It’s Hard To Be Home For The Holidays When You’re Depressed

I’m just gonna say this straight up: I hate the holidays. Yes, it means that I get plenty of time to unwind from the intense workload I deal with at school. But it also means spending close to 100% of my time in the immediate vicinity of my family. Work-related anxiety is replaced not by complete and utter Bliss™ but by even more anxiety caused my family.

I don’t feel like myself when I’m at my parents’ house, mainly because I have to ask permission whenever I go anywhere and it feels like I’m a child again. I have to watch my tone when I speak so that the conversation wouldn’t end in a screaming match and/or tears. I have to hide my crippling depression because I am in the closet about my mental illness and my parents would just complain about how I don’t smile. With all of that—and some childhood trauma to boot— I mostly choose to spend the holidays lying in my room and petting my cats whenever I have the energy. One time I told my shrink all of this and she advised me to get married so I wouldn’t have to deal with my parents ever again. Way to go, shrink lady.

My family and I don’t really talk. No one really knows what I’m up to because we block each other on social media. I sometimes go through their Instagram feeds using the Instagram account I made for my cat, and I am immediately reminded of why we don’t follow each other. That being said, I still sometimes screenshot the things my brother posts, because he is an actual living meme.

 It’s like I’m trapped in that supermarket in The Mist, but the creature in the mist is small talk and the overly religious crazy woman is 13 year-olds playing Truth or Dare.

My family doesn’t celebrate Christmas, but we are big on Eid. It’s a holiday I always approach with equal parts excitement and dread. I spend my entire Eid break at my grandma’s house. Being with my extended family during the holidays has always been pretty weird. I don’t hate them; they’re actually really nice (I know this because my aunts always tell me to eat some more rice). I just don’t ever know what to talk about. My mind is always trying to force-quit the situation when it comes around. Is there a way of casually letting your family know that you love them but you just want to be by yourself and not talk to them?

Distant relatives (who my grandma low-key does not like) come over to my grandma’s house and make small talk for two straight hours. My younger cousins usually run upstairs to do something else in order to avoid any crises. A cousin closest to me (who actually knows about me because she is my Snapchat friend) recently reported that these kids are actually playing Truth or Dare the whole time, except that nobody ever does any of the dares and the game is basically just them sitting in a circle answering extremely inappropriate questions I do not want to know the answer to. I usually exist in the in-between world of bringing snacks from outside to a spare room where I can hide and watch makeup tutorials. It’s like I’m trapped in that supermarket in The Mist, but the creature in the mist is small talk and the overly religious crazy woman is 13 year-olds playing Truth or Dare.

This time of the year, I am constantly reminded that I am a “Person with Green Hair,” because family members look at me like I have shit on my head. I do have the privilege of being an average-sized person, so no one is actually commenting on my figure. But they do compare mine to my cousins’, and it only ends up making all of us uncomfortable. I even feel some degree of guilt regarding this. Is it weird to apologize for your rude body shaming aunt because you feel secondhand guilt? It keeps me up at night.

Is there a way of casually letting your family know that you love them but you just want to be by yourself and not talk to them?

I’m trying to come up with the good parts of the holidays, and I can only think of two. First is stuffing yourself to death with food, which is weird because on regular days, I am not usually a big food person. The second thing is that my family doesn’t really give a shit about marriage; something that I know is a big deal in other families. I’m so proud of them for that reason. My grandma still comes up to me to remind me not to let boys touch my tits before marriage, but it’s chill.

Since most people feel a lot of discomfort about the holidays, who actually enjoys themselves this time of the year? Probably Bruce Wayne. However, I, a Treat Yo Self advocate, would like to remind you not to forget to reward yourself for spending time with your family, especially if it’s particularly difficult for you. Tough it out, and then relapse when you’re alone. Buy a gift for yourself. I’m here to tell you that it’s OK to feel uncomfortable around your family, and it’s also okay to succumb to capitalism sometimes. Spoiler alert: It’s what the holidays are all about, after all.

Rock Bottom is VICE Indonesia’s on-going column on mental health, depression, and how to deal with it all in a country where frank discussions of mental illness are still pretty taboo.