I believe that all years are difficult in some way, and that December is when that fact comes most crisply into focus, and that everyone probably needs a month like that, whether they know it or not.
–Tom Cox, “December”

I’m not sure if anyone else has mentioned that December is traditionally a bad month for writing. It is a month of Mondays.
–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I’m starting off here with two quotes about December because like many people who hate December, I feel a little defensive about it. Tom and Anne are here as my backup, because among other things that I’m saddled with in December, one of them is the churlish, teenagey desire to prove to people who are older than me (so boomers, basically) that I’m not uniquely grouchy. Anne is a boomer, and published Bird by Bird in 1994, the year I graduated from high school. Tom is a fellow Gen Xer, and published his take on December last week. Verily, December has always sucked.

Is it a Gen X thing, to have a chip on your shoulder about being unfairly smeared for not being cheerful? Or is it just that the existence of December regresses me to my teenage self? All I know is that when I opened Tom’s December essay in my email last week and read, “These are my bad weeks. It’s the same every year,” I felt relief. Not because I celebrate the suffering of one of my favorite writers, but because his words make me feel less cantankerous and isolated.

For sure, this is a bad month for writing, at least for me. For years of graduate school and academic life, it was the month of deadlines: I’d work myself into a sleep deficit finishing my own papers, then weep with fatigue through piles of grading. Upon completion, I would collapse with whatever virus was circulating around campus, just in time for the family reunions and guilt feelings about not wanting to go to church. It’s been exactly ten years since I finished my PhD and moved on to the nonprofit industrial complex, which has its own fucked-up December rituals. My body does not know what to do with this month. All my spirit wants is to be on the couch under a blanket, with a book.

Still, I scribble in a notebook and burn through pencils, because writing is a thing I do, or whatever. Here’s some writing that has gotten me through the first two weeks of December.

• There are brown crickets in the basement. They moved in a few months ago and I’ve been trying not to get a complex about them, but the thing that spooks me is that I’m not entirely sure they’re crickets. Their torsos are foul little puck buttons, beetle-like, and together with their tangles of menacing legs, almost undead-seeming in their mechanical angularity, they resemble some sort of quasi-biological automaton from a grimdark fantasy novel. Yes, I could take a picture and Google it. But then I’d have to linger near one of them long enough to photograph it, and then it would jump at me.

  Eric asked me if I’d killed any of them, and I said absolutely not. Just because I find them visually repugnant does not mean they don’t deserve to exist. Also, they would crunch.

• I have a shitty first draft (thanks, Anne Lamott) of No One Really Means What they Say, Part Two. I’ve been procrastinating on the editing because it requires me to think about sex trafficking, and my day job right now is also requiring me to think quite a bit about sex trafficking, and the news is also, obviously, requiring some attention to sex trafficking. I am good at compartmentalization–too good, really—and collaborating with trafficking survivors is a part of my job that I adore. But this is a lot of thinking about sex trafficking for a month of Mondays.

  Also, that essay draft has a lot of writing about my horrible former advocacy mentor, and she is one of my least favorite people in the world to think about, right up there with, like, Mike Johnson.

• A few months ago, my friend Jade Miller asked me if I’d come with her for moral support while she recorded an interview about Dissociative Identity Disorder for the mental health podcast Back from the Abyss, with Dr. Craig Heacock. I went along with her, feeling overprotective, because Craig had described himself to her as a “DID skeptic,” but I needn’t have worried; Craig was authentically humble, and clearly listening to learn. He said later in his introduction to the finished podcast, “This episode has made me begin to more critically look at some of my prior assumptions about DID, and more generally, what kinds of things might not be showing up in my office because of who I am or what I believe.” (Seriously, listen to the episode. It’s so good.)

  Jade, who has DID herself and gradually learned to manage her system of parts through group problem solving and unconditional love and acceptance, is not into trying to make people’s parts go away. People who come to her for peer support are often trying to recover from therapists whose approach to DID is to try to eliminate it. Jade says, “the parts aren’t the problem, the trauma is the problem.” Radical, I tell you.

• Could we–and by we I mean humans–please stop making all the trauma? Please?

• In related news, my Republican relatives sent me an e-card for Christmas. “Get to know Jesus He is present here and now Hold him in your heart.” Cool. This feels respectful. I think the “Jesus” they currently worship is busy terrorizing immigrants, murdering Venezuelans, decompensating on social media, and threatening his political enemies with death. You know, the Jesus who apparently came back from the dead to cosplay a Roman emperor and settled on Caligula. If only there was room in my heart for that guy. (America in December, amirite?)

• This morning, my cure for December was a hot bowl of chickpea broth with a poached egg in it, and buttered toast. This is the kind of thing I never ate before I started reading the food writer Tamar Adler, whose every word I now devour, because she is exactly the kind of writer who consistently manages to re-enchant the ordinary.

• Ever since I gave up social media last year (other than to share my newsletter posts and then scuttle away like a spider), my life has been fundamentally oriented around three core practices: reading, writing, and cooking. Some of it’s work, some of it isn’t. Cooking rarely feels too much like work, for me, because my spouse appreciates but does not expect it, and I don’t have children to feed (not that I mind feeding children, but I know enough parents to know that it is work). Cooking, like writing but more straightforwardly so, is where I sort out my head and reconnect with the earth and all that ancestral business, which generally involves cabbage.

• I rarely lose my appetite, but when I do, it’s usually because of anxiety. It happened to me abruptly last Sunday evening, in the middle of preparing a satisfyingly time-consuming meal of squash empanadas and roasted potatoes. My cat Inej started stumbling around the kitchen, her fabulous calico sassy walk devolving rapidly into a drunken weave. I flashed to our cat Bonzo, another beautiful acrobat, who died in early 2013 of a neurological ailment that affected his balance. Call it a trigger if you like–it felt unbearable, and my interest in food was gone in an instant.

  My friend Imani, who understands this anxiety because she has a tender heart and a dog so dumb that he eats moldy Taco Bell out of the garbage, came with me to the vet the next morning for moral support, which I needed. One ear infection diagnosis and antibiotic/steroid shot later, and the sassy walk returned. I arrived home from the vet nearly faint with hunger, whereupon I piled a plate with empanadas and potatoes, and ate until I returned to a state of functional humanity. Inej has likewise returned to a state of functional catting.

• We cancelled all our streaming services last spring to save money and divest from various evils. The only service we kept was our subscription to Critical Role, the indie Dungeons and Dragons troupe, which is inexpensive and isn’t run by anyone but a bunch of ridiculously creative voice actors who mostly act in video games. I love it because I’m a fantasy geek and a sucker for really good collective storytelling, but also because it’s so kind and wholesome, in the ways one needs when one’s country is run by moralizing bigots and sex pests. Like the other night, we were watching an episode where several characters had to walk blindfolded across a terrifying winding bridge across an abyss, and the likewise blindfolded actors who played them were just scooting their tiny D&D miniatures around on a cardboard drawing while their fellow actors yelled, “ok, forward just a bit, ok STOP! Now turn right, but careful, you’re getting too close to the edge, scoot to the left a little, NOT THAT MUCH,” and at that moment, I had no desire to be entertained by anything or anyone else.

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