There's this myth that suicides go up around the holidays in December. Statistically speaking, it isn't true, but the fact that it exists at all says a lot.

Getting together with your family — or maybe not being able to get together with your family — can end in a lot of upset. Maybe it's something along the lines of familial rivalry, as trivial as being compared to your wildly successful cousin while you are still scraping through school. Or maybe it just brings back memories of different times, like before your parents got divorced, or back when all of your grandparents were alive. Or maybe the holidays just remind you how ridiculously broke you are, when you can't get anyone better gifts than print-off cards from Microsoft Publisher.

Then New Year's rolls around, and you get to mull over how many questions you messed up on your exams, count how many pounds you gained, and wonder if your ex really is happier with that new person. You spend New Year's Eve wondering why your party does not look like an episode of Skins or a scene from When Harry Met Sally... Or better yet, how come your life isn't like Love, Actually? Where's 20-something- year-old Hugh Grant? Midnight strikes, time passes, and you enter a new year that feels just like the old.

Then, just as you finish nursing that hangover from cheap champagne, it is time to start sludging through dirty snow and crowded buses to get back to school, hoping it will all be better this year.

Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but December tends to be the worst for me.

Back home in the Bahamas, we have a parade called Junkanoo, which only happens twice a year: once on Boxing Day and once on New Year's Eve. It originated from the days of slavery. Because slaves were not allowed to celebrate during the day, at night, they would use “junk” to make costumes and instruments. Junk. Anew. Junkanoo. The two parades take a whole year of work and put into a night of strenuously “rushing” down the street of the capital, a feat that, ultimately, seems pretty exhausting and pointless. But, much like life, that's the fun of it. Junkanoo is about having fun, celebrating, and pushing through the exhaustion of the dark, and making it to the morning, gleaming bright with sweat, like a piece of coal under the pressure of the night.

A challenge for this holiday season is, rather than ignoring your scars, to glorify them and acknowledge how they made you who you are today, to look at every failure of mistake as just a blessing in disguise. Rather than looking backwards in regret or forward in dread about how tedious the winter term may be, focus on the end result.

Like they say, it's always darkest before the dawn.