It is currently the eve of Christmas Eve, and as the holiday season usually means, I’m feeling nostalgic.

Something about the saccharine songs, the TV specials, the yule log videos that are currently on constant rotation in my apartment. It all gets inside of me, makes me feel reflective and nostalgic, somewhere between somber and content. I remember reading, when I was seventeen and pretentious about collecting these facts, that the word “nostalgic” comes from the combination of the Greek words “nostos” meaning homecoming and “algos” meaning pain, and that it was classified as an actual mental illness for some time in the 18th century. Nostalgia is a longing for some nebulous home that no longer exists, whether that home is an actual house, a person, or just a long gone version of yourself. For me, nostalgia feels like a pain deep in the spirit. It is lodged between my ribcage and my heart. It feels like a physical weight. 

I’ve been dreaming of Christmases past. Maybe I’ve been watching too many Christmas episodes of my favorite TV shows. Maybe I’ve seen It’s A Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street a few too many times this season. Or maybe it’s the music, which blasts from every storefront and has now infiltrated my own Spotify history. Every year I do this. I feel the need to watch everything Christmas related, read Christmas books, listen to Christmas music, for the entire 24 days before Christmas. After all, those are the only twenty-four days that I have to do it, for the entire year. It brings me joy, but it also means that there is also a stronger sense of the passage of time during this season. I can feel January creeping up like a bad dream. I know that I will feel sad when this season passes, and I am left with two more holiday-less months of cold and dark. 

But I also know that this Christmas feels different than the last few. For one, I have moved from the town that I called home for nearly six years. It was a college town, a liminal space not meant for the long-term. In fact, the people who stay there long-term often seem stuck in that stage of life where you are young and everything is possible, chasing that effervescent feeling. It was always sad to see them on nights out, older than everyone else by a decade but pretending that they were still twenty-three. I was always irrationally afraid of becoming that. Maybe that was just an excuse to be afraid of putting down roots, a thing that I’ve never done and seemed entirely possible after half a decade somewhere. 

So, when I graduated, I didn’t resign my lease, a decision that was partly financial and partly emotional. I didn’t want to stay where all my friends had left, surrounded by memories. I found a big girl job in the foothills of California. I’ve been living here for a little over a month now, trying to make a home in this strange place where I don’t know anyone and the town does not revolve around a college. When people ask me how my new job and apartment are, I say, They’ve been good. I like my coworkers. Things are going well. And these things are true. The town is nice, and I like seeing the mountains surrounding it and driving somewhere that is not entirely flatland. The downtown area reminds me a bit of Fort Bragg, which makes me sad and happy all at once. My coworkers are nice, and I am about 90% less miserable than I was at my last comically terrible job. 

But here is another truth that comes with every move. I should be used to it by now, with all of the practice I’ve had moving, but I’m not. 

I feel lonely. 

I know that this is always true for the first few months in a new place. But it sucks in a new way every time. I am grateful for my partner, who only lives thirty minutes away and visits often, and for my family, who come to visit when they can and vice versa. But I’m still lonely. Moving brings up existential loneliness. Where are my friends, with whom I spent the last two Christmases having parties and exchanging gifts? We met at boba shops and at my last apartment and we dressed festively, and a few days before everyone went home for the holidays, we went to bars and got drunk Canes afterward. Can I make new friends? Will I have more drunken nights, more boba shop gift exchanges? Am I meant to be here? What am I even doing here, in this adult life that it sometimes feels like I was just dropped in, like a tea bag dunked haphazardly into water?

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about Christmases past. I remember my first Christmas in Davis, back in 2019. It was not unlike this one. I was dirt poor, like I am now, in the way that only moving can seem to make you. About a week before school ended, I scrounged up some change and went to see Little Women because it is my comfort book and the 90’s version was my comfort movie, and I wanted to see the new adaptation. I had no one to see it with, so I went alone. I had spent the last few weeks feeling like a tiny fish in a giant pond. As a first-gen student, I had no clue what I was doing. I hadn’t made any friends yet, and my roommate was a seventy-year-old white woman who was beginning to resent me being in her space after just a few months living together. I had left class twice after feeling on the edge of a panic attack. I’d gotten so stressed one time that I left school early because I thought I was sick, only to just be stress sick for one day. I dreamt about my community college, which was the first school I’d spent longer than two years attending, and I missed my old friends. 

That day, I almost cried in the theaters as I watched the scene where Jo laments to her mother, I am lonely, Mom. 

There it was laid plain. The words that I hadn’t even admitted to myself yet, much less said aloud. I am lonely. Tears welled in my eyes as I sat in a darkened theater that held only me and a group of five friends. I had spent so many years feeling that way, move after move, friend group after friend group, lonely days eating lunch alone in the library as the new kid, only to finally assuage it with new friendships and the sense of place that I’d carved out at my community college. And here it was again. That old feeling, seeping into my bones, carving out my chest. The loneliness was so real it felt like another person. I thought I’d never escape it. The next quarter, I met my best friend in the world. The quarter after that, through the quarantine haze, I joined a reading series on Zoom, and I met more friends that I still have to this day. I made it through. Just as I had every other time that I felt that weight between my ribcage and my chest, that sinking in my stomach. Just as I will now. 

Christmas is a time to take stock of what we have, and of what we’ve lost. A time to process the year, and to re-evaluate. A time to watch corny specials with family, and to drink hot cocoa, and to indulge in too many baked goods. It’s a nostalgic time, but it’s also a time of hope. Maybe that is where my love-hate relationship with the holiday derives from, even more than the financial instability that has always made making holiday magic difficult. The mixture of feelings. The concoction that I feel in my stomach. The loneliness. And the hope. I’m trying to feel more of hope than loneliness, or to at least feel them in a balanced way. I’m trying to find my faith. In myself, in the universe, in the inevitable waves of life. 

For now, I know this much for sure; this year is ending, and a new one is beginning. That means new people, new experiences, new places. It also means accepting what I have now, and making the most of it in the coming year. And that, more than anything, makes me feel hopeful.