From the tumblr archives | ‘And so this is Christmas’: depression, isolation and community-building
‘Tis the season to cry even more
note: this post has been dug up from my old Tumblr blog and re-homed to kick off my new ‘stack; it was written in deep-pandemic December 2020 (I am not currently depressed, nor heartbroken)
Picture the scene: it’s Christmas Eve, I get off work at five, wish my colleagues a happy holiday and praise the little team of new-starters I’ve been teaching all sorts of mind-numbing processes this week for their hard work; at half past I pour out an extra large glass of red wine and sob while Careless Whisper and Hopelessly Devoted to You play repeatedly on rotation. This, I suppose, is what Christmas looks like when you’re 23, depressed, heartbroken, caught in the middle of a global pandemic and alone in a house (albeit a beautiful one) in a locked-down capital city.
Though it’s tempting to indulge in my own woes here, I’ll save that for my diary and my therapist and instead endeavour to broaden the issue. I spend the majority of my evenings crying, but why does tonight, Christmas Eve, seem to weigh heavier on the heart? Well, for one thing, it’s personal. Some of my best memories are from this time of the year, and this year a lot of the people and the kinds of plans that made the holidays special have as good as dropped out of the picture. For another, there’s a sense in which, this year, the heaviness is universal: it’s rough for all of us - though for each of us the particular inconvenience or pain imparted by the pandemic is unique, complex and multi-layered. Still, I think there is a little something more.
A holiday like Christmas which, though founded in religious tradition, has now largely been detached from its pious origins (at least here in the UK) plays an interesting role in the present-day cultural imaginary. It is imagined primarily as a time for exchanging material gifts, sharing a dinner with your immediate family, and indulging in excruciatingly cheerful media. Though much festive media is pregnant with social values like love, mutual care and solidarity, politics at the dinner table is the contention to end all contentions. The insidious sleight of hand here is that too often capitalists profit off our foundational attraction to these values whilst actively working to fracture communities, alienate us from our neighbours and exploit vast swathes of society.
There’s a kind of suffocating commitment to joy and cheer which abounds in December - in many ways it’s much worse for those of us suffering and unhappy than the bleakness of January (or, this year in particular, than the bleakness of the rest of the year wholesale). What Guy Debord calls the spectacle - the economy of representation - stuffs us full of images of happy families, life-changing gadgets and toys, and happy endings. The fact is that Christmastime is not imagined with the lonely, the loveless, the homeless, the hungry, the indebted or the grieving in mind.
I’m currently reading Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s International Booker Prize winning The Discomfort of Evening, and when the eldest son of the novel’s central family drowns on Christmas Eve, the Christmas tree is tossed out in the street and the whole affair is cancelled. There is simply no space for grief at Christmas, and I find this to extend to all emotions perceived as negative (often imbued too with a sense of the moral failure of the depressed). Though it’s become a bit of a buzzword, a critique of toxic positivity feels especially relevant at this time of year.
A google search reveals a surprisingly helpful definition of toxic positivity as ‘the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations’ [which] ‘results in the denial, minimization, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience’ [source]. The holidays are a prime candidate for this species of denial, minimisation and invalidation because there is an abundant expectation that we put our dreary lives, all our woes and troubles, on hold for the season. The problem - often willingly misunderstood by many of those who haven’t experienced it - is that depression does not simply let up for the holidays. Still the clouds hang close. I might add what a tragic thing it is that, collectively, we get so excited to be given the chance to pause our lives and work for a while. In such a light, we might ask if there were ever a more damning indictment of the present society’s capacity to produce human flourishing than our cultural obsession with Christmas.
Toxic positivity hurts all of us, even those of us who are, all told, fairly happy. This is because it idealises something impossible in this world - uninterrupted happiness and positivity. To make an ideal out of this is to deny the reality of the presence of boredom, pain, heartache and of death in all of our lives. In the same way that the logic of capital (the endless pursuit of profit and exponential growth) is fundamentally flawed, a logic centred on the endless pursuit of happiness is similarly fundamentally flawed. Both deny the realities of ourselves and our natural environment. We must make space for ourselves and our planet to simply rest.
Christmas is saturated with messages of charity and goodwill; my question is how we might go further than charity towards authentic and thoroughgoing solidarity. While the perspective of charity positions some as others, or outsiders, who may or not be worthy of our goodwill, solidarity recognises the fundamental humanity shared between every one of us and centres our capacity to support, and to extend care towards, one another as equals. How might we extend whatever the so-called Christmas spirit may be such that all of us - even the stubbornly unhappy of us - are included within its reach?
We make a start, I think, by moving away from individualistic traditions towards communalistic ones, and making community-building and caring activities into staples of the season. An element of this thrust would focus on meeting the grieving where they are at and offering appropriate modes of care and support. Because of how memory-laden the holidays tend to be, a time like Christmas calls for communities to rally around those hurting, suffering and grieving. This is in direct opposition to the suffocating effect produced by the kind of banishing of bad emotions practiced by so many families so commonly at Christmas. The pain this denial causes is usually unwitting, and only the best intentions are present. But this, I submit, is a corollary of the empty appropriation of social values by capitalism which is particularly rife at Christmas. Social values without class consciousness are infinitely less helpful than they might be - and they keep revolutionary thinking at bay. This Christmas, somber though I am, I look towards political revolution with hopes that it comes quickly. It is imperative, for the sake of us all, that we imagine a better future as possible, and as something that we can build with our own hands and hearts.
Places to start:
https://www.crisis.org.uk/crisis-this-christmas/
https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/provide-vital-support-for-refugees-this-christmas/