New Year, Still Here. Nope. Adios 2023, Welcome to the New Me. Pass. Still Thirsty on January Firsty?? Hahahah, ok, closer. 2024 and your mother’s a— Wait, what in god’s name is going on here??!! I guess we can’t all be Tennyson.

If you were to put forward an argument that the best part of the entire year is in the moments before New Year’s Day and before New Year’s Eve, even, I’d believe you. Probably sign my name on your petition and everything. This tiny little perch-in-time may not be holiday of its own but the views are aaaallllllll holiday. Close enough to the changing of the calendar to be in touch with the groundswell of optimism for the as not yet minted year but well clear of the hangover (literal or emotional). In Spanish, depending on context, the word resaca connotes either a hangover or the detritus left on the beach when a tide recedes. I think both meanings are beautifully appropriate for the aftermath of “the holidays,” a period which culminates on New Year’s Day. These moments also perfectly accommodate a luxurious wash in the bittersweet waves that come from irremediably closing an era, putting it away forever. If there’s a more gratifying experience than submerging into a pool of melancholic nostalgia–hell, possibly with candles and a glasses of wine (is there such thing as a glass of wine? It’s always a glasses in my experience)–I can’t think of it and if I’m honest neither do I want to. No, that perch has it all, including the as-yet fruitless promise of some easy epiphany which might unlock Zachary 3.0 for the new year.

The holidays-at-large are a real sticky wicket. If I squint I can appreciate the underlying theory of coming together with loved ones and related ones (sometimes even one and the same!) but every year I just seem to fall short. Or, at least I used to fall short, now I abscond myself away to the isolated ruralities afforded by my sailboat. I’ll tell you that part of my aversion to holidays is a conscious, rational distaste for forced commercialism, fireworks, the gross purge of uncomfortable historical truths that don’t fit one particular narrative, and the general spirit of bullying that the collective tends to subject itself to. Don’t believe me. I believe me, but that’s probably only because it makes me feel smart.

No, the more frank assessment of the pernicious underlayer of holidays is that they are uncomfortable. My experience is they tend to put a fine point on the (purported) fact that I am different, that I am mentally ill and don’t experience feelings in the way that others do. I’m BiPolar, and the deeply rich irony is that for all the emphasis on the extreme poles, most of my conscious life is spent muddling in the cold, vacuous middle. I don’t use middle to suggest medium happy; this isn’t a quaint, if dull, little coastal town you’d stop at on your road trip between San Francisco to LA. No, this town is a paradox all its own: it isn’t on the map because it doesn’t exist, yet you somehow live there, except there’s no there. All perfectly clear, right? How’s this: there just aren’t a lot of feelings in my life.

For years I’ve learned to console myself with the narrative that I just don’t live with a typical ebb and flow of emotions. I might tear up at a telenovela episode while at the same moment obtusely failing to understand why someone might be sad when a family member dies. The idea of feeling Excitement for an impending [anything] is an utterly, utterly foreign a concept to me. I’m not even so certain I know Fear very well, in spite of ostensibly being deeply cowardly. Anxiety though? Ok well now we’re getting into my sweet spot. I have a theory that all of my perceived emotions are just differently-tinged shades of anxiety–all of them–and I won’t be easily talked out of it, either.

So, I dread holidays because they position a magnifying glass over this void; I perceive myself as this emotionless android walking through a world full of individuals who are either experiencing or pretending to experience (which, do you imagine, is worse??) a rapture of conviviality of which by and large I find myself incapable (leaving aside, for now, the lush confines of gluttonous excess). That’s a very lonely feeling, I can tell you, and it can quickly cascade into self-loathing. But lately, I’ve been in touch with a range of feelings that I thought long obsolete and out of reach for my ill, aged synapses. Crackles or jolts to that effect, at least. I can assure you it is a wildly gratifying development but naturally it does carry with it certain uncomfortable baggage. I told myself I am incapable of feelings, but it turns out that maybe I’m just a selfish asshole? Insert cringing emoji here, amiright?? Whoops, talk about uncomfortable holiday conversation!

The good news is that I like the person that I am more than I ever have before. At a minimum I can say that I wear myself ever-more comfortably. And I think that largely speaking each year is better than the last–though I grudgingly recognize that given I’m typing this from a lengthy sailboat voyage around the paradise of coastal Mexico, it might be more surprising if I didn’t have on rose colored glasses. So there’s hope yet! And perhaps somebody smarter than me can put together a pursuasive argument that it is better not to be fully self-actualized, because then what would one strive for? And in this universe where perfection doesn’t exist, is not the striving to be better more important than the actual state of being?? Uhhh, like I said, it’ll take someone smarter than me to cook that up convincingly. So…someone? Anyone?

It all leaves me brooding on whether the various “truths” that we know about ourselves are in fact helpful shorthands to summarizing our existential experience or if maybe every bit as often they are just outdated boundaries that we haven’t bothered to knock down and stroll beyond. On the one hand, how can you grow if you are forced to relearn/reconfirm the same lessons over and again? On another hand, who wants to live cooped up when new horizons may very well await? In the end I don’t think leveling up is probably going to come of this knockoff variety of end-of-year philosophizing. All the romanticizing and contextualizing and rhyming refrains in the world are likely not going to cut it. It’ll probably take some work. Real, actual, hard time which: eeeeesh. On second thought, maybe I’ll just blithely blog my way into Zachary 3.0. That’s probably just as good, right?