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Best wishes on the healing! I think Karen's advice about the hydration is really good.

So happy all went well other then the bed (it sounds like). Expect to sleep a lot for the next week or so which is normal and eat healthy along with drinking more water than you would normal.

And another potential path to dealing is that like so many other things, holidays are cultural expectation. We are taught these feelings and expectations for the time of year, it's not a natural biological/brain chemical response. We have the choice inside how much weigh to put on this cultural construct while we are figuring it all out. It takes a lot of years, I know, but from personal experience I know it's possible to take a good look at our actual lives, and adjust our internal feelings about them, which has been the absolute best remedy for me personally in dealing with the change, and I'm in group a, the really dysfunctional, trying to have tv perfect holidays, then back to the day to day crap. Realizing after several years that it's just another day altered by the cultural understanding which I never really fit into all that great anyway. This is not a slow process, and not right for everyone, but if you think it might be right for you it's completely worth persuing and can be done. How I ended up on the path is this. We have a holiday here called Sweetest Day. It's basically a second Valentine's Day that Hallmark made up to sell cards in thier off season between the summer wedding season and the winter holidays. I had never heard of it growing up on the east coast where it didn't catch on, and my freinds in Jersey still tell me they've only ever heard about it from me when I ask outta curiousity. So I watched people scrabble about to make it a 'perfect holiday' for their so's like they do in feb for Valentine's day, and it was a revelation. Holidays are just social made up things, and I had the choice to participate or not. (Once someone wrote down the name of the holiday for me and I understood it, I kept makeing swedish meatballs because I thought they were saying Swedish Day and I Thought it was some heritage celebration locally like the German Festival they do annually in Toledo with all the food, not just beer). And I didn't feel left out, or alone on years I didn't have either a boyfriend or girlfriend at the time. And that made me stop and look at the other holidays, and realize...they're the same. So now Christmas isn't a huge deal other than having a bit of fun looking at all the bling all around town and a nice family dinner with gifts. And if the gifts and family dinner went away, no big deal. Because I spent years working out my internal feelings vs. the cultural ones I was taught and get externally reinforced. It was...freeing. What other paths have you guys taken? I'm curious what my other options were aside from Monica's excellent suggestions and the one I took.

Karen, Thanks for sharing this! I've thought a lot about assimilation in the past few months as I've basically been trying to do it myself. Ultimately I agree with you that it's important to be available to help others as we can - for me it was (is?) driven by a desire to adjust my social life - for about 20 years of living as a gay man I had built a social life around that, so it was important to me to shift that now that I'm (authentically) living as a straight woman. Especially since I would very much like to be in a relationship (that would be hard to come by at gay bars). Having said all that, I'm definitely not trying to leave behind the LGBTQ community :-) xoxo Chrissy