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Thread for Feelings/Advice About Covid-19 and the Winter Holidays

When you want support through something scary or rough, and help pulling yourself together and getting through, this is the place.
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We ask that users looking for general, ongoing emotional support post in this area of the boards, and that you use this space to both ask for, give and receive that support primarily from each other, rather than from our staff and volunteers. As a staff, we simply are often too overextended with all we need to do in running the organization and its services to do that for extended periods of time, and one of our main aims of our community at the boards has always been to facilitate peers to better be there for each other.

Users often report that they have no in-person peers they can talk to or seek support from: we want this to be a space for online peer support and somewhere everyone can get some practice asking for, getting and giving support so that doing it with people in your lives feels more doable.

Please remember that neither staff, volunteers nor your fellow users can provide or replace mental healthcare when that is something you need. Users struggling with issues like anxiety, depression, abuse or physical health issues are strongly encouraged to seek out qualified, in-person help with those issues in addition to peer or staff support.
Sam W
previous staff/volunteer
Posts: 10320
Joined: Mon Jul 28, 2014 9:06 am
Age: 33
Awesomeness Quotient: I raise carnivorous plants
Primary language: english
Pronouns: she/her
Sexual identity: queer
Location: Coast

Thread for Feelings/Advice About Covid-19 and the Winter Holidays

Unread post by Sam W »

No lie, a few days ago I couldn't figure out why everyone was talking about Thanksgiving in the U.S until I looked at the calendar and saw it was the 15th. We've talked before on the boards about the winter holidays being a stressful time for a lot of folks for a lot of reasons and the pandemic has put it on hard mode.

A lot of us are having to set boundaries with family members, for maybe the first time, around visiting and celebrations. Some of us are stuck at home with people we don't feel we can be ourselves around. Some of us are stuck at home alone. Some of us are stuck going to work when it doesn't feels safe. We have a bunch of advice for dealing with all this in our Covid tag: https://www.scarleteen.com/tags/covid19. And friend of Scarleteen, Captain Awkward, put together a great link round up, including advice on setting boundaries and celebrating alone: https://captainawkward.com/2020/11/16/l ... bout-them/

As with basically everything in life, there's no one correct way to feel about all this. Quite frankly, I think most of us feel a mix of things. So I thought we could use this thread to share those feelings, as well as the things we're each using to get through all this and maybe offer each other some support or advice.

Personally, while I'm exhausted and frustrated with the fact cases shot up in our county, there are things I'm looking forward too. We live in a rural area, so we'll probably get a permit to go out and cut our own Christmas tree in the wild. Which means Marceline the rabbit will get to encounter a Christmas tree for the first time, and if past experiences are anything to go by, rabbit plus tree inside the house is hilarious.

How about y'all?
And you to whom adversity has dealt the final blow/with smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go/turn to and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain/and like the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.
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