Pain and joy can co-exist.

You’d think that intense pain means minimal joy, but that’s not always the case. We are complex beings, folks.

You can feel significant joy while feeling significant pain.

It’s not, “It was hard but it was good.”

It’s “It was hard and good.”

Life is bittersweet, right?

My dad died in May. He had schizophrenia and that made our relationship complicated. It’s Christmas, and my habit lately is to say I miss him but it’s a relief. I caught myself the other day. I miss him and it’s a relief. It’s not a contradiction.

Humans feel lots of things at once. It’s not like we process one feeling and send the next feeling to voicemail. You can’t put your feelings on silent. Sometimes they all ring at once.

You can celebrate and be sad. Every single one of us has stuff to celebrate and stuff to be sad about.

You can celebrate and be angry. You have every right to feel angry but (I mean, and) that doesn’t take away what you deserve to celebrate.

You can celebrate and bring your clinically depressed and anxious selves along for the party. I’ve done that a few times. It’s not like I don’t go to the party. I get all three of us dressed and ready. Maybe I even flat iron my hair and show up with a store-bought cake. Perhaps I don’t have a bad time.

I celebrate and I am depressed and I am on the verge of a panic attack. It can be two or more things and none of them changes the others.

Here’s to you if you are sitting around in the aftermath of a celebration trying to process. If you can’t quite put your finger on what you are feeling, that’s probably because everything you are feeling is tossed around like a giant salad. You don’t feel tomatoes or bacon or croutons–but tomatoes and bacon and croutons create something unique, and we feel uncomfortable because it’s unrecognizable to us and we don’t know if it is what we are supposed to feel.

It’s never all good and it’s never all bad. Nothing in life is all good or all bad, after all. And it’s going to change soon anyway.

And there is no “supposed to.” You aren’t supposed to feel a certain way. You’re not even supposed to do a certain thing. Let go of that. You feel like you feel and then you do what you do. And all of it is okay.

Merry. Happy.

On Christmas Day we got all three of our dogs to wear pajamas.