“These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.”
Jose Ortega y Gasset.
I’ve spent holidays in detoxes. I’ve spent them in hospitals. I’ve spent them alone. I’ve spent them in cynicism and bitterness, an idea festering, growing in me that these are just dates on a calendar, a Western consumerist ideal that almost never meets anyone’s expectations. Nostalgia bears down. Tensions can flair as individuals who may not spend as much time together regularly are brought together or the inverse: maybe somebody who used to be here isn’t anymore. It can be as stressful as it is joyful in many ways.
It’s a hard time of year for a lot of people. And I get that. I understand it fundamentally. I didn’t think I’d have a family to celebrate with in those days. I didn’t think period. My foresight was unequivocally set to zero in my single-mindedness. I couldn’t bear to face my past, present, or future self, instead choosing to alleviate or mask my despair by any chemical means necessary.
I’m grateful I don’t have to live that way anymore. I’m grateful that God blessed me with freedom. I’m grateful that I was able to receive that readily available grace, seemingly by doing nothing and everything, all at the same time. Those miserable holidays were a keystone in the formation of my recovery program in that I experienced the true loss of self, spirit, and hope. Staring out a hospital window by yourself on Christmas Eve is a lonely experience, but one that I’m equally grateful for, as it empowered me to finally find the strength to desire something new and accept help to get there.
I firmly believe we suffer to heal. We struggle to gain ground and traction, to see new horizons—vistas of color and light, of wholeness, and accomplishment. Growth isn’t created in a vacuum of stability and peace. It’s facilitated by the daily grind, the trials, the tribulations, the loneliness, even the despair of eating Thanksgiving in a state-funded detox program by yourself with only the TV to keep you company.
If someone’s missing from your table this season, if they’re lost in the muck and the mire of disease, addiction, or mental illness, and you’re mourning their absence, then maybe that’s something we can hold onto. The fact that their absence may be transforming them. Transforming you. That the struggle is the whetstone against the steel that we’ll become – that in our woundedness, we become sharpened, better healers of others, that our expectations may be tempered, our need for control lessened. That we can just be. And allow the plan to unfold as it will. Allow the pain to give us softened hearts to accept the grace that is so freely given to us.
I know it’s hard. Letting go is never easy. I’ve sat on unresolved issues within myself for years that I’ve only recently attempted to reflect on and move through. The holidays periodically evoke in me an illicit sense of longing or loneliness. But what I can rest on, what I can still hold onto, in the melting of that cynicism over the years, that these are just dates on the calendar, is that Christmas was a rebirth for me. It was my beginning. It was my end. It’s where the first steps of my journey took place, and it will always be a moment in my life that reminds me that grace, transformation, and hope, are tangible and real: and that they can break even the most deeply rooted negativity, cynicism, bitterness, and darkness the human soul can come to know. Anything is possible.
As hard as this holiday may be for you, or someone you know, in the end, it could be the most perfect one you or they have ever had. And you won’t even know it as it happens.
God Bless. Merry Christmas. All the love.
Sean, In Recovery
