I awoke this morning, on New Year’s Day 2024, from one of those deep sleeps that makes you wonder if you ever really sleep at all. I have been sick for the better part of the holiday season, in every sense of the word—physically sick, heartsick, lovesick, grief sick, job sick—and most of my nights have been fitful, either because of a hacking cough or the prickly agitation that comes with the sort of longing that NyQuil can’t shake off.

The chest infection combined with other people’s holiday obligations meant that I spent most of the back half of December alone, an experience I am deeply familiar with after years of working in the Manhattan restaurant industry. In food service, someone has to work the Christmas Eve rush, frost New Year’s cupcakes, and cater Thanksgiving dinner to folks who don’t cook. Even if the business is closed on the actual holiday, someone has to work the day before and after, rendering cross-country travel impossible.

Thus, my clearest holiday memories are not of cozy, matching pajama-clad mornings, but of a Christmas dinner of Caesar salad and buffalo chicken wings at the Jewish diner underneath my apartment, long walks with my dog down silent Manhattan streets, the deep sense of toska pulling at my heart.

Goddamned toska.

A Russian word with no English equivalent, Vladimir Nabokov said it best: “At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

Perhaps, given my pockmarked history of holiday experiences, I am primed to feel the weight of toska each year. Or, perhaps this is something experienced by those who have lost a core member of the family. The holidays, for all their cheer, will always be a quiet reminder that my father is not around to throw a tantrum over tangled Christmas lights. Or maybe it is the mark of adulthood, when the magic of the morning is tempered by all the work it took to create it, and all the impending work it’s going to take to erase it.

But the stupid heart always has hope.

This year, while a campy holiday Hallmark movie chirped in the background as I loafed prone and achy on my mother’s couch, we talked about uncertainty. My illness, it seemed, was the physical manifestation of everything I don’t know going into the new year. And I don’t know anything right now.

I have had a sense, for months, that big change is coming to my world. And yet, there is no indication of what that might be or where it might take place. All I know is that in October, my income evaporated when a client’s situation changed, and since then I have watched lead after lead dry up while I anxiously monitor my bank accounts.

My heart, too, is searching for a signal, but the frequency I put out keeps getting lost in static. And yet I cannot shake the situation, the person, and how their existence in my life has fundamentally altered my perception of myself, my abilities, and what I want to experience in the world.

Meanwhile, in my Instagram DMs, a woman reached out to tell me that after 16 months of tapering, the last night of the year would also be her last time taking an SSRI. I reposted this on my Instagram stories, thrilled to get a bit of good news given that most of the messages I receive are of the opposite ilk.

The post gained attention, at soon folks were messaging me with other antidepressant withdrawal wins. One woman went to her first concert in four years, armed with earplugs to combat withdrawal-induced noise sensitivity. Another shared a story about her first trip to the grocery store after coming out of Zoloft withdrawal. Another recently gave birth to a healthy baby fourteen months after horrific Effexor withdrawal.

These little messages, most from folks who’d contacted me in the depths of suffering, lifted me not because of any hand my work may or may not have had in their healing, but because it reminded me that blind conviction is a requirement during fallow seasons. The other side of toska is hope. It is hope that lets us endure the pining, restlessness, and yearning for the magic to return, for the static to clear, and for the body to find health and equilibrium.

And so I awoke lighter this morning, the pull of toska not quite as heavy, the phlegmy cough a little less rough, with a little more patience to let the signal of work and love travel to their receivers.

Bestill the stupid, stupid heart.