New Year’s Eve
There was a time in my life when I enjoyed celebrating New Year’s Eve. When I was a little kid, I spent it with my family, trying my hardest to stay awake until midnight. I drank sparkling grape juice and had so many snacks and created mostly happy memories from those years. I remember being anxious when the year changed from 1999 to 2000. I was young, but I was old enough to be afraid of Y2K. I remember when the clock struck midnight, and the ball dropped on T.V., and we were all waiting for the world to end. Nothing happened, and we all moved on with our lives.
As I got older, New Year’s Eve became more of a social event, and I did my best to enjoy it. I know I had some good times in high school, but that was also the beginning of a series of terrible New Year’s. My very first boyfriend broke up with me on New Year’s Day in 2009 after spending New Year’s Eve with the girl he would leave me for. I think that was the beginning of the end for me. That was the moment when I realized there was more to be afraid of now that we’d all made it through Y2K.
Every New Year’s Eve, there are a million little endings, some of them welcome and some of them dreadful. It’s mostly felt like I’ve been surrounded by the dreadful ones. One year, I had a panic attack while driving to my friend’s house on New Year’s, so I just drove back home and spent the night trying to calm myself down. Another year I sat at home filled with anxiety, while my boyfriend spent New Year’s Eve with another woman in another country as if it was the most normal thing in the world for him to be doing. The year after that, we buried my uncle on New Year’s Eve, and the day took on an entirely different meaning. There have been so many endings. None of us knew that 2019 was the end of the world as we knew it.
Now I spend my New Year’s either working, panicking at home, or enjoying a healthy combination of work and panic. I try my best to distract myself, but my anxiety always finds a way to creep back in. There’s always this fear that someone somewhere is doing something that will hurt me. Whether it’s the person I’m dating cheating on me or friends celebrating without passing on an invite to me. There’s really been no instance where either of those things have happened in the last few years, but still, I cannot stop my brain from conjuring up those fears anyway. I become this horrible version of myself that I don’t blame others for not wanting to be around. I forget how to trust. I forget how to be happy. I forget how to enjoy the time that I have with the people I love. I end up in bed early, even if I don’t work early, and I cry. I think of how much fun the world is having around me and how it’s become impossible for me to enjoy it because I’m just so fucking afraid.
I’m afraid to drive at night in case I get lost like I did all of those years ago. I’m afraid that my friends would rather hang out without me because it is more fun that way. I’m afraid that whoever I might be dating is going to meet someone they like more, and then I will be alone again. I am so afraid of how the night will end that I just try to sleep through it. I try to plow through the day like it is any other, and I long for the sunrise to show me that I’ve made it through another night.
The pressure for holidays to be perfect is debilitating. I spend so many of them emotionally drained that I forget to enjoy the time off from work and the time with my family. I forget that along with all of the endings that come every year, there are also many beginnings and many good things, too. I am so focused on how wrong everything could go that I forget how often it has all gone right. I think I am so worthy of leaving that I can’t imagine myself as worthy of loving.
Every New Year’s Eve, I lose myself.
And I don’t return until the sunrise.
