Good morning, everyone. I definitely ended yesterday on a better note than it began, even if I’m still not 100% okay. On and off, I’m pretty depressed, and while Christmas is making it come to a head, I think it’s this entire year.

It’s everything that got canceled (conventions, Mwako and Snow and possibly even Drake visiting, the Alaskan cruise ship, the trip to Tampa) it’s Grandpa Bob passing away, it’s the LANs and parties that didn’t happen, and barely seeing friends, it’s the shock of people I thought I knew turning out to be kind of horrible, it’s barely seeing my mom, my mom in law, my sis. It’s the stress of the election, the division in the country, it’s my husband not being in speaking terms with his father (if for very good reasons.) It’s my little snail hobby being kinda spoiled by months of dealing with mites and snails dying on me, and it’s my terror of losing my mom to the virus. It’s poor Christopher working himself to exhaustion on a schedule that doesn’t allow us to be together as much as we want.

Some are small things and others are not, but bring them all together and it is a lot.

The lack of human connection is what has caused a lot of my self-esteem issues to spiral out of control this year. If I had to say… what am I craving more than anything… it is love, and acceptance, from the people closest to me.

I find myself second-guessing whether I am loved far more often than I ever did. I’ll put way too much meaning into a tone, a look, even the way a text is punctuated. I worry too much whether I’ve done something to cause this or that person to stop loving me. Maybe it’s a mild form of PTSD…? Lol. The frame of mind this puts me in is hard on me and on those around me, but I think normally, I am around family and friends more, and as a result I don’t microanalyze every interaction so much. And simple being with loved ones helps.

Now that the vaccine is being shipped around the country, maybe in a few months we’ll have something a little more resembling normalcy. I can see how this has affected my friends, too. We need it. We need a little breather. Bad things will always happen again, hard times always come, that’s fine, we can all deal with so much if we have that connection with our family and friends, but not having that makes the most trivial of problems difficult to bear.

But I feel the year is on track to end on a good, hopeful note. So I’m trying not to let negative feelings push me down. We can’t give up, not now, after all we’ve gotten through.

Imagine how good it will feel, that moment when we are at a convention again and run into a friend’s arms, or go to pick a visiting friend up at the airport. Or the next time you are all around a table again during a holiday, holding hands during a prayer, the first one you say when everyone is together again with no fear.

I’m holding out for that, and I hope you’re holding on tight to whatever you miss and hold dear, until you can have it again.