Once upon a time (2010 - 2012), I was a sad, stressed out, very poor young adult, who had managed to graduate from college with a liberal arts degree in the middle of a recession, during a period of time when my generation was largely hated among hiring professionals. “Entitled” was what they called us. Lazy, demanding, and self-absorbed.
My own uncle even told me once, as a VP at Segway, that he would never hire a millennial if he didn’t have to, because he could get a GenXer to do the same work for the same price, but with many more years of experience.
I moved in with my grandmother post college (so I didn’t have to pay rent), and slowly picked up job after job after job, some $9/hour work and some contract gigs which, though I didn’t realize until I started tracking my time more carefully, were paying me roughly $3/hour. It was a very stressful time of my life, to say the least. And I was desperate for something more stable.
Finally, I got an interview, followed a couple weeks later by a phone call: “You got the job.” They offered me $43k/year, health, dental, and vision insurance, and a 401k. I cried. It was $13k more than I’d asked for, and more than double what I’d been making working 5 simultaneous part time jobs.
I began my new job as a curriculum developer gratefully, willing to do just about anything to stay employed. I was fast, efficient, and learned everything they set in front of me as well as I could and as quickly as I could.
The problem was, I’d never had a full time job before. And I didn’t know what types of expectations I should have for what was normal or abnormal. There were some things that bothered me somewhat, mostly in the treatment of lower level employees by managers, and while the issues weren’t critical to my ability to do my job, they did interfere somewhat with my ability to do my job well.
And I didn’t know who to ask for advice. Everyone I knew with a corporate position was either my own age and had no experience to speak of, worked at the same company as me so I didn’t feel comfortable asking them, or worked in a completely different industry.
What I wanted was a professional mentor. Someone who was not invested in this specific company, but was instead invested in me. Someone I could ask questions. Someone I could ask for feedback about how to handle situations at work. Someone I could trust to have my best interests at heart, but also the knowledge, skills, and experience to provide me with valuable advice.
It just so happened at the time, as part of my job, I was working on developing an e-learning for high school students on how to find a mentor. So I thought to myself, “Maybe I should test some of these strategies I’m including in this lesson.”
So I did.
I reached out to five different organizations in the area: two professional ones, a local education-based non-profit, and two retirement associations. I told them I was a young professional working in my first full time position, and I was wondering if anyone would be available to answer some generic questions about working at a corporate job, expectations, and perhaps provide some advice on how to handle conflict in the office.
Only one of them got back to me. A woman named Deidre emailed me ten days later and said, “If you'd like to meet for coffee and chat I'd be delighted.” She was the secretary for one of the retirement organizations, and had been the first person to see my letter. She’d run it by the board, and then volunteered to meet with me herself.
She lived only a few blocks away from me, as it turned out, and had a long career working for the Department of Health & Human Services. We met at the Panera not too far from us, ended up talking for nearly two hours, and thus began one of the best relationships of my life.
We started meeting at Panera every other week or so, and eventually, she simply invited me to her house. She always had orange juice, brownies, and snacks on hand. And her dog Jerry was always pissed when I arrived, but would eventually calm down and cuddle with her while we chatted. Her front room smelled like cinnamon, and a family of foxes lived under the shed in her backyard.
She adopted me into her life quickly, inviting me to family events, reading my books when I first published, and meeting my boyfriends. She was open with her opinions, never pretending she thought or believed something she didn’t.
Deidre was one of those people who knew herself. She knew what she wanted and needed. She loved her kids and grandkids more than anything. She believed strongly that it was her role to make the world a better place for the next generations. She poured her time and energy into volunteering wherever she could, and showed up for her friends and neighbors when they needed help. And she showed up for me.
She made me soup when I was sick. Gave me Christmas presents, even when I barely knew her. And for someone whose life was as chaotic and unstable as mine, she provided a solid foundation I could rely on.
“No, that’s not normal,” was a common thing she said to me. “You shouldn’t have to do that. You don’t have to put up with that. Have you talked to HR?”
And her advice quickly advanced beyond my work life and into my personal life. She had thoughts on my family, my friends, the people I dated, and somehow, was always able to give advice without making me feel like she was trying to force her opinion onto me. “This is what I think. What do you think?” she would say.
I was always allowed to have my own opinion, no matter what. She never tried to force me to see things her way, simply provided her perspective and let me draw my own conclusions about it.
During the period of my life when I met her, I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what I believed about anything—religiously, politically, ethically, philosophically. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life. I didn’t know what I wanted my future to look like. I didn’t know where I belonged. I was floating in level 3 of Dubrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration, and I had no idea how to get out of it.
But I slowly began to realize that with Deidre, I always belonged. There was always room for me on her couch, at her kitchen table, with her family. She was my best friend. A lifeline when I was most alone.
Deidre died in 2019. It was sudden. Heartbreaking. I’m still heartbroken, years later.
2019 was a pretty shitty year for me. Deidre died. Then my cat. Then my great aunt. My grandmother. And the list continues. And, as you’ll remember, 2019 rolled right into 2020. I had next to no time to process my grief for any of the people I lost, and then people started dying all over again, but this time at a macro level. As in, hundreds of thousands dying from Covid.
My primary covid stress-management strategy was art. I drew and drew and drew. I locked myself in our bedroom and binged TV shows, and filled page after page of my sketchbook. It was my cave, my space where I hid from the realities of the world. And slowly, I realized that, perhaps, if I could use art to survive the pandemic, then I could also use it to heal from my grief.
So I drew the people I loved. Each person I lost, I tried to immortalize in art. I drew a pencil drawing of my cat. And one of Josh’s grandmother. My friend’s brother. One of my own grandmother. But for some reason, my heart wouldn’t let me capture Deidre. Every time I tried, it hurt too much.
I changed a lot in 2020. I fully crash landed in the 4th level of Dubrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration. If I’d thought I’d been there before, I was wrong. I was there now, not wondering who I was, but actively deciding who I was. And the whole time, I had Deidre front and center of my mind.
I wanted to be like her.
She was herself, not ashamed of her life, but not prideful. She existed fully as herself, or at least it seemed that way to me. And that’s what I wanted. I wanted to know who I was and what I believed, and I wanted to be confident in it. Confident enough to not apologize for my beliefs, confident enough to change my mind when I learned something new, confident enough to just be myself.
Fast forward to 2021.
I’ve never liked Christmas. And Christmas 2021 happened only a couple months after I’d had a medium-sized surgery. I was on a new medication, dealing with a lot of physical and mood fluctuations, and really didn’t want to be around anyone.
I’d already dialed back my participation with family holiday events significantly through the years as I didn’t believe in the religious foundation of the holiday, and I had struggled with a lot of the secular traditions too. I liked the decorations and good cheer, but didn’t like the over-the-top gift giving (partially because I grew up poor, and partially because I don’t like the stress of the reciprocity effect [social psychology]) and heavy obligations to perform other people’s versions of the holiday for them. I liked the food and the music, but not the extensive traveling and stressful family events.
Josh’s and my preferred Christmas day looks like this: sleeping in, making potatoes and green bean casserole and whatever meat Josh is in the mood for, and playing video games for 15 hours.
But in 2021, I was having intensely swinging feelings about the holiday. The lights and the music made me feel good, and then immediately reminded me of how much I disliked the holiday. I wanted to decorate our house, but I didn’t want to celebrate. I wanted to put up a tree, but I didn’t want to give gifts.
And in a fit of frustration, I said to Josh, “I just want to have it and not have it at the same time.”
To which he replied, “Why don’t you just make up your own holiday then?”
Because I married a genius, obviously.
The idea took root. With my own holiday, I could discard the elements of Christmas that bothered me, while participating in the overall culture of the season. I could celebrate something important to me at the same time everyone else was celebrating something important to them, without feeling like I had to lie about what I did and didn’t like about the holiday. I could have my tree, and eat it too. (Well, not literally haha, but you know me: I can’t resist a terribly mixed metaphor).
The question then became: What kind of holiday? What or who would I celebrate?
You can see where this is going.
Deidre loved Christmas. She loved all holidays, in fact. She was the kind of person who kept themed dishes for every possible occasion. She had strings of lights with tiny Christmas trees, Easter eggs, and American flags on them. Every season, she had some new décor around her house—pumpkins, fall wreaths, snowflake garlands, bunny rabbits.
I personally didn’t care about Christmas or Easter, and not even patriotic holidays all that much. But I did care about Deidre.
And so, let me introduce you to Deidre Day.
It’s sometime in December—the 21st or the 22nd or the 25th—though you can celebrate it anytime, really. Any major holiday you don’t like for whatever reason, simply replace it with a Deidre Day celebration. I think she’d be delighted.
On Deidre Day we celebrate kindness. We do something kind for another person—volunteer, give a gift if you want, solve a problem for someone else. We remember good advice we’ve received from people who love us. We reach out to our friends and tell them how important they are to us. We repair and invest in interpersonal bonds when possible, while taking care to maintain our personal boundaries and respecting others’ boundaries, for our own mental and emotional health.
We give blankets and ornaments as gifts, donate to non-profits, bake zucchini bread and chex mix, and make homemade peppermint bark from white chocolate and candy canes. We drink hot chocolate and drive around to look at holiday lights in our pajamas. We light cinnamon candles and hang up decorations that make us happy. We decorate with sparkles and glitter, in black and silver and green, and we remember the people in our life who we were blessed to know for however long or short we had them.
Deidre Day can be celebrated alone or with others. By running a marathon or watching a marathon. By cooking at home or eating out.
Truthfully, the only thing you need to celebrate Deidre Day, is to be grateful for someone who once helped you.
Happy Deidre Day, friends. I hope you have, had, or will have someone in your life who means as to you as Deidre did to me.