First christmas alone research

Hannah_84

A week before Christmas, I become a researcher again.

Not the neat, academic kind with clean questions and manageable variables. The kind you become when your life turns into an experiment you didn’t consent to and your only tool is attention. I study my own days the way a historian studies a crumbling archive: carefully, relentlessly, with the sick knowledge that the record is being lost even as I write it.

My data set is my body.

Swallowing: unreliable. Eating: procedural. Spoon, small mouthful, wait, hope it goes down. Pain: constant background noise with sudden spikes that rearrange everything. Fatigue: not tiredness, but depletion. The kind that makes the simplest tasks feel like they belong to another species.

My second data set is social.

Messages that stop mid-conversation. People who mean well until the conversation includes the word “pain.” Invitations that don’t arrive, explained away as misunderstandings. Courtesy that feels like a fence: pleasant, smooth, and designed to keep me on the outside.

I observe how Christmas changes people.

The lights go up and everyone starts performing the version of themselves they think they’re meant to be. Generous. Cheerful. Together. Whole. The season becomes a set of expectations you’re meant to meet without complaint. A shallow agreement to pretend life is coherent.

And I can’t meet it.

Not in my body. Not in my face. Not in the way my emotions leak through the minute someone asks if I’m OK. I can’t fake the smile now. I can’t round off the corners of the truth to make it easier for other people to hold. I’m too exhausted to translate my experience into something palatable.

So the week before Christmas becomes a slow, excruciating reveal.

I learn what my presence costs others.

Not money. Not effort. The cost is emotional. To include me, they would have to admit something they’d rather deny: that suffering exists without meaning, that bodies break, that love is supposed to show up without being rewarded by a tidy outcome.

Including me would force them to face the unfairness they’ve been outrunning with decorations and alcohol and spending. It would puncture the story.

So they manage me instead.

They tolerate me in short, controlled doses. They keep things light. They change the subject. They offer solutions that don’t fit. They treat my pain like a conversational hazard. They act as if my honesty is the problem, not the reality I’m describing.

This is where the real Christmas starts for me.

Not on the day itself, but in the lead-up. In the noticing. In the accumulation.

I keep thinking about who I used to be in their minds.

The leader. The fighter. The one who could carry her own chaos and still show up for others. Sobriety was my great, visible battle. People understood it because it had a storyline. A before and after. A triumph they could applaud.

But this is a different kind of fight.

Chronic illness doesn’t have an after. It has a today. And then another. And another. It doesn’t give people the satisfaction of seeing you “come through” with a neat ending.

It just keeps going.

And the truth I keep circling, the one that hurts more every time I touch it, is that I don’t have a backup plan for this.

I had a plan for addiction. Structure. Recovery. One day at a time. A ladder out of a pit.

There’s no ladder out of pain that doesn’t relent.

There’s no chip for swallowing without choking. No milestone for enduring a season where people look through you because your reality makes them uneasy. No applause for being alive when being alive is not inspirational but hard, grinding, unglamorous work.

So I do what I’ve always done when I’m trying to survive: I search.

Not for medical answers this time, though I still read and compare and note patterns. I search for people. For evidence that I’m not uniquely failing at something impossible.

I look for others who are sober and still struggling. People whose health got worse after they got their lives “right.” People who know what it is to be treated like a problem because you can’t pretend the world is fine.

I don’t want shallow reassurance.

I want language that doesn’t flinch. I want witnesses. I want someone to say: I know what it is to be judged by society, abandoned by people you trusted, and tortured by your own mind when your body won’t cooperate.

I want connection that doesn’t require performance.

Because the deepest cruelty of this season isn’t the empty chair. It’s the way the world insists the lights mean warmth, while my experience of those same lights is a spotlight that says: you don’t belong in the story anymore.

And yet the longing is still there.

Not for the fake version of Christmas. Not for the obligation. Not for the ritual that asks me to disappear.

The longing is for something simpler and truer: a room where my reality is not an inconvenience, where I don’t have to edit myself to be allowed to stay, where someone can sit beside me in the mess and not try to fix it or flee it.

A week before Christmas, that’s my research question.

Where are the people who understand?

And how do we find each other before the silence convinces us we’re alone?

MW123

@Hannah_84

Firstly, welcome to the community Hannah.

I recognise so much of what you’ve written. Illness changes everything, and it hurts when people pull away because they can’t face the reality of it. It’s not about being a burden, it’s about wanting to be treated like we were before. Chronic illness tests family and friendships in ways that are hard to explain. The hardest part isn’t just adapting to our limitations, it’s trying to stay the same in the eyes of others while they reshape who they see us as.

Hannah_84

Thankyou I suppose I'm reaching out and trying to make sense of why this peticular season shines a huge light on how much my life has changed. How I've had to grieve the past me, adapt and try my best to be authenticly me. I always question everything and having had a hard time the last 2 years constantly having to advocate for myself I'm getting exhausted. It's really nice to find a forum to voice my experiences.

So thankyou for your kind words it makes sense.

Catherine21

Very powerful i felt every word

Rosie_Scope

What a heartfelt piece of writing @Hannah_84, you have a fantastic way with words.

It's so hard to find deep connections with people who understand and don't flinch at the inconvenient parts of chronic illness. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I hope this community is a place where you feel less alone and can express how you're feeling about everything. I'm sure lots of us have felt isolated by our conditions and know what it's like for the rest of the world to just carry on around us, leaving you feeling like you've been left behind. And it's all especially present at this time of year.

Welcome to the community by the way!

Hannah_84

Thankyou so much for your supportive words. It means the world to me that I've found people that care x

Yani09

May you find inner peace. Maybe you could just accept the season as you are and not what you were. Enjoy the time when people try harder to make the best of it and bring some joy. A respite from the norm for us all. Be you today and tomorrow.. others can not be changed.. we adapt to our new day even if they can’t. Best wishes.