day very quickly wears off to be replaced with a sort of energetic sludge which, by Boxing Day, feels intensely disturbing to me if I allow it to (mostly, these days, in physical sense which can feel like a hang-over even through I don’t drink or over-indulge with different foods to normal). Thanks to the conversation that Lee opened, I now know that I’m not alone in experiencing this, which makes a huge differences.

It doesn’t mean I don’t look forward to tomorrow…but it does mean I go into it with my expectations set at a realistic level, I focus on the familial love (and send the wish of that feeling being readily available to all people everywhere) whilst taking care of myself even more than ever, which I recommend to anyone else who is similarly sensitive. In the last few years, it feels as though I have reclaimed Christmas on better terms; partly by approaching it as something new and as a celebration of light, love and gratitude; and by not being so ingrained in traditions and pleasing  or meeting the expectations of others. By allowing it to be something spontaneous each time it happens, with no sacrosanct rules to be maintained, no “where” or particular “way” that I have to be, I have given my energy field room to breathe and to evolve, year on year, so that the occasion no longer feels like trying to squeeze into a box I have already outgrown.

Originally published on Spinning the Light.