THANKSgiving?

This really is one of the worst holidays.

My family is all into Thanksgiving. Making the casseroles and the turkey and the pies and the sweet potatoes and bringing out the apple cider. We make all this food, sit around my aunt’s dining room table, and take turns saying what we’re thankful for.

I don’t know what to say. I never know what to say. I’m supposed to sit there and say thank you to God, for what? Life, love, family, friends?

I’m sorry, what are those again??

That’s the thing about being depressed. You feel so alone all the time. No friends, no family, no love, no life. How am I suppossed to say thank you to God when I can barely stand to pray? I hate it, I hate it so much.

But every single year I sit there and I say it, I say thank you for my friends, and my family and the love we all share, and for my life. I say it because I am trying to pretend. I need to pretend that I’m okay when I’m around my aunt and my cousins because if they knew what I was really like when it’s just me and my siblings and my mom at home, they’d tell my mom to stick me in an insane asylum.

So I sulk in silence all through the meal, all through the day I have to spend with my jabbering cousins going on and on about their ruined love lives. Every week with Jaime and Erin it’s a different boy they are infatuated with and then the next week they’ll be talking about how he screwed them over. I find this both irritating and entertaining, seeing as how I’m not even like this and I’m YOUNGER then they are.

Oh well, I suppose it’s no big deal. I am glad I can keep up this act around my mother’s side of the family. I’m glad I can sit there all through the meal and pretend that I’m having the best time and that life is just going insanely good. Because it’s not, it rarely ever is for me.

But they don’t know that, they won’t ever know that.

I guess that’s what I’m thankful for.