Hi Darling Ones,

I trust you all survived Thanksgiving relatively unscathed and are girding your loins for the holiday season.

My Thanksgiving soup was wonderful, my monster cookies were ugly but delicious, and yet I fell into a puddle of sadness and now I’m drowning in a pit of despair I can’t climb out of

There was a sadness triple-whammy that I wasn’t quick enough to dodge.

#1. The obvious. it was the first holiday after my Dad & Uncle Danny died. Bound to suck, right? It didn’t suck too hard, but then. . .

#2. The unexpected. Before she left Supergenius HQ to watch the Vikings game from the comfort of her own recliner, my mom asked me to change the Lock Screen picture on her iPhone. It’s the picture of my dad in front of the Oregon duck making the Oregon O. After I finished I handed her the phone back.

“Good,” she said. “Now I can see him every day.”

Ouch.

#3. The subconscious sneak attack. So then my brain decided to kick me when I was down. Thursday night it served me up a dream about my Grammu. Even though she died in 2003, in the dream she was still alive but dying any minute. I was, obviously, upset. In the dream she kept crying and saying how much she was going to miss me after she died.

Fuck me.

Since then I’ve been a giant, weepy, occasionally sobby, mess.

I AM SO SAD and I hate it.

My internal monologue has gone back to some of the greatest hits of my early to mid-30s. Including, “You are unloveable,” “Nobody cares about you,” “You suck at everything and ruin it in the process,” and, my personal favorite, “You don’t matter to anyone. At all. Ever.”

I’ve tried everything to snap out of this funk. I. . .

• slept in
• got up early
• exercised
• showered
• practiced
• ate four cookies
• ate meals that involved vegetables
• watched kind and charming tv shows
• watched tv shows that I know by heart
• read attention-grabbing British mysteries
• read a sweet but predictable rom-com
• laid on the couch listening to The Rolling Stones
• took a break from work after working twelve days in a row
• worked
• listened to the happy mix on Spotify
• deposited two months’ worth of mortgage in my checking account

None of this worked.

I’m still a crying mess. I’m crying right now because I’m so tired of being a giant, self-involved bummer.

My hope is that writing about it helps. Sometimes it does.

Fingers-crossed,
Jodi