Affliction

With Christmas, as with so many afflictions, I have taken it too seriously and not seriously enough. Too seriously: it is not a grave injury that is done me by a brutal world. Not seriously enough: my distress is a thing I have to thoroughly understand and intelligently address.

Yes, yes, it is distressing in that it’s a last gasp of a dying Christianity that doesn’t understand itself. It’s being celebrated by people who don’t believe in it for reasons they themselves do not understand and do not process properly. Yada yada yada miserable people trying to fill a spiritual hole with mountains of crappy stuff yada yada they won’t even sing a damn Christmas carol together yada yada yeah all that. Take it as read.

But my distress has much more to do with an autistic person’s distress at interrupted routines, and in particular what feels like an intentional subversion of everything I try to build in the course of the year, every bulwark against anxiety and overeating systematically stripped away. Like the damned time-change twice a year: everything I work so hard to create is violently jolted. And the timing of the winter assault, with Thanksgiving leaving just time to semi-recover, and then Christmas (with New Year’s for a coup de grace!) wrecking everything again. It is as demoralizing as it could well be: it’s as if designed to ruin me.

It is not designed to ruin me. It is people clinging desperately to one of the last scraps of sacred time left to them. Mauled as they are by modernity, shell-shocked and stupefied by diabolically clever marketers, they’re still trying to salvage something. Wish them God speed. But I still have my own problem. I lose myself, I lose my nest, I lose all my supports, I’m naked in the wind.
First of all: remember: no one gives a fuck. No one is paying attention. You do this season however makes sense to you. They are actually looking after each other, in their fashion. You just figure out your own stance, and your own ritual. So you don’t have your breakfast cafe for two days! What that means is that you can do extended sits, both mornings. Like maybe two thirty minute and one twenty minute sit, with your little walking meditations in between. Then make your breakfast and have your coffee and face the day. Whatever else happens then, you will have done something that will feel like it’s of value, and like it’s not participating in ruination. And say a prayer, while you’re at it, for the exiled Christ-child. This can’t be fun for him either.