Holiday Survival Notes, 2024 edition

Some intertwined snapshots from the edge

The holidays.

Here they come.

Whether you be happy, sad, bedraggled, cancerous, divorcing, marrying, birthing, or dying: they are here, the holidays, to bring you extra pain and clarity.

Even if you choose to ignore them, good fucking luck with that.

Everybody huddles and pretends and tries their hardest, and my friends and I share notes over texts. My therapist friends tell me everybody heads into new levels of despair.

My friend from the war-torn country with the recent breakup tells me she’s just going to avoid the lights altogether.

All the pain getting dredged up. The foster mother’s suicide attempt. The relapsing husband. The angry parents going into assisted living.

The war, the war, the war.

My miscarriage on Christmas Day, alone.

I tell certain stories to my lover as we hold each other, late at night. Not everything. He listens. I listen. He tells me his, I tell him mine.

Stuff heals.

……………

photo by Brendan Pelley

Together, we decorated the tree. Ash puts the star on the top.

I always loved the tree. I wanted to sit by it, play near it, bask in its midnight light-glow, smell it, soak it in, play piano near it.

When I was in 9th grade, my friend confided in me: her father had sexually molested her on Christmas one year, when she was little.

She did not like the tree.

I never looked at the tree the same way after that: I still can’t.

One woman’s tralala is another woman’s trigger.

……………

I’m trying to rehearse a Regina Spektor piano cover song as a Christmas gift to my patrons. But also, I want to play it. It soothes me.

……………

I have awoken, for the past four days, wanting to write at length about the swirl around me, not wanting to bring anybody down, wanting to lift everybody up, knowing that the lifting is often in the bringing down. This physics. This trampoline of uppy-downy around the holidays. I write like I always write now: by candlelight starting at 3 in the morning until Ash wakes for breakfast at 7.

For inspiration, I read Miranda July during the day and bask, bask, bask in the freedom I have as a writer, to get paid by the people and not by the publisher, and I still can’t ever stop feeling jealous of the writers with their real, real books. Meanwhile, they’re jealous of me and my real, real, crowdfunded salary. And never the twain shall meet?

Here in the new house, the fires burn and the love grows. Brendon and I keep finding new levels of delight and horror in the idea of a future beyond the past, and the table is laid every night with a kind of disbelief that this is really happening.

Ash asked, as the last question of the night last night as he drifted off to sleep in one of the guest beds (he’s been commuting to a different bed every night, slowly telling me and Brendon the details of his heartache from different locations):

“Mom, do you know what life is like?”

Tell me, Ash. Tell me what life is like.

“Life is like having to eat an earwax-flavored jelly bean.”

Pause.

He continues.

“It’s like . . . you have to just . . . face it. But then you do it and you eat it, and you get through it, and then it’s over and it’s not so bad.”

With that, he looked up and closed his eyes, like a little sage.

……………

Yesterday morning, I took a walk with a new Random Female Friend around a reservoir. The temperature had shot up, and suddenly I found myself taking off layers and layers of shirts and coats.

Random Female Friend and I talked and talked about the state of the world, the kids, the gut biome.

We walked up a hill near her house, and I got back in my car, sweating so profusely I took my T-shirt off and drove back to my house in just a bra.

It’s hard to tell nowadays what’s the menopause and what’s the climate change. It’s nice to have an RFF.

We walked out to a spit of muddy land, where the birds were perched, where the little liquor bottles floated, where the sun shone down in the mud.

My RFF said: I’m going to regret this because of the mess later, but I want to feel the mud squishing between my toes, so I’m taking my shoes off.

I deliberated.

“You could just wade out to one of those rocks when you’re done and rinse your feet and put your shoes back on. It might not be so bad.”

I wanted to feel the mud squish in my feet. I didn’t take my boots off. I watched my RFF jealously.

I wonder if I’ve changed for good.

……………

A woman from a country in South America messaged me on Instagram yesterday to thank me. She had just taken the abortion pills, she said, and was stopping to take a moment to message me in the middle of making her two kids lunch. Her husband is helping her with the termination. They run a small business. They can’t take the time off work. She wanted to thank me for all I have written, all the music, the openness about abortion . . . it’s all helping get her through this moment.

You got this, I tell her. I love you. No shame, no guilt, and happy holidays. Take care of yourself and your kids.

I flick my finger on the screen and, in an instant, see images of assassination, floods, leather handbags, and holiday sales.

……………

My 9th-grade response to my friend’s disclosure was to write a song about it.

I was 14.

I was reading a book at the time—who knows how I got hold of it, but I thank Harvard Square for having multiple used bookstores with vast and fascinating fiction sections—called Not the End of the World. It was a painful and fragmented exploration into what it felt like to be sexually assaulted as a child. I was drawn to these stories of survival: this book and The End of Alice were two of my treasured reads around this time. They wove together into my friend’s story, they all poured into the lyrics, the music.

There was nobody else to talk to but the piano. The piano listened and screamed back. I remember seeing the little twinkly Christmas lights of the tree reflecting in the sheen of the grand piano’s fallboard while I tried my hand at creating chords that sounded like something I would want to listen to myself. Major? Minor? Fast? Slow? Wistful. Pretty. Horrible. Yes, that works. Christmassy, cheerful, and awful. The piano obeyed. My fingers learned to dance on the keys to draw out the sounds. I thought about my friend and protecting her identity. I titled the song after her name. But I gave her a new name.

I never recorded the song as an adult, but it’s on a Maxell 90-minute tape somewhere.

I still have it memorized, all these years later.

I never played her the song. It wasn’t totally for her, I suppose.

……………

You do it and you eat it, and you get through it, and then it’s over and it’s not so bad.

……………

Everyone in the house is currently peer-reviewed and/or doctor-reviewed ADHD, and I’ve bought four cookbooks and guides to ADHD but I’m too distracted to read any of them. I just admire them on my bedside table. I skitter around the house like I always have, doing 24% of each task and then switching to the next, trying to entertain myself and—if Brendon has this right—feed my dopamine addiction.

Am I a dopamine addict? Or am I just running a weird career with a million moving improvisational parts, and moving into a new house, and raising a culture-shocked child of divorce, and trying to be the kind of person who cooks meals from scratch, and dealing with aging parents, and trying to understand the nuances of global politics ALL AT ONCE? Perhaps it is both.

……………

I’m in my bra and it’s 55 degrees outside and I’m sweating in my car and driving down Massachusetts Avenue and still not sure if it’s the climate crisis or the menopause.

Instead of texting and driving, I try to pull over when my skittering brain has a “you must do this right now before you forget” thought.

Am I a dopamine addict? Or just busy?

I’m late for work.

My job isn’t real anyway.

I just need to practice piano for my recording tomorrow.

Is my job even real?

I don’t want to practice the piano.

I need to record this Regina Spektor cover I promised myself and the patrons I’d record.

Really I just promised myself.

Nobody will care.

I want to get Ash a sleeping bag for Christmas.

I should send a card to my new booking agent in Europe.

I should mail my step-granddaughter some pink presents.

I could just buy some near the post office and send them today.

Christmas is in like eight days.

Ugh.

I fucking forgot dish soap.

I also forgot the laundry that’s in the washer, and that was two days ago, and I wonder if it’s mildewy, but maybe if it is I can use some vinegar and run it again, and I’m not sure if we have vinegar, and I wonder if you can use the apple cider kind if we are out of the clear white kind, and I wonder if I should be the kind of person who makes their own vinegar, and if I made my own vinegar we would need apple trees, and if we were going to plant apple trees in the yard now, Ash would probably be grown and out of college by the time they actually produced any apples, and I should just maybe not go home to rehearse this Regina Spektor cover and I should just go to the shop and get some vinegar, but maybe we have some.

I also want to—right now—order this book I’m hearing about on NPR right now that analyzes the post–post–Cold War era, the increasingly aligned Russian and Chinese governments, and the flashpoint of a new, global nuclear arms race. I feel I should understand these things if I’m going to be a good mother. I’m going to forget the name of this book. I should write it down. I’m driving. I could record it on my phone? I could pull over. I should write down the sleeping bag thing because I’m going to forget that too. I pull over.

I am, I realize as I randomly (not randomly) pull the car over, in front of another friend’s house. I text her instead of writing down the name of the book or jotting down my sleeping bag note.

I text her not once but five times.

She’s another new Random Female Friend of mine in Boston, but we made friends lightning fast, like speed-dating besties, touching tentacles and agreeing that we could race through all the pleasantries and just get right to the stuff of sex and death and pain.

RFF #2 works from home, and she strides out of her house within seconds, before I ever finish sending the last text. She shines in the sun, flail-waving her long arms in the too-hot winter air like one of those car-lot inflatables. It’s so fucking warm out for December and this all feels wrong and delicious. A reminder of summering Boston, remember that? When people used to wave at one another and go to the beach and be all spontaneous and friendly and stuff. Heat affords you kindness?

The house is a mess, she says, no, REALLY a mess. She’s got ADHD, did she ever mention? She’s been on meds for 20 years. Would I like some of her meds? They help! she says. I look at her completely organized desktop and the scattered clothes and books and random objects and dog hair all over the floor. Your desk is clean but your floor is a mess, and you stand between these two worlds, I tell her.

She says: you know, this is really confronting, Amanda. Because another friend of mine stopped by RANDOMLY the other day and told me he’d never seen the house this messy. He asked if I’m depressed.

She looked at me, open-faced. I’d been in the house for two minutes. I was still in my bra. My bra was wet. I was starting to get cold and clammy.

I don’t know, I said. ARE you depressed? No: wait. ARE you the kind of person who wouldn’t know if they were depressed?

She pondered this. Good question.

I don’t think I should take your ADHD meds, I tell her. That would be weird. I’m starting to freeze. Do you have a shirt I can borrow?

This is where friendships form. The random exchange of clothing.

She goes into her bedroom and returns to the living room with a blank gray T-shirt. She tosses it to me and I take off my wet bra and pull the shirt over my head. It’s so soft.

We walk out onto her back deck.

I can’t stay, I say, the minute we walk through the back door. I have to work. My job isn’t even real.

I have to work too, she says.

Her job is real. I’m jealous, but I also think about her floor, and I’m not jealous anymore.

I’m glad I got to see you for three seconds, I say. Do you need the shirt back?

No, she says, I don’t even know whose it is. Someone left it here.

(Who left it there? A lover? A partygoer? A relative? I wonder if her house is like mine: with “where-did-this-even-come-from” coats and clothing items outnumbering the items of known origin.)

She looks around the mess. She says: I also have to mail these presents to these people in the family who don’t even talk to me.

I understand, I say.

And I do.

Why is she helping me?

I head to the door in the shirt that is now mine (I think, but I can’t quite accept it), wet bra in hand, and I promise her we’ll go for a walk so we can figure out ADHD and depression. I get back in my car to drive to the shop next to the post office.

……………

Before I pull out of the illegal parking spot I’ve been occupying in front of her house, I check my texts. People from all over the world are sending me love, sympathy, empathy, good wishes.

I read another message from the woman in the foreign country going through her abortion. It’s not even a full message. It’s an emoji. What’s the abortion emoji? I shudder. The bandaged heart? The gaping hole? The middle finger? Ash loves using the gaping hole emoji lately. It stands in for so many concepts: negativity, emptiness, non-ness, The Great Mystery.

The shirt is the softest I’ve ever felt. A gift. A Christmas gift. I bet I can keep it. I bet she never asks for it back. It’s mine now. The sun is streaming through the windshield and my body is recovering from the clammy hot flash and feeling like this soft gray T-shirt is a gift from all womankind, a hug around my body, a reminder that I’m not alone. How much meaning can I assign to this one T-shirt? I never wrote down the name of the book, nor the reminder to get the sleeping bag.

I reach down at a stoplight and close my eyes, and feel the fabric of the shirt against my chest.

You do it and you eat it, and you get through it, and then it’s over and it’s not so bad.

……………

Earlier that morning, I’d called around to some friends in New Zealand. I almost never have time to do that anymore.

So many sad stories. Grandparents estranging babies and mothers not talking to daughters and people crying everywhere and all that.

……………

Ash wakes up early in the morning and he reads, on the red couch, by the glow of the Christmas tree lights as the sun comes up.

……………

I make it to the post office.

I don’t manage to get dish soap. It’s fine. We’ll use hand soap to wash the dishes till I do.

I buy the sleeping bag.

I don’t rehearse.

I check in on the woman getting the abortion.

Why am I helping her?

I wonder if all artists in history have some form of ADHD.

I make a mental note to try ADHD meds someday.

……………

Past bedtime, past lights-out.

I was still recovering from the earwax comment.

His eyes were closed, but he was awake.

They fluttered open. I turned the light out.

The moon came in through the window, my eyes adjusted, I looked at his cheek outlines, his little nose.

Not-so-little nose.

He’s getting so big.

Nine. Nine.

“Mama, I want to tell you a secret.”

About the earwax jelly beans?

“No.”

What’s the secret, Ash?

Pause. He looked me in the eye, which he doesn’t do often.

“I love you.”

And with that, he fell asleep.

……………

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed, please share the piece and support me, even by following along for free. This piece will be delivered as a read-aloud video sometime in the next few days to all my paying patrons ($1+) at patreon.com/amandapalmer, and to the $5 subscribers of this Substack. If you’d like to support my patreon, that’s where I post near-daily and make my living, and I’d love you to join the community over there as well. You’ll also get to listen to my stupid Regina Spektor cover, which will hopefully be out around Christmas. This Substack is reserved for my larger-format essays & memoir writings, which I drop every few months or so, or whenever I am moved to feel like a Real Writer not relegated to the bowels of my off-grid patron-cave. I’m hoping to publish a few important pieces in the coming few months, I’d love to see you again.

Happy holidays, everyone. Hang in there.