This evening I attended a Christmas dinner in my dining room starring my uncle's girlfriend and her kids and grand-kids. They worked hard to make the event festive and welcoming. There were conversations about people I didn't know punctuated by the sound of children screaming playfully. There was a table overflowing with processed foods I couldn't eat, and the few meatballs and sweets I consumed as a courtesy may end up triggering a cluster headache tonight.
It was a nice event, but it was definitely their event, not mine. It reminded me a little of the big holiday dinners my aunt used to host, when more family members were alive. Back then, I ate all of the food offered to me and ended up dealing with cluster headaches during many of these celebrations. Everyone else would be siting around having fun while I paced outside in the snow in wretched pain. Eventually I got better at only eating tiny amounts of high risk foods.
This is the darkest time of the year, which means it's a great time to dive into the shadows and deal with unprocessed stuff. Last year around this time, on the Uncomfortable Conversations podcast, I discussed childhood abuses that I survived in painstaking detail for two hours. At the same time, I released a collection of essays called Navigating Dystopia about some of my major challenges and the perspectives that came out of them.
All of that stuff was pretty heavy. I feel good about it, like the podcast and essay collection marked the completion of something important, but it was heavy. 2022 feels much lighter. While it's true that the novels I wrote this year considered some weighty subjects, they were fiction, which is easier to carry because it's less personal. And the stuff going on in my world today seems much more hopeful than the stuff that was going on a year ago.
True, I spent last winter and spring dealing with horrific cluster headaches, then lost most of my money in May's TerraLuna debacle and the subsequent implosion of FTX. It's also true that intractable problems continue to cast a shadow over my house. These aren't minor issues, but they didn't keep me from making good progress in areas that I do actually have control over.
Work is good. I feel satisfied in a professional and creative sense. My next steps as far as marketing my fiction are becoming more clear. And I'm reveling in the process of coming up with a new project for the start of the new year.
One thing that's coming up from the darkness in this dark winter is my stubborn reluctance to ask for assistance in matters that I need help with. Many times when I've asked for help over the years, I've ended up receiving nothing at all or something unhelpful. So I developed the habit of only asking for help with small, simple things, like rides to medical appointments or the storage of pieces of art. For bigger things, I just handle them on my own, enlisting specialized professionals when necessary. This habit has served me well AND it seems obvious that there's a better way to be.
Another thing that's been coming up points directly back to childhood abuses. This is a generalized distrust of good things; the fear that such things are merely tricks designed to make me docile and easier to harm. Rationally, I know that not all good things are tricks by malicious actors. But I'm still an unreasonably suspicious person.
In this area, at least, I've been making good progress. Learning to trust, with help from the woman I love. She's caring and patient and inquisitive in a way that honors my boundaries. I feel like she's there for me no matter what might come up.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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