Chag sameach to everyone celebrating Chanukah. And happy holidays to all of you celebrating whatever is meaningful to your heart this time of year. Especially marginalised queer & trans folks.
May warmth & love & hope & kindness & gentleness & softness & understanding & self-acceptance show up as guests for your feasts & never leave. May the shape & meaning of your life tell you about itself loudly, so you don’t have to stay up nights feeling terrible & wondering. May you have community to support you through the grimmest days, and through the joys that overfill your body, and may you have the encouragement & strength to ask for that support…or extra-empathic loved ones who offer. May you have help & signposts as you figure out the special, specific shape of who you are (and how that is always changing), and acceptance & celebration & welcoming for when you do. If you are currently in hostile territory where hardly anyone sees your sparkle, may you remember just how many people in other parts of your life think you are awesome.
3 blessings for us all: May we love & feel loved. May we have each others’ backs. May we survive the coming months with hope (don’t undersell it; sometimes it’s all marginalised folks have, however ‘unrealistic’) and persistence. We are strong, with the strength of those twisted trees rooted into mountainsides. We are the magic candlelight we have been waiting for.
