The holiday season has a way of amplifying silence. For many, the festive commercials depicting nuclear families in matching pajamas, the aggressive cheer of department store playlists, and the twinkling lights adorning every street corner do not spark joy. Instead, they create a jarring dissonance with reality. When the world demands you be merry, sadness feels like a personal failure.
For me, 2025 was not just a difficult year; it was a demolition. It was a year defined by a relentless series of subtractions. It began with the loss of my financial security when I was laid off in January. Seeking comfort, I adopted my first cat, a small creature who became the witness to my daily solitude, only to have to cremate her months later due to a sudden illness. Then came the final blow: the death of my last living grandmother. She was the architect of my childhood, a woman without whom I would be a stranger to myself.
Grief fundamentally reshapes our internal landscape, yet we live in a society that refuses to hand us a map. We are conditioned to view resilience as the ability to bounce back instantly, to treat loss as a hurdle to be cleared rather than a terrain to be traversed. In a world that constantly demands productivity, allowing yourself time to process sorrow is a luxury many feel they cannot afford.
After every setback this year, I did what I was trained to do: I pushed. I intellectualized my pain, packed it into boxes, and shoved it into the dark corners of my mind. Work doesn’t stop, rent doesn’t stop, and life doesn’t stop, so why should I?
I learned the hard way that if you do not make time for your grief, your grief will eventually make time for you. According to Psychology Today, unresolved grief is a shapeshifter; it can manifest as irritability, delayed depression, guilt, and crippling anxiety. By avoiding my emotions through procrastination and distraction, I was merely accruing an emotional debt with high interest.
The bill finally came due during the holidays. My physical and mental health entered a steep decline at the precisely worst moment. It is a disorienting experience to feel profound isolation while standing in a room full of people who love you. After months of performing “okayness,” the weight of the mask became too heavy. I finally admitted defeat—or perhaps, I finally claimed victory—by consulting a grief and family therapist.
This holiday season, I am learning the radical art of honesty. I am allowing myself to sit in the presence of grief and whatever else it drags through the door. To be blunt: it sucks. There is an emotional whiplash that comes with grieving during a celebration. I find myself laughing at a family member’s joke, feeling genuine gratitude, and then, moments later, being pulled under by a riptide of sorrow. My therapist described this as natural, comparing grief to the ocean. It sounds like a cliché, but you truly cannot stop the waves; you can only learn to tread water until the tide goes back out.
Part of this process has been rewriting the script on vulnerability. I have always feared that telling friends I wasn’t okay would be a burden, or what the internet calls a “trauma dump.” But hiding is exhausting. When I finally opened up to my circle, I didn’t find judgment; I found a safety net. Vulnerability is not a transaction; it is a bridge. Realizing that I would hold space for a friend in my position helped the guilt gradually fade.
Perhaps the hardest lesson has been accepting the timeline—or rather, the lack of one. When my grandmother passed, I took my corporate-allotted five days of bereavement. I returned to my desk on day six, typing emails as if the world hadn’t ended, hoping busyness would act as a distinct substitute for healing. I was wrong. That suppression only purchased me a delayed depressive episode and a pervasive sense of anger that I wasn’t “over it” three months later.
The holidays are stressful even in the best of times. A 2023 survey by the American Psychological Association found that 41% of Americans feel an increase in stress during this season. But for those carrying loss, that stress is compounded by the pressure to perform happiness.
If you are navigating this season with a heavy heart, please give yourself grace. It is okay to leave the party early. It is okay to cry in the bathroom. It is okay to not be merry. In a year that has taken so much, the best gift you can give yourself is the permission to simply be.