I can’t quite believe I’ve been writing to you all for nearly six months now. From a young age, I have wished on shooting stars and prayed to every God that I would one day have an audience who would not only read my notes, poems and stories but resonate with them also. The texts that most profoundly affect me have always been the ones that I can relate to, such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, in which Plath illustrates the agony one undergoes when unable to turn the light on in any room and when afraid to sleep at night. I see so much of myself in Esther and her unconventional etiquette. She succumbs to constant overthinking and turmoil despite the positives life delivers to her. I can painfully relate - the more attached I get to people the more I worry I’ll let them down. And I almost always do because I fret and agonise and brood over the prospect of disappointing my loved ones I practically will it into happening.
I watch A Charlie Brown Christmas every year and I think it's a masterpiece of a film. There are so many hidden messages within the classic, such as the fact that even young children are susceptible to severe melancholia during the holidays. What I believe Charles M Schulz was attempting to convey is the necessary yet undiscussed transition a child must make in their beliefs surrounding Christmas: children put all their confidence into a bearded man in a red suit set to make their dreams come true and are then expected to transfer this faith into Christ with no guidance as to how. This wasn't a year that I began to doubt my faith, nonetheless, it has far and away been the hardest year I’ve ever had to go through. As a relationship person, the breaking down of multiple friendships all at once has been a really difficult pill to swallow. Regret and sorrow have woken me up every morning for the last few months; I spent all of September with an agonising sadness in the forefront of my mind. Now it’s December, and I don’t know if I’ve moved on at all, but I’ve definitely got on with things very well - like Charlie Brown, I've always been good at that.
Whilst this is the time of year many of us find ourselves dolefully reminiscing on past times and what has changed since the previous year, I’m attempting to leave the events of this year behind as we step into 2023. This time next year, I want to be happy. And I'm going to try really, really hard to make sure I am.
But if I end up crying to John Williams' Christmas Star, that's okay too.
Thank you so much for every blessing you've granted me over the last 6 months.
Wishing you the merriest of Christmasses and the happiest of New Years,
Karisma xxx