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Being an introvert at Christmas is a recipe for disaster, especially when your idea of a break is alone time.

My hometown Christmas tree can give the one in Covent Garden a run for its money. At least in height.

By the time you read this I’ll probably be enjoying an ear-piercing teething baby serenade, I’ll most likely be annoyed at the glacial speed at which people put their belongings away, and will be definitely rolling my eyes every five seconds at anything that moves and anyone whose breathing is too loud. There’s something about being shoved into a very self-contained space like sardines in a tin at 10,000 feet of altitude that unleashes my absolute worse instintcs.

Popular wisdom says that the first step towards solving a problem is to acknowledge its existence but that doesn’t seem to be particularly useful when my problem is precisely the existence of other people. This is usually an issue in general but I feel it’s impact on my wellbeing particularly more acutely when I’m feeling overwhelmed and at my wits’ end but I need to be brave and endure the next ten days as best as I can.

Because, dear reader, it’s that time of the year when I’m about to travel home for Christmas.

Joy to the world, the anxiety is come.

I think it’s about time we collectively accept without any judgement that some of us have an extreme low tolerance for the outside world and those who live in it, disregard for special occasions, a high level of demand avoidance, severe time blindness (it’s a thing, trust me), and serious challenges around executive function.

A trip back to Spain for Christmas is the least ideal of activities given the above conditions as it implies being at one of the world’s busiest airports at a time when it’ll be full to bursting with very loud Spanish families. Heathrow at Christmas makes Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon look dead by comparison. Considering that I describe meetings with more than three people as massive gatherings, it’s no surprising the sheer amount of humanity that assembles at Heathrow every year headed towards warmer climates and dispositions feels daunting.

Add to this the mounting anxiety that overcomes me every time I need to take a plane in the morning as a result of all the reverse maths I have to do to calculate when I need to set up the alarm and leave the house to be able to complete all the different steps of the journey, each of which is a demand on my energy I’d rather avoid than execute. No matter that I always take the same flight at the same hour, I am still incapable of understanding how much time I need.

Being an introvert¹ at Christmas is a recipe for disaster, especially when your idea of a break is to have uninterrupted alone time. Good luck explaining that to an extrovert mother that for weeks has been reminding you she is really looking forward to seeing you, which translates as “I want to spend every waking hour you stay here glued to you.”

In an ideal world, I would spend the two weeks preceeding any flight back home -but in particular the one at Christmas- in complete isolation and silence in order to gather the necessary energy I need to survive the experience, which to begin with is more akin to a crossing of the desert than the beginning of a holiday.

I live in a remote area in Spain and it takes about 13 hours to get there door-to-door if everything goes according to plan, including me setting up the alarm correctly. If any of the multiple means of transportation I have to take is delayed, what was already an stressful journey turns into a choose your own adventure immersive experience, except that the choices I’m faced with are “go to the bus station and pray for a last minute bus ticket when everyone is trying to get home for Christmas and embark on a three hour journey that will make you sick” or “sleep at the train station until tomorrow and pray there’ll be any train tickets availabe. If not, go to the bus station.”

If you have an adventurous disposition, the sound of this can be quite thrilling and add a bit of excitement to what for outsiders is just a rather uneventful London-Madrid flight. Ignorance is a such a bliss sometimes.

For me, however, the Christmas trip is like the Russian roulette of trips and it’s nothing short of a miracle I haven’t had a complete meltdown in all these years and started sobbing in desperation while saying to anyone who cares to listen “I only wanted to be left alone to read, I never asked for any of this! Why did you have to make me Spanish, god, why?”

The things that can go wrong at Christmas range from a fire alarm going off at my tube station as I am about to head to the airport (don’t recommend), an overnight cancellation of the train I was planning on taking to avoid the temperamental nature of the tube, or the flight being delayed for a few hours or cancelled last minute (not uncommon this time of the year). Of course, everything can run smoothly and once at the airport I’ll realise that I have left my passport at home (which has also happened).

The Christmas trip is a dementor that sucks you dry and requires you to be fully alert, like a gazelle in the open plains of the wild savanna constantly tuning in for signals of a predator and ready to run for its life at the twitch of a leaf. Except that the predator is time and the one usually running is me towards the next tube/train/flight/train I need to catch if I don’t want to be left stranded halfway through my journey of the ten circles of transport hell.

Travelling home is not always this stressful. There are other times of the year when, while still subject to multiple mishaps, the levels of anxiety of this trip are more manageable. In a random week in May, for instance.

However here is the truth of living abroad, especially if you are from Spain: Like a tragic heroine, you have no alternative but to face your destiny and go through the trials that are sent your way to test you. So whether you want it or not, god forbid you aren’t home for Christmas because hell had no fury like a Spanish mother scorned during the festive season.

And because with age comes wisdom, I’ve learned to pick my battles and choose the path of less resistance, which in this particular situation means taking five different means of transport, one of which will probably make me vomit all over myself at the end of a long day of unpredictable travelling.

The alternative is enduring a string of voice notes from my mum stating her imminent death (despite being in good health and being a very active person) and how selfish I am for depriving her of my presence on such special occasion when she has so little time left on earth -in case this didn’t sink in the first time- when I as much as hint at the possibility of going home at a different time of the year.

The pandemic was the only time where I had a valid excuse not to be home for Christmas and even then I was chastised for not being available whenever she wanted to videocall me.

“Where were you? I’ve called you three times and you weren’t picking up. You’re not supposed to leave the house over there either, aren’t you?,” she said when I called her back.

“I was in the shower.”

“The three times I’ve called?”

“Well, yes, because you’ve called three times in five minutes.”

“You could have picked up and say you couldn’t speak. I was worried thinking something had happened to you.”

“I’m at home, what possibly could happen to me? Also, how was I supposed to respond from the shower?”

“You should have taken the phone to the bathroom. What if you slip in the bathtub and hit your head and you don’t have the phone with you and can’t call anyone and die there alone? I can’t believe you’d do something like that to your own mother.”

I don’t know if this is true for other Southern European mothers but for mine tragedy can strike any minute on a foreign land and you’d better be ready for it if you don’t want to be told off for your lack of preparation to face your own demise.

Perhaps my travel anxiety has not so much to do with my own sensory and executive challenges as much as with the pressure of keeping myself alive throughout the whole journey, or at least until I touch Spanish soil.

No wonder that with so much to worry about, by the time I get home I feel more like a battered piece of meat than a functioning member of society. My capacity to articulate full sentences usually disappears after I board the plane at Heatrow, by which point I’m three to four hours into my journey and already exhausted by all the potential pitfalls that I have avoided in order to be there. This is when I go into airplane mode to manage my energy levels as best as the crying babies on their way to meet their grandparents for the first time allow.

When I get home and feel I can finally relax after running on adrenaline for hours, the only thing I want to do is lie down and sleep. According to my mum this too is outrageous behaviour because she only gets to see me twice a year and who knows if she’ll be still around for the next one, but sure I’m welcome to sleep all I want, she’s only been waiting months for me to be home again, but she understands that at almost midnight I prefer my bed to her company. In my mum’s book a sprinkle of fatalism never did anyone any harm. Probably also no good but I don’t dare telling her because anything that can prevent me from embracing my bed is not worth the fight. I’m very zen these days, you see.

This is the real challenge of every trip back home at Christmas: The mismatched, perhaps slightly unreasonable expectation placed on how I must spend my time there. As an introvert my idea of a wonderful time is being left alone with a book. Obviously my extrovert mother, who loves being around people at all times, has a different view. Being home is always a regression to my younger self, a girl who naively thought that being an adult would be amazing as I would be finally able to spend my time as I pleased instead of having my mum repeating every five minutes “your brains are going to melt if you keep reading.” I inform you that nothing has changed.

Don’t get me wrong. I love having time off work and seeing my family during this time of the year, especially for our big Christmas’ Eve dinner, but spending Christmas as home is far from a relaxing experience and definitely NOT a holiday. This can’t be stressed enough and it’s true for any Southern European I know who lives in London.

If the weeks before flying have been busy with work, like this year, and I have been unable to spend enough time on my own getting mentally ready and building the necessary energy reserves for all the socialising that Spanish Christmas and my mum require, I’m running on a depleted tank and the opportunities to recharge it are slim.

I think for next year I’ll tell any company who wants to have a call or meeting in the two weeks before I am due to travel home that I have very limited availability as I am focusing on averting a serious family crisis. Because I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be haunted by my mum’s ghost should she die unexpectedly carrying out an errand for which I have refused to accompany her while I am at home for Christmas because I had to rest. No, no, no, no. With nothing to do but remind me that she may still be alive had I gone with her, her after-life would make my during-life insufferable.

I was actually considering staying in London this year to have an proper and much needed break until my sister and I decided that this year it’d be nice to spend a couple of days in Madrid before going home, which sounded like a great way to fill up the cultural tank and enjoy some time together as we both live abroad.

Because here is the other truth about living abroad: You rarely get to be a tourist in your own country. When you travel home, you travel home home, not home elsewhere because it is an open inviation for your mum to guilt trip you for failing to visit her when death is fast approaching, least you forget. Which means that the last time I spent a full day in Madrid that didn’t involved a transfer from the airport to the train station to go home or vice versa was in 2007, when I had to go to the US Embassy for my J1 visa appointment. Happy days.

As I type these lines I still have to face the analysis paralisys of what to pack (the dream of every person who struggles with demand avoidance and executive dysfunction) as well as triple check all the alarms and that my passport is indeed in my handbag and not on the bedside table drawer. I won’t be the cause of my own downfall again.

I feel marginally more relaxed compared to previous trips as once I land in Madrid I don’t have to worry about the next step of the journey for a few days, and then my sister and I will head together to the bus station for the dreaded three hour bus trip home. Fingers crossed I’ll manage to keep everything inside but three hours is a long time and anything can happen. Including the bus breaking down when you’re only ten minutes from getting home. At least we finally came to a halt when I was about to let it all out and that seemed to contained the situation. There’s always a silver lining.

“When you get to Madrid, send me a message to let me know you’ve arrived,” my mum says to us at the beginning of the week, our trip to the airport still days away. You bet that when we get off that bus she’ll be anxiously waiting for us at the station.

And then, when we’re finally home, the real Christmas endurance test will begin.

“Do you want to come with me to…?”, she’ll ask as the textbook extrovert she is.

“Actually, I’d like to stay home and rest a bit,” as the introvert I am.

“Have daughters, they said. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong in life to deserve this, but I won’t be around forever, just so you know. Anyway, I’m off now, you do what you want, but honestly I don’t understand why you prefer to stay here instead of coming with me and see people. You can always stay at home and read in London².”

By this point, my patience will have worn so thin, and my need for alone time will be so wide, that I’ll snap and swear that this is the last time I’m coming home for Christmas if every time it’s going to be like this.

The thing is that deep down in my subsconscious I know damn well that, for better or for worse, this is exactly where I’ll be in a year’s time, possibly having the same conversation, because after all you truly never know when it can be the last.

Home anxious home, here I come.

Happy Christmas everyone!

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Abroad is an independent publication about London, living in between cultures, creativity, and being human in the age of artificial intelligence.

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1. By now it’s obvious to me that there is a lot more than introversion at play but let’s leave it at that.

2. Perhaps this is a good moment to clarify that while my mum can be a tad melodramatic and definitely of an anxious disposition, she also has a great sense of humour and is a very loving person. So while it’s true that she will resort to her imminent death to get us to spend time with her while we’re home (which mother doesn’t?), my sister and I will use this as ammunition to fight back. An innocent message where my mum -the person with the most active social life I’ve ever known- tells us that she’s been quite busy going out with her friends is a golden opportunity for us to remind her that death is waiting at every corner and that a decent woman’s place is her home, not the street. To this she often replies “Precisely because I don’t know how long I have, I need to make sure I’m making the most of it.” You can’t outwit her.