On Christmases Past and Healing

Taken by me, Christmas 2011

Ten years ago today, I was alone but free. It was Christmas eve and I was full of emotion and relief.

A couple of months before, I'd unceremoniously cut my mother out of my life. I didn't realize I'd cut her out yet. We'd been arguing on the phone - a term I use for lack of a better word to describe the emotional minefield of the verbal battle between a narcissist mother and her daughter - and I realized suddenly that it wasn't worth it. Not only would she never hear me, but she would always cut me as deep as possible in order to maintain her power.

So I called her a "fucking bitch" (something I would NEVER have dared said before) and hung up the phone. We hadn't (and still haven't) spoken since.

That Christmas was the first good holiday I could remember beside the one I spent in England with my best friend and my cousin.

I'd HATED Christmas as long as I can remember. Don't get me wrong - I loved the season's trappings. I liked the lights and the sparkle and the songs and the movies and the idea of the most wonderful time of the year. But the actual DAY? Please. That day was miserable. My mother guaranteed it. Narcissists love to ruin holidays to make themselves the center of attention. It was always shit my whole childhood, full of tears and emotional scars.

Then I worked retail. I worked the floors of shopping hell for ten years. Ten years of hard retail labor during the worst season of shopping (and I'd wager it's gotten worse for workers since). The holidays meant stress and exhaustion. Then Christmas eve came and I had to leave my job and make the trek to my parents' crap home (the first years out of high school in the same town, though I moved out at 18, then a several hour drive from bigger cities in traffic) and go home.

I hated going home. Home should be refuge from the mayhem of life, but my home was far from safe. My home was stress upon stress. And in those last few years of contact, her other mental illnesses had come spilling out. She was a grabbag of unpredictability and volatility.

So that Christmas, the first one of my estrangement, was my day of freedom. I took myself out of the game. I locked myself in my hour and watched Harry Potter and ate treats all day and, even though Christmas is supposed to be about togetherness and family, being all alone to feel what I wanted to feel, to have some peace and quiet and no tears, no cruelty, no manipulation, was in-fucking-credible.

This is from Thanksgiving that year, not Christmas, but I like that my smile was real.
You can see the relief in my whole body.

But I had a long way to go.

Seven years ago today, I was on a solo trip to Seattle. I'd just gotten out of one of the most toxic relationships of my life, second or third to my mother, and was reeling. I was living in Oregon by then, but had no plans or time to go back to California and I was not about to deal with my unbearable roommate on Christmas. I had to get out.

So on a whim, I booked a hotel in Seattle and drove the 3 hours. The hotel was empty, so they gave me the penthouse. And I just tromped around the city and took photos and met random people.

I took a lot of self portraits during this period, with my DSLR. I think I was trying to see me, the real me, in the photos.
How very Mulan of me, am I right?

I made friends with a sushi chef on Christmas eve as he fed me rolls after rolls and charged me a fraction of the cost while I shared my life story. I waited in line at the Space Needle and met a lady who lived in my small hometown in California and went to church with one of my childhood classmates. And an elderly waiter at a Chinese restaurant read my palm and told me great love and a long life were in my future. None of those experiences would have happened if I hadn't been on my own.

And I wrote. I wrote a lot. I learned to appreciate who I was on my own and value my own company. Not only was I healing, I was finally meeting myself at the age of 31.

Three months later, I met the man I'd eventually marry, a man who loves Christmas. Our first Christmas living together, some 5 years ago, I said the one thing I wanted was to keep Christmas day for us, just the two of us. No running around, no drama, just us two enjoying our little family and new tradition. We've never broken it.

Tonight, I'm still learning and growing.

I've learned to love the holidays in my own way. I love finding the perfect gifts for those I love and I still love the glitz and the lights and the singing. But I'm learning not to fear the holidays, to not be triggered by them.

Check out this festive bitch right here

It's been ten years since that first alone Christmas and here I am again.

Tonight, I've got a cold, suddenly and unfortunately, but that means that I skipped out on family Christmas eve happenings (left them, in point of fact) to sit in bed and watch The Lord of the Rings. It also means I had some quiet alone time to write, something I've been itching to do for a while. I have so much on my mind, so much I want to share. I want to talk about this support group I'm in and how it's given me perspective on my trauma and PTSD, both how much I've grown and how much work I have left to do.

I have grown. I do have so much left to do. I will always have healing to do, but I think I've come to peace with that. Just as I can leave the stressful holidays in my past and accept them as they were, but leave them there, safely behind me, I can accept that I will always need more healing, that the scars of my trauma are always on me and that's just how it is.

So happy holidays, my friends, however you spend it. I hope you're finding your happy.