Holiday Sadness: Finding Hope When the Season Feels Heavy

Holiday Sadness, The Mundane of everyday life, and GRIEF THAT REFUSES TO LIFT

Another season has arrived, carrying memories I didn’t realize I was still holding. Summer still plays in my head like an anthem, but Thanksgiving is already here. The air now carries a chill that nips at my cheeks whenever I walk through the neighborhood. Light fades by five, dissolving into a midnight blue by six-thirty.

Now that it’s officially the holiday season, here come the blues — not the kind you dance to, but the kind that hums beneath the surface. It’s a sadness only the holidays know, the kind that lingers in the background, the type that makes Christmas carols sound out of tune, a quiet contradiction to the glitter and cheer. It’s the kind of sadness you feel as deeply as the chill in the air but don’t know how to say it out loud.

Lately, I have been stricken with emotional whiplash by how quickly time is passing. The days seem to rush past — weeks stacking into months until, somehow, almost a year has gone by. A year that felt like a winding road driven on fumes, no signal, just faith and forward motion. Days where hope could be found in the morning light and in laughter with family, and days that seemed to meander into meaninglessness — as gray as the concrete outside the town center, as mundane as the fluorescent hum inside a CVS, as ordinary as the same three cars circling the same parking lot, searching for nothing in particular.

The weather is as gray as frostbitten silence, bare tree branches scraping at the foggy sky. Now that Thanksgiving is here and Christmas right behind it, here comes the kind of days where the holiday blues settle in quietly, heavier than they look.

Lately, the world feels heavy with both hope and sorrow — familiar forces that tug and wrestle for control over my days. I’m learning that life has a rhythm that never stops: not when things fall apart, not when the heart breaks, not even when the credits roll. I’ve learned, painfully, to move with it anyway, piecing together the fragments of heartbreak and the parts of myself I’ve lost. Life moves like the Metro-North at peak hour — packed, relentless, buzzing like a phone lighting up with notifications.

I struggle to keep pace, especially when holiday sadness creeps in quietly, reminding me how hard it is to keep coping with holiday grief while pretending everything is normal.

Even though it’s still fall, the first signs of winter are here. The shrubs that line the strip malls on the corners of the highway with mom-and-pop shops beside chain coffee stores and dentist offices, are dusted with the first snow of the season. The trees on my block, once flushed with red, now stand hollow and bare, a few stubborn leaves clinging to their branches. On my evening walks, the air nips at my feet as I listen to music. The lake turns blue and still as the sun sets at four o’clock. It’s almost time for it to freeze solid until March, the same way I freeze when anxiety overtakes me, when I’m navigating loneliness during the holidays and trying not to disappear into myself.

Some days, the clouds resemble ships drifting along a stormy coastline, trying to hold on to treasure. Other days, the sunlight fights to break through — sharp and piercing — as if the sky itself is trying to remember warmth.

Sometimes I’m the same way — fighting for light when my feelings threaten to swallow me whole, when hope feels foreign, like it belongs in another stratosphere and I’m stuck down here on earth, trying to make sense of the holiday blues in the ordinary and the mundane.

I find solace at the gym. If I’m honest, I try to lift the heaviness away — chasing PRs like proof I’m worth loving. I feel the angst in every rep, in the way my now sinewy muscles tense, bracing for impact. It consumes me — like running a race without knowing where the finish line is or like being tossed into choppy seas with no life raft. The angst only dissolves when sweat drips down my skin on the StairMaster, but it always returns the moment I leave, wrapping itself closer than my coat. Painful memories tighten a noose around my throat, invisible scars pulling inward until I feel like I might scream.

The world is rushing and I sometimes feel frozen in time — frozen at the moment my heart broke, when despair replaced hope, when loneliness crushed me with a weight I never expected to carry. I wonder if I’ll ever move on, if the memories will pass like storms eventually do, if happiness will finally come like the first fruits of spring. But before I know it, the holidays are here again. They didn’t announce themselves — they just showed up like an uninvited guest.

I thought I’d be happy by now, but Thanksgiving knocks anyway, insisting I show up at family dinner with a smile and a pie, even when I’m feeling sad and unsure how to explain it anymore.

I see the rush everywhere, and it’s disorienting. In the mall, people stream past glowing storefronts trimmed in emerald and gold. A white tree stands in the main mezzanine, glittering under the bright fluorescent lights. Every entrance is lined with strands of holiday bulbs. The ‘take a picture with Santa’ display — an ornate metallic-red sleigh beside oversized gold gift boxes dusted with glitter — is already waiting by the food court, ready for children to climb in and smile for the camera, innocence captured for a moment before the world teaches them otherwise. It’s surreal watching joy unfold around me while I’m quietly coping with holiday grief, moving through the season with a kind of slow, private ache the world doesn’t see behind the impeccable outfits and big hair.

Packs of teens wander by with Ulta and Aeropostale bags, laughing in groups of three and four, and for a moment I find myself longing for the good old days — when things were easier, when adulthood didn’t teach me how alone a person can feel even in the middle of a crowded mall. Christmas music echoes in the women’s restroom, and as I wash my hands, I catch my reflection in the mirror — sunglasses now a kind of armor, hiding the grief in my eyes, a barely visible shield I use when I’m navigating loneliness during the holidays and can’t bear to meet my own gaze.

At night, I dream of trains heading toward the city — to Stamford, to Poughkeepsie, to lives that stretch beyond my sleepy Hudson Valley town. I dream of parties in the big city where no one knows me, where I drift through gold rooms in my thrifted Vera Wang strapless dress and leather heels, red lips curling into a nervous smile. My eyelids flicker as I drift toward sleep, and suddenly I see champagne flutes clinking, jazz humming through warm air, conversations rising and falling like tides — actual voices, not just the birds outside my window come morning. The contrast between reality and fantasy is sharp, reality bites and the holiday blues settle in as the nights grow longer.

Grief doesn’t announce itself the way holiday ads on YouTube do. It slips into the cracks of ordinary days — into bus rides, grocery lines, gym sets, the hush of a church sanctuary at nine a.m. It sits in silence. It drips down gutters during rainstorms. It becomes the smile you’ve learned to perfect, the makeup you use to hide the pain. It’s a shattered mirror where everything looks out of place, where flaws magnify until they’re all you see. It’s the voice in your head you mistake for your own — the one you drown out with social media, noise, and other people’s lives, especially when you’re feeling sad during the holidays and don’t know what else to do. Sitting with yourself and the grief is terrifying and the holidays demand joy, so you stay busy with shopping and distract yourself with loved ones.

And somewhere inside all this — the heaviness, the sameness, the echo of old memories — something in me still hopes. Not perfectly. Not loudly. More like putting on a cute outfit and going to a coffee shop, dressing for the version of myself I hope to meet one day. The one whose smile doesn’t break the minute she’s alone. Even in the quiet shadows of holiday sadness, hope flickers — small, trembling, but alive.

I’m learning to lean into the sadness instead of fearing it. I won’t let grief hollow me out, or make me jaded, or convince me that life is all downhill now that I’m in my 30s — as if I’ve missed my chance, as if it’s too late to start over, as if I’m someone meant to stay in the background, the noise people drown out. Even in the soft shadows of holiday sadness, I’m trying to believe I deserve more than just surviving.

So I’m tending to the garden of my heart. Scraping away the tundra left by depression — the parts frozen by pain, hardened by bitterness. I’m planting seeds this season, even if I don’t know when they’ll bloom. But I’m choosing hope anyway, that small, trembling faith that rises in my gut when I create, paint, write, or simply get out of bed in the morning. This is how I’m coping with holiday grief now — gently, slowly, watering the places in me that still want to grow.

And I know this: I’m going to keep moving, even if it’s slow, even if it’s clumsy, even on the days when the grief refuses to lift. This is what it means to be moving forward after grief — not with perfection, but with persistence.

So here’s where I am now — not healed, not whole, but trying. Finding hope in hard seasons, trying to piece my life back together. Learning how to create through the ache. Learning how to stay open when everything in me wants to shut down.

On Pursuing Creativity Despite Holiday Sadness

It’s hard to stay focused when sadness loops in your mind — the same scenes replaying, retold slightly differently each time, somehow getting scarier the more you remember. Sadness can be much like a fog. It obscures everything in its sight until even lies look like the truth. And it’s hard to pursue creativity when exhaustion settles into your bones and your mind feels slightly detached from your body.

Some days I sit down to write and the words spill out like a confession; other days I stare at the blinking cursor, my inner critic demanding perfection with every click.

Lately, I’ve been coping with holiday sadness through creativity and coffee shops — two things that steady me when everything else feels uncertain. Going to coffee shops and creative work are how I’m keeping up with my soft productivity rituals. After my mid-September crash from working too much, I’ve been trying (and sometimes struggling) to find a gentler form of discipline. You can read about my soft productivity journey here.

Going to coffee shops dressed in cute outfits break up the monotony and I can convince myself my life is slowly stitching itself back together. There’s something comforting about being around people — especially other young creatives who turn cafés into makeshift offices. I watch friends laugh and joke; college kids talking about professors and AI. I watch young mothers with their babies, the babies staring into the crowded room with big, beautiful eyes that haven’t yet witnessed the ugliness this world can bring. I see myself in their eyes, the me before I saw what life really is about.

The baristas move with muscle memory — hands quick, movements almost musical — the espresso machine wailing as the wood floors echo and they call out orders. In these small, ordinary moments, I feel a kind of creative healing, a sense that I’m part of something bigger than my own holiday loneliness. For a moment, I’m not as alone, even as I stare into the hum of the café, quietly hoping someone might notice me. Notice me and say hello — a tiny act of finding comfort during the holidays that would mean more than they’d ever know.

I’ve thrown myself headfirst into my work and my craft. When the grief threatens to crush me and the silence of my apartment becomes deafening, creativity is the light I reach for. It steadies me in the sadness, a life raft when everything feels choppy and uncertain. Above all, it brings me joy. There’s something thrilling about making something tangible out of an idea that once lived only in my mind. Writing feels like therapy, and painting lets me translate the ache into color — hues that clash the way happiness and despair do in my head. This is my creative healing, my way of coping with holiday sadness when the season grows too heavy.

Creativity pierces through the grief. Hope rushes in like sunlight streaming through the coffee shop windows and warming my face. I find joy in taking pictures for my blog, in curating outfits, in posing for a tripod-held camera with a quiet courage guiding each movement as strangers walk by. It’s a kind of healing through art — a way to stay soft when the world feels harsh.

Photography saved my life once, back in Asheville, and in small ways it saves me still — with every beep of the timer, every iPhone flash revealing a version of myself I don’t always recognize in the mirror: beautiful, becoming, ripening into someone new. And even now, even in the ache, I’m finding hope during the holidays in the images I create and the person I’m slowly becoming.

How I’m Choosing Joy Through Holiday Sadness

As Thanksgiving approaches and sweet potatoes wait in the hanging fruit basket of my kitchen, ready to be turned into pie; as Christmas music carols through every store in the town center; as New York City pulses with life, never falling asleep; as the mall glows with lights and whole cul-de-sacs erupt in extravagant Christmas displays; as my aunt and uncle finalize the headcount for Thanksgiving dinner and I choose my gift for the white elephant game we will play after; as I sit in my favorite coffee shop — the one that buzzes with life and possibility, the one that makes me feel a little less alone — I’m choosing joy, even when it hurts. I’m choosing joy during the holidays even while holiday sadness lingers quietly in the corners of my heart.

Not to pretend that everything is okay or that I have my life figured out, but because I’ve stopped waiting for perfect circumstances to let myself feel alive. I’ve spent too many holiday seasons alone, too many years hoping joy would find me. This time, I’m choosing it — even in the ache. This is how I’m slowly coping with holiday grief: by letting joy and sorrow sit beside each other without forcing them apart.

I don’t know what the coming months will look like. Maybe the grief will linger; maybe it will finally loosen its grip. But for now, I’m learning to live inside the in-between — the ache and the beauty, the loneliness and the light. And as the holidays rush toward me in all their noise and glitter, I’m choosing to stay open, to stay soft, to stay alive to my own becoming.

Maybe that’s all any of us can do — keep finding small joys, the ones so subtle we forget they count. Maybe we choose joy even when our hearts feel heavy instead of waiting for it to find us. There are small joys all around us, waiting to be noticed: a warm drink, a favorite song, a walk through the town center lit in gold, tea with loved ones. These little glimmers don’t erase the sadness, but they make the darkness less consuming. And maybe, someday, joy will feel less like something you’re reaching for and more like something that finally stays.