Pouring out onto the page

An interesting Christmas, to be sure. (listening to: Dave Matthews Band, "Where Are You Going?")

Ahhh... Christmas. How wonderful the time of year. Everything lightly dusted with a coat of freshly fallen snow, the streets also white with snow and ice, the windows of your room frosted with intricate patterns of frozen water spiderwebbing its way across the pane. Some might think that God himself paints the earth this way purposefully. Like the white page, the earth ready to be re-written in a new year, fresh with beginnings and possibility. With all this optimism around me, why do I feel so down?

Maybe it's many reasons. Maybe it's because my brother is home, and reminding me just how possible it is for one person to make an impact on their corner of the world. Something I've failed to do since being released from the safety net of college. Maybe it's because the holidays are a time for gathering together with loved ones, and family gatherings are filled with couples sharing the presence of each other in comfort and joy just to be together. Something I have yet to find. Maybe it's because something is trying to show me just how pointless it is to try and save money to start a new life, as everything around me breaks down, forcing me to dump more and more of the green into it just to stay afloat. Something I have yet to learn, or at least to put into practice.

Maybe it's a thousand of these reasons, and millions more that have yet to congeal themselves in my head. Overall, there is a very large sense of lonliness, inadequacy, and foolishness that all seem to add up to a very lonely holiday season. Fighting with friends, being unable to keep up even the closest friendships so I can look at something around me and be happy with it. TO be able to point to something... anything and say, "Look at what I've made. I'm proud of this." Lately my foot seems to find it's way into my mouth so often that I often wonder if I'm standing on my head.

The thing I've been told to cure the holiday blahs is to make a list of everything I'm thankful for, and give thanks that I have all those things. But every item on my laundry list seems to resonate more with things I don't have because of my foolishness than things I can take pride in. Living, as I do, day to day, I often feel like a duck on a pond. On the surface, everything looks calm. But below the surface, I'm paddling around furiously just to be able to breathe. I seek comfort where there is none, and the more I turn to things I have sought comfort in before, the more I find them falling away from me.

"I want to hold on to something that won't break away or fall apart; like the pieces of my heart."