When The Holidays Ask Too Much.

I didn’t mean to disappear for a month.

It wasn’t intentional, and it wasn’t because I didn’t have anything to say. If anything, I had too much to say, too many feelings, too many tangled thoughts, too many moments where I couldn’t tell where the season ended and my own overwhelm began.

The holidays have always been complicated for me. They’re loud, emotional, expectation-heavy. They stir up memories and pressure and the kind of invisible weight that settles into your shoulders before you even realize you’re carrying it. Everyone else seems to move through December with this effortless glow, and meanwhile I’m over here trying to keep my nervous system from short-circuiting.

This year, though… it hit different. Harder. Sharper. Like every emotion had teeth. And for weeks, I thought it was just the holidays doing what the holidays do. But it wasn’t just that.

I spent most of December simmering. Not explosive, not dramatic, just this constant, low-grade anger humming under my skin. Everything felt like too much. Every sound, every expectation, every tiny inconvenience. I kept thinking, Why am I reacting like this? Why does everything feel so sharp? Why can’t I get a grip on myself?

When you live with a personality disorder, you already spend so much time trying to understand your own reactions. You become fluent in self-analysis. Hyper-aware. Always checking in with yourself, trying to figure out what’s you, what’s stress, what’s trauma, what’s environment.

So when something feels “off,” the first place you look is inward.

What am I doing wrong?

Why am I like this again?

Why can’t I regulate?

Why can’t I just be normal for once?

I didn’t question the anger. I questioned myself. And that’s the part that hurts the most in hindsight.

It turns out the medication I was taking was making everything worse. And I had absolutely no idea.

I was already overwhelmed. Already stretched thin. Already trying to navigate the emotional landmines of the holiday season. So when the medication started shifting my mood even further off-center, I didn’t recognize it as something external. I thought it was just me being “too much” again.

That’s the tricky thing about personality disorders: when your emotional baseline is already sensitive, it’s incredibly hard to tell when something else is messing with it. The line between “this is me” and “this is something affecting me” gets blurry. Sometimes invisible.

I didn’t see the signs. I didn’t connect the dots. I didn’t even consider that something meant to help could be quietly amplifying everything I was already struggling with.

And honestly? That realization hit me harder than the symptoms themselves.

When I finally understood what was happening, it felt like someone opened a window in a room I didn’t realize had gone dark.

Suddenly the last month made sense. The anger made sense. The overwhelm made sense. The way I felt hijacked by my own emotions made sense.

It wasn’t that I was “getting worse.”

It wasn’t that I was “failing.”

It wasn’t that I was “broken again.”

It was that something chemical was nudging my emotional compass off-course, and I didn’t have the clarity to see it.

There’s a strange kind of grief in that realization. Relief, too. But mostly grief for the version of me who was trying so hard to hold herself together without knowing the ground was shifting under her feet. So here I am, on the other side of a very long month, trying to make sense of it all.

Trying to forgive myself for the moments I snapped. Trying to understand the days I felt like a stranger in my own skin. Trying to hold compassion for the version of me who didn’t know what she didn’t know.

The holidays don’t pause just because we’re struggling. They don’t soften themselves for our mental health. They don’t dim their intensity when we’re already overwhelmed. And when you add unexpected emotional changes on top of that, it becomes a kind of survival that no one really talks about.

But I’m talking about it now. Because disappearing for a month doesn’t mean I failed. It means I was surviving something I didn’t yet understand.

I don’t have a perfect takeaway. I don’t have a neat bow to tie this up with. But I do have this:

I’m learning myself in real time. I’m allowed to have seasons where I go quiet. I’m allowed to be human in ways that aren’t tidy. And I’m allowed to tell the truth about it.

If the holidays were hard for you too, I hope you know you’re not alone. If your emotions felt bigger than your body, you’re not alone. If you’re still untangling what was you and what was circumstance, you’re not alone.

We’re all just trying to find our way through the noise.

And sometimes, surviving is enough.