xmas counted: merry xmas!

The Christmas Song - King Curtis

My last song of the year is tends to be fairly subdued. The arrival of Christmas morning is usually a relief for me. I hope it was for you, too.

The middle two weeks of December are just stressful, you know? It’s a busy time. There are parties upon parties, and I get too ambitious about presents, and I feel guilty as my holiday plans solidify without any space for this cousin or that friend, and I never finish up everything I promised at work. There are too many things. I just can’t fit them all in. What's more, it’s the end of the year, and I look at my countless lists of weekly/monthly/annual goals, and it’s my last chance to be the sort of person who finished that song or code or post or, or…

I want to be that sort of person. I really do! I want it too much.

I catch myself sitting on the floor at two in the morning, shivering and cutting out pieces of fabric for a stalled sewing project that has been haunting me since the spring, even though it doesn’t have any kind of deadline and I need to be at work in seven hours.

When Zach and I briefly lived together in 2015, they felt like our relationship was falling apart in December. It seemed like everything they did just made my life more stressful, until we realized that I get like this every year. For real, it’s not you, it’s me. In more recent years, they would listen to my stress-rants over the phone, and, at the end of my frenetic recitation of today’s to-dos, affectionately suggest that some of the items might not be strictly necessary.

The upside of my mid-December panic is that I have the most glorious January hypomania. All the optimism of early January! Everything is new! I have reams of shiny fresh goals and I haven’t fallen behind on any of them! It is a fortnight of joyous energy drawn from my own potential. (Followed by one of my worst fortnights of the year, because of course I eventually fall behind on something and this confirms that I’ll never achieve anything and am doomed to a life of failure. 'Tis the season of strong emotional patterns.)

I intend to invent some shiny fresh goals over the next few days, but I doubt they’ll stretch to the end of 2020. Since Zach died, I’ve found it very difficult to think about the future on a timescale beyond a month or two.

My various effective altruist involvements mean that I am, not infrequently, asked, "What's your plan for improving the world?” I had a variety of answers to that question, before. Go into biosecurity research? Get involved in disarmament diplomacy? Start a biotech company? Become a full-time organizer? Move back to Canada? Move to the UK? The only real constants in my visions of my own future were that I’d want to do some kind of work on responsible biotechnology and that I’d be in a relationship with Zach.

Well. That's been hard. I'm very grateful that my therapist pointed out that planning my next few years would require, at least on some level, moving on. I’m not there yet. That seems reasonable. I wouldn't expect someone else to have "moved on" less than five months after their favourite person died. I lost a lot of really good futures. I don't want to forget them. They were, and are, important to me. But I recognize that I need to invent something else to look forward to.

My therapist suggested that I try to identify other things I could be sure of. What am I confident that I want in my future?

I tried to write this down. What a mess! At any scale beyond “I like puns” and “I want to stay in touch with my friends” there are far, far more things that I enjoy and want than can possibly fit into the time I’m going to have. I apologized to my therapist for how little I had to show from the exercise.

“Well,” she said, “I guess you can be certain that you want to room in your life to do a wide variety of different things. You probably don’t want to be focused on a single project for ten years.”

Which is fair. The tagline I chose for my website is Tessa Alexanian likes too many things.

Like, uh, writing lengthy newsletters about xmas music has nothing to do with anything that matters on a grand scale. But I like it. It's going to keep happening. Whatever new creature I re-aggregate into in 2020 is going to do a tremendous miscellany of things.

Hoping to be here next year, and the year after that,
- Tessa