Today is Thanksgiving.

Today is Thanksgiving (the day celebrating genocide of indigenous peoples and colonialism, I know. The day of gluttony and fake familiarity. I know.)

Last year, I was at my ex-partner-now-friend’s family’s house celebrating the holidays and eating until we burst. It was a family I didn’t know growing up. I finished all of my PhD program applications that weekend. The opposite of going to my family’s house.

We spent Christmas with my family last year. I didn’t listen to my body and the trauma she holds, and ended up coming home after 6 days with them, tearing off my clothes, laying in our bed naked just to feel something on my skin, and staring at the ceiling for three hours. Completely depleted, utterly destroyed.

But nothing had even happened. Everything was fine. He and I had four shots before the inevitably shameful Christmas Eve service (you’re a worm, you mean nothing, Jesus came to save you from himself.) The shots really made it fun. And Christmas morning brought new earrings, a dog eating the presents, and coffeecake. And it was fine. Everything was fine.

My family doesn’t do silence. They don’t sit in a room, each alone together, secure in ourselves enough for a silent moment. No, everything has to keep going going going going. Make it look good, make it right, say the right thing and perform the song. Perform until you come home and dissociate from your body in your bed because you aren’t you.

I didn’t want to be anywhere at that moment. I wanted to become nothingness, not to die or disappear, but just not to feel. I didn’t know I had been doing that for so long that I had nothing left.

This year, he and I spent Thanksgiving together. Not together together, but together. It was the best holiday I’ve had. No expectations and no perfections. Just cooking and records playing and green bean casserole and a good cry over trauma and our divorce and all the things I have been feeling for so long in my body coming up in my brain.

I told them I wasn’t coming to family holidays this year or for the foreseeable future. When I said to my therapist that I was planning this, for my own mental health, but felt guilty for it… she said, why isn’t your mental health a good enough reason?

Why am I never good enough? For them. Not for me. I know I’m good enough. I’m worthy. I’ve loved and I’ve been loved. But not by them.

And at this point, who knows if I’ll go back to spending holidays like that again, a shell of a person filling herself with food only to emerge empty, in bed staring at the ceiling and filled with uneasy feelings that something isn’t right but she can’t trust herself. I’d rather spend holidays crying over a cider mimosa.

In all seriousness, holidays are incredibly difficult for queer people and people with childhood trauma around their families. I hope we learn to normalize chosen families and weird holiday celebrations.