The Childless at Christmas

And really, the whole holiday season

Hello friends and thank you for the grace to be gone the last month or so. I needed the time away from Substack and writing in general, and I was also traveling overseas + having terrible jet lag upon return. I would say the break was good for my mental health, but it’s November, so who are we kidding?

I’m not sure when it started, the deepening pit in my throat that began every November and continued through the end of January, at least. I’m sure there’s some Seasonal Affective Disorder happening there—living in a house that gets so little sunlight probably doesn’t help this—but it manifests itself mostly as just a sense of dread of what is to come and then an almost choking grief at what passed mostly uneventfully. Each year I try to anticipate it, ward it off with plans to bake more, enjoy more, get out more, but every year the ache only deepens by all I do and all I leave undone. There is no cure for it, I have found, but to just move through each day with whatever amount of purpose and hope I can.

There is a paragraph in my novel-in-progress where I write,