Thoughts on comfort and joy

Those who are depressed or dysthymic will recognize the holiday season as an especially poignant time. The demands to feel joy, and in particular to find joy in one's networks of family and friends, are particularly acute.  We often refer to those networks with the shorthand term "home." "Home" of course carries a massive and unruly load of meanings and associations, many of them real, certainly, but many of them manufactured, especially  in the context of the holidays.
Indeed, what may be the central image of the holidays, if its ubiquity is to be taken as a sign—the family gathered around the fire, frosted windows providing a view to a landscape swathed in a perfect, puffy blanket of snow—is at once a reflection of a deep truth and a carefully manicured lie. The truth is nothing more than the pedestrian fact that winters can be harsh, cruel, and even fatal, and a creature as fragile as a human needs shelter and warmth to survive the season.  In the context of the holidays, that pedestrian truth is pressed into service as an all-purpose metaphor: winter is merely the world beyond our networks of family and friends, beyond the "home" that provides shelter, warmth, and protection from the often cruel indifference of the larger world.  Implicit in this metaphor is the concept of belonging. We do not belong in the snow; we belong at home, next to life-giving fire. A human can venture temporarily outside into the snow, if properly outfitted with fuzzy hats and gloves, but we can welcome such a outing as fun or joyful only when we know that at its end we have a place to return to, a place of warmth and protection. A home. A place where one is enveloped in love and joy and comfort.  Or, comfort and joy, as the carol would have it. What else can the glowing, warm fire in those images represent, in a world where it has been decades since most people had fireplaces? And so it is with our outings into the world: we steel ourselves for the rigors of the metaphorical outdoors, and among our armaments is the knowledge that we have a refuge to which to return, a place where we belong and where those with whom be belong will shelter and comfort us.

And once we accept this as a metaphor, we are very close to seeing how the metaphor shades into a lie. Not the lie of the fireplaces that we no longer have, but the lie of the home as a place of refuge. I'm not referring to those for whom home is the place where they are most likely to be abused or assaulted or killed, though for them the distance between comforting image and harsh truth is particularly tragic and cruel. (A lie, of course, is merely the distance separating reality from promise.)

Instead I mean the distance between promise and reality for those who never feel that belonging.  It is difficult to discuss a "sense of belonging" as it is a nebulous and abstract concept; it may be even more difficult, then, to discuss its absence. But one of the issues I'm trying to get a handle on is this very issue: the problem, first, of feeling like you don't belong, and second, of having that feeling become heightened during holiday times when one is supposed to be most gladdened by that sense of belonging.  The irony is that the pressures to feel that sense of belonging—and they come from within and from without— only add to the sense that you don't belong. If you don't feel you belong, the pressure to feel you belong makes you that much more aware that you really don't belong.

We can discuss this in terms of alienation, but of course in the end this is really just an affective issue. But for skeptics and cynics the holiday season provides a particularly rich excuse to intellectualize away one's disaffection.  The most obvious grounds would be the skeptic's detachment from the  Christmas narrative, which, contrary to Fox News, is very much on display during the season. Add to this an ugly frenzy of consumerism that serves as a reminder that we are adrift in a culture with radically anti-humane values (I can think of few things more opposed to human dignity than our society's tendency to define us by our material possessions, the worst part of which being that it, in turn, causes us to define ourselves by that same narrow and shabby criterion) and you have a holiday season that seems almost designed to make us feel detachment and disgust rather than comfort and joy.

And that may allow us to begin to see the great danger the holiday season can present to those who need to overcome dysthymia and/or depression. By providing such an easy intellectual target, by cloaking the cold consumerist essence in the warm garb of metaphors catering to our deepest longings to feel at home (whether that be at home in a family, in a society, or, religiously, in the universe) the season demands to be viewed with skepticism.Yet one finds oneself surrounded by people who are not skeptical, and so that skepticism seems to provide yet more proof of one's alienation. And here is the great danger—and this is a point I will return to repeatedly. Anyone with dysthymia who insists on understanding the condition as an issue of alienation rather than as an affective disorder is missing the most important conclusion necessary to begin dealing with it, to begin fighting it. The very concept of alienation is an impediment to this struggle. And the holiday season, by offering such an easy target for intellectual critique of one's surroundings, allows us to continue convincing ourselves that the problem is one of alienation rather than affect.  Thus keeping us from seeking out the sorts of  programs or treatment that might actually work for us. And so it is that all those holiday messages of ersatz comfort and joy serve to prevent us from attaining the actual comfort and joy we desire and deserve.


The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, "Fairytale of New York"