It's Just Another Day

There’s nothing more depressing than watching people live your dreams. I always dreaded going to school after the holidays for reasons other than doing school work. The room would drown with chatter of people’s holiday escapades: I visited my family in Philadelphia for Christmas. I took a plane down to Florida and spent a few days at Disney and Universal. My family drove to New York and we bought tons of gifts and saw the big tree at Rockefeller. Everyone would ramble about their exhilarating holiday thrills, and I would sit and smile.

Meanwhile, I spent my holiday cooped up in my bedroom, scrolling through my phone and finishing schoolwork. My Dad always worked during the holidays and my Mom never wanted to go anywhere, so we just stayed home. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were never a huge, picture-perfect feast of caramel-colored turkey, golden-brown pies, or creamy mashed potatoes speckled with black bits of pepper: we just had our usual three meals of cereal and rice. We never had visiting family or friends because everyone was either occupied with their own plans or lived across the globe. Outside, the streets were always lined with a rainbow of cars in varying sizes, colors, and brands, and suddenly our home, our place of comfort and security, felt suffocating. The holidays were more like another regular day for us.

So you can imagine the difficulty in answering the obligatory question of “What did you do?,” when you didn’t do anything. People would go on and on about their disastrous road trip, their hectic holiday feast or their simply divine stay at a far far away place, and when they would ask me the question of “What did you do?,” the conversation suddenly ended.

“Oh, I just stayed home and did work. Not much.”

“Oh, well, that’s cool.”

And then it was over.

Don’t get me wrong, I love hearing people’s experiences. Seeing people so emotional, whether good or bad, is refreshing in their storytelling, and their life stories are genuinely interesting and keep the conversation going. But it’s hard to not feel the familiar pang of envy when they talk and you realize that you don’t (and will probably never) have the same fortune that they have. When you wish you could have more and not have less. It’s frustrating to have such revelations and impossible dreams of gaining that same fortune, yet you keep reminding yourself of them anyway.

Maybe it provides a bit of hope for the future, a bit of motivation. Something to remember when you’re at your lowest. Either way, I’ll always remember and I’ll always hope. There’s nothing else to do.

So for those who spend their holidays with their loved ones and go on invigorating trips to far far away places, be grateful for your experiences. For some people, it’s just another day.