Nora McInerny

Our performance hadn’t brought us closer together; it made us feel even lonelier than we already did. What we needed was not a passable performance of gratitude but the acknowledgment of the pain we were all silently holding inside of ourselves.

We all wish we’d spent that Thanksgiving creating a new version of the holidays that matched our emotional landscape. We could have watched the Marvel movies in chronological order or even just laid face down on the kitchen floor for a few hours.

I wish we’d had the guts to say out loud how bad we all felt, how terrible it all was. I wish we had simply opted out of that year’s holiday season, had pretended it just wasn’t happening instead of pretending it was all OK.

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Nora McInerny is the creator of the podcast “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” and the founder of the Hot Young Widows Club, an online support group.