Did you have a nice Christmas?
Mine was… strange.

I had a really good day just before Christmas, on the 18th. My son had to go to the dentist but it was cancelled, so we went out and had a good day instead. I felt hopeful for once, and I was genuinely looking forward to our quiet Christmas together. I thought about how last year I was still deep in a relapse, avoiding food, and how this year would be different because I’m in recovery.

So we did Christmas things. We bought Christmas food. I bought my son some books and a Heartstopper calendar. We splashed through puddles in the heavy rain and laughed about it. It felt like progress. It felt like something had shifted.

I even wrote a whole blog post about that cancelled dentist appointment day – I’ll probably still post it. But when I woke up the next morning, ready to share it, everything had changed. All of that hope had gone. In its place was dread, anxiety, and a very low mood. I told myself it was probably burnout, or just a blip, and decided to wait until I felt better before posting.

But I didn’t feel better.

And that feeling stayed with me through Christmas.
What I ended up having wasn’t the Christmas I imagined – it was a Long Dark Christmas, with both cougars that maul me and bears that comfort me.

The Ghost of Christmas PTSD

I went no contact with my mother about four years ago. She had always been emotionally abusive towards me, but things escalated when her behaviour began to turn towards my son.

I’ve tried to escape her my entire adult life. I moved away from her – she moved next to me. I changed my surname – she changed hers to the same surname. It borders on obsessive behaviour.

I told her in no uncertain terms that I only wanted to hear from her in an emergency. I can’t block her completely because my dad has been missing since 2020, and she is the only way I would hear if something happened to him.

At first, she sent cheques for birthdays and Christmas. I never cashed any of them. She must have noticed – she checks her bank – because after that, the cheques stopped and the Amazon deliveries began.

Every occasion now comes with many days of random packages. I’ve tried contacting Amazon, but they won’t let me block her from sending things. At one point I even reported the parcels as scam packages, because they genuinely felt that way – random items arriving with no explanation. That just led to her escalating again: gift notes attached, followed by days of text messages telling me she’d sent them.

My son is upset about it too. He said, “This proves she never knew us at all.” And he’s right. The items are things like fidget spinners, strange pens, little mazes – the kind of stuff you look at and think, who is this even for? Why do they even make and sell this?

When the first package arrived, I thought that was it. I told myself it was over, that now we could just enjoy Christmas. But they kept coming. Then came the texts. Then the cards through the letterbox.

I wish it didn’t affect me – but it did.

I tried to force myself back into the Christmas mood by watching Christmas films and programmes, but instead I just felt increasingly irritated, angry, and triggered by how this is what my family looks like. And then the guilt crept in – guilt that my son doesn’t have the glossy TV version of family either. Guilt that this is somehow my fault.

That voice has always been there. My mother has always said it’s my fault. That she’s the victim. That her behaviour is justified – even now, when her harassment simply arrives via Amazon boxes instead of direct contact. I always believed that to be true, until she started suddenly behaving the same way to my son. It made me question everything because no one could ever convince me that he deserves it even though she tried. He does not, he is wonderful and has always been so adorable, loving and kind.

It didn’t help that I was ordering a lot myself in the run-up to Christmas. Every delivery became a moment of uncertainty. Was it something I’d ordered for Christmas? Or was it another reminder of her mind games? More than once, I found myself thinking that the little maze she sent would be easier to navigate than her behaviour.

What those packages really did, though, was something else entirely. They reminded me of the empty chairs at Christmas – the people who actually loved us and should have been there. They reminded me how much I miss my best friend. How much I miss my dad. And without them, her harassment feels louder, heavier, harder to carry.

I felt terrible – and then I felt terrible for feeling terrible. But once those feelings were stirred, everything else came crashing down with them.

The Ghost of Christmas Presents

I did try. I didn’t completely let myself be pulled straight into the depressive black hole that had started forming around me. I fought for my son, and for a while I managed it – until it became impossible.

Suddenly it felt strange that it was Christmas at all. Not sad-strange. Just wrong. Like celebrating Christmas in July. Everything was slightly off-kilter, disconnected, unreal. And once that feeling set in, food became difficult again.

Before I fully realised what was happening, I was skipping meals. My hunger cues disappeared. Even drinking enough water felt like effort. This didn’t come out of nowhere – it’s been building since I had Covid.

Before Covid, I had convinced myself that my chronic fatigue syndrome was mostly caused by my eating. Even during recovery before this relapse, my diet hadn’t been great. So this time, I did it differently. I ate more whole foods, more protein, more nutrients. I took fish oil, creatine, magnesium. And for a while, it felt like it was working. I still couldn’t do what “normal” people do, but I had one or two extra spoons some days. That felt huge.

Then Covid happened.

Since then, I’ve regressed back to where I was before – severe fatigue, burning eyes whenever I do anything, including eating. I struggle to stay awake after meals. My meals are already small. My maintenance calories at 42, with very little activity, are low anyway – my biggest meal is about 500 calories, the rest less than that – and still, eating leaves me feeling sedated for hours.

Skipping meals right now isn’t about weight or my eating disorder. It’s about avoiding that sedation. It’s about grief and anger about the way eating properly appears to make my chronic fatigue worse. In the early stages of relapse or refeeding, it can look like my fatigue improves – but after a while, both restriction and recovery end up making it worse in different ways.

I haven’t even weighed myself for over a week. I don’t want to see it. I probably have lost weight. I just don’t even want to know because it’s not about that. It’s not about the numbers or trying to maintain control.

What’s hitting hardest is the grief. I thought I’d made this better. I thought I’d cracked it this time. And now this flare – whatever it is – has made every single thing I worked so hard on feel irrelevant. Even creatine does this strange thing where it helps for a week or two, then my body adapts and I’m back at baseline. I’ve tried increasing it – 3g, then 5g, then 8g, then 10g – but I can’t keep increasing forever just to have the initial boost benefits.

It’s not that I haven’t tried everything. I have. I even did graded activity, but Covid – and two weeks in bed – knocked me back to zero again. Now I get burning eye fatigue from popping over the road to Greggs, and then more fatigue from eating once I’m back.

I blamed myself for this too. Depression always makes my chronic fatigue more unliveable, so I tried everything I could to pull myself back from the edge of that black hole. Nothing helped.

And in trying not to fully concede to it – to the long, dark pull of it – I ended up doing the only thing that felt manageable.

I played The Long Dark.

The Ghost of the Christmas Cougar

The Long Dark did help, at least a little. For reasons I don’t fully understand, I’m on the run of my life. I’m on day 177 with permadeath – a personal record by far. My previous best was 118 days.

This run almost ended when I got mauled by a cougar. Severe lacerations – the kind that randomly start bleeding again, something I didn’t realise until I slept and nearly died. I survived by sleeping one hour at a time for seventy-two hours straight. I still don’t quite know how.

The Long Dark is pure survival. Food. Water. Fire. Shelter. And not dying to cougars, apparently. There are long walks where you have to be completely present, completely aware – mindfulness, if mindfulness occasionally involves being mauled. I’ve been playing with the trader too, and honestly I might write an entire post about my exploits. I play chaotically. I don’t play safe. I wander into blizzards without pots, pans, or a way to make fire, and somehow keep surviving. At one point I seriously considered eating animal fat just to avoid losing my Well Fed bonus because I’d gone out without food again.

The fact that this run has made it to 177 days feels like a miracle.

And it’s a very on-the-nose metaphor for my life right now. Somehow, I keep surviving. But it’s Christmas, and it feels like it should be more than that.

The Long Dark is a quiet apocalypse, and Christmas felt like one too. On Christmas Day, my son played his new Pokémon game and the DLC I bought him. We sat under blankets, played games, and watched EastEnders. In that small, contained way, The Long Dark helped. This depression feels like something I have to wait out – the same way Astrid waits out severe lacerations – trying not to lose a Well Fed bonus, staying hydrated, sleeping when you can.

I still wasn’t fussed about food on Christmas Day. I ate my regular food, tried not to skip everything, swapped some meals for snacks and a mince pie. I grieved the Christmas I thought I’d have because I’m in recovery. I just wasn’t interested in Christmas food. I wanted my food – the food that functions.

My son loved his gifts. I did try. But I felt disconnected. Right now, The Long Dark is the only thing that makes sense to me. My son has had fun watching me play even though the cougar stressed him out too. It felt like it was stalking me afterward, because I didn’t know messing with a cougar spawns more cougars.

Usually, when Christmas burns me out, Boxing Day brings relief. I start looking forward to New Year’s Eve – it’s always been my favourite of the strange Christmas days. This year, I’m not looking forward to it. All I feel is dread. Then January comes, and with it another anniversary of losing my best friend. That’s all I can think about. I miss her so much.

Maybe this is part of recovery too. This is the first Christmas in recovery – and also the first Christmas where I’m actually feeling things instead of numbing myself out with a lack of food. I’m not uninterested because I’m avoiding. I’m uninterested because I’m here.

There’s a line Dexter says in the worst episode of Dexter, the last one of the original run. Something like: “In the past I would have done anything to feel. Now that I do, all I want is for it to stop.” I think that’s where I am.

This feels like a make-or-break point in recovery. Not relapsing completely – but standing face-to-face with recovery and everything it brings back with it. Grief is one of those Sisyphus rocks I want to run away from instead of pushing. The question is whether I learn to push it, or keep running.

The mother rock is there too. That one would be easier to push if it didn’t harass me every step of the way up the hill.

Did You Have a Nice Christmas?

People keep asking if I had a nice Christmas, and I keep saying quiet but yes – how about you? Because who actually wants the real answer. This post is the real answer. And still, I genuinely hope yours was better than mine.

It helps, actually, when people tell me they had a really good Christmas. It reminds me that what I experienced wasn’t a quiet apocalypse everywhere – it just was for me. And knowing that makes it feel a little less final. It makes the world feel a little bit warmer than the one in The Long Dark that I’ve escaped to.

I might still post that piece about the good day we had before Christmas. It mattered. It’s proof that good days do happen. I just can’t organise my mental illnesses and my grief around preordained calendar events. I wish I could, and I tried so hard to out of love for my son even though I knew that was impossible.

This song is for my son. I feel like being ill at Christmas, is letting him down.