‘Tis The Damn Season
A second lockdown. An unexpected second Taylor Swift album. A pleasantly mild December. A quiet Christmas. A trepidatious New Year.
We hold our breath every time our elected politicians come on the screen and tell us what we can and can’t do for the coming weeks. I know a little bit of hope was extinguished in all of us when we heard what the holiday season would look like, layered on top of our already complicated relationship with Christmas as Muslims living in the West. Maybe it’s okay that your heart broke a little when the grinch cancelled Christmas this year. Maybe you’ve caved this time and gotten a little tree for your apartment, now that you no longer have to answer to your parents as to why you’d celebrate this jahil holiday. Maybe you’ve come to terms with it, knowing that if you don’t get to experience the holiday spirit in outdoor Christmas markets or holiday work parties this year, you’ve realized that if you want to feel that festive feeling, you were going to have to make room for it yourself in the walls of your own home.
Maybe it’s no surprise that an album by a blonde white girl romanticizing cottage life is tugging at all of our heartstrings, because maybe the idea of being cut off from the world other than your teenage lover is the dream right now. It would be nice in this moment to not feel the weight of responsibility for keeping this virus at bay, keeping local businesses afloat, juggling already-strained friendships with public health policy, maintaining the same level of productivity working from home, keeping your physical and mental health at bay, all this while the regular quarter-life crises still exist, while we grapple with self-actualization and unfulfilling careers, breakups and the Muslim marriage crisis, and just regular old millennial existential dread.
Hey, maybe it’s actually, seriously okay that we all feel like shit right now. I’m not saying this as a mental health professional right now, I’m saying this as a newly-minted 30 year old who’s had to celebrate birthdays and milestones in lockdown, who won’t get a graduation, who’s angry at how unproductive I’ve been lately, who’s faced with this stubborn quarantine gut every time I look down, who stares down the tunnel of this pandemic with no end in sight. Maybe there is, with the rollout of this vaccine. Or maybe not, when it’s up against the stupidity of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers.
There’s a lot of maybes in this post, and there continues to be a lot of maybes in life. I think if there’s one thing that this year has taught me, it’s to be okay with maybes. And that’s huge–for someone who struggles with things out of my control, someone who’s been coached into perfectionism and certainty, this is actually a really big accomplishment. I wonder if we all reflected on any unexpected character growths we’ve developed over this incredibly taxing year, and maybe that would make us feel slightly more okay today.
As one of the greatest artists of our generation once said, this is me trying.¹ And that’s gotta be enough.
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1. Swift, T. (2020). Folklore [album]. Republic Records.