Savoring a solitary Christmas
Yesterday Santa, disguised as my bank account, delivered four studded snow tires and a pair of snowshoes from the locally-owned shops in my new town. There is also a small package from my mom that sits beside another box from two friends I’ve known since 2009.
They await me beside no stocking. I forgot to buy myself one this year. There is a stocking with my name on it somewhere in a landfill, a relinquished remnant of a relationship from Christmases past. I have plenty more years and relationships left in me to make a new stocking, that’s for sure.
That realization and others will make it a good Christmas morning this year. I’ll wake up with life in my lungs once again and leave the perfect, cozy sanctuary of my new apartment to drive my brand-new car down a winding dirt road from the hills into town. I’ll arrive on a doorstop to several warm hugs from new friends and a plate piled high with homemade waffles. I’ll spend the day there until I decide to come back to a fridge full of food made with money I earned doing work I love.
I can’t find one reason this Christmas won’t be a good one.
I’ll say that I arrived there mentally before the invitation from said new friend, which happened by circumstance two days ago in the style I’ve come to expect from the Universe. Prepared to spend Christmas in total solitude, the unexpected surprise perked me up quite a bit. But not because I was sad. Or resigned. I wasn’t suffering in the same way I had chosen years ago. There was only the empowering prospect of savoring a solitary Christmas so full of gratitude and contentment, only the best plans could compete. Then those perfect plans happened like The Christmas Miracle.
What makes them perfect is that my mere presence will be a present for this new friend, who is grieving the recent loss of a child. Sometimes I feel a bit like a lost child. Our circumstances make a perfect pair.
Amidst so many posts and utterances of “this year being a really hard year”, I feel like the contrarian no one likes. Honestly though, after so many consecutive years of challenging experiences, I came to realize it was my attitude and mindset that made them for better or worse. That’s why I can’t consider this year, despite a long list of good reasons, more difficult or more challenging that all the ones I’ve known. In fact, it was one of my better years. It was a year of more healing. It was a year of rebuilding. It was a year of less grief and strife and more love and power and progress. It was another year of life, lived. It was everything I made it, personally and professionally. It included less drama that the year before, and was worth celebrating for that reason alone!
Even as I write this, I reflect on the texts I sent and received this day last year with a woman who, at the time, had a grip on my senses and gave me good reason to anticipate the passing of the holiday. We were going to go to the movies the week after Christmas. The relationship held potential. I was excited. For the first time in a long time.
By New Year’s Eve, events unfolded in such a way that I garnered all the wisdom needed to break a cycle that had eluded me for decades. 2017 started on an excellent foot literally on the heels of that pattern dissolving and revealing the self-perpetuating prison I had kept rebuilding since my childhood. The prison of pursuing and surrounding myself with unavailable, unreliable and otherwise unkind people. Because it’s a growing edge that creeps along at a glacial pace, I gingerly guide others around me with the personal development work that has chosen me as a profession. “Watch your step, there, it’s a gnarly one” and “oh boy, that choice…yeah, no. I wouldn’t” and “WARNING: DANGER AHEAD.”
2016 was the year I stepped in less booby traps. It was the year I gently backed out of tunnels lacking cheese. It was the year I heard and heeded my intuition and we became better friends. We weren’t on speaking terms since the early 80s when the invalidation of my childhood drove us apart. 2016 was the year of our glorious reunion made possible in part by my transition, a process that has plunged me deeper into the morass of my own identity re-formation.
Perhaps I give the transgender thing too much credit. Finding peace in my own company really began Christmas mornings many years ago. Around 2007, having moved from New Jersey to Boston, Amtrak prices and my family dynamics led me to stay in the city to wake solo for the first time in my life.
While it provided me the opportunity to watch the entire Godfather trilogy in one sitting without having to share any Christmas cookies with anyone, it was also one of the most challenging life experiences I’ve known and I wrote about it several times since from the same place of solitude. Those are some of my most popular posts in seven years of writing, which means people either love reveling in my lonely life or, probably more accurately, they can identify with the feelings I write about for so many reasons.
I write about the sadness. The confusion. The relief. The rise and fall of the feelings as they ebb and flow out with every story from another person I meet. As the good listener I strive to be, people open up and share more freely around me. Most of it is complaint. Complaints about the company they feel forced to keep. Complaints about the families for which they feel no affinity. Complaints about the time they don’t have to buy things they don’t want or need or didn’t clean or bake or won’t get or shouldn’t eat or couldn’t do. The feelings of gratitude and joy they grieve, even as they live. Somewhere, once in awhile, I hear something akin to celebration and peace. It’s always a relief to see privilege appreciated.
From that place of privilege, I reflect on the Christmases of my childhood when I woke to piles of presents around a realistic-looking plastic tree. Along with the memories of abundance and pleasure, I mourn the innocence and joy that has since dissolved in the fallout of dysfunction that, I’m learning, is quite common among humans. Those memories from my relatively happy childhood now fray at the edges as they merge with the past ten years which are a patchwork of bright and bitter. And there are threads that reach out, hesitantly like my heart, for Christmases of the Future. Those threads are my resolve to make the most of the years I have moving forward.
That’s why, after several years of trying to find a Home for the Holidays as the Dickensian orphan I purported myself to be, literally using the word surviving in my posts in the true dramatic fashion I’m sometimes known for, this year I settled on savoring my solitude instead. I was no longer bereft but instead empowered to know I could go or do other things. Still I chose a solitary existence in the face of social media’s mix of morose melancholy or massive, celebratory meals amidst large family gatherings. I settled on sitting in the mix of emotions that brought me to this place, reflecting on the many choices that have made my life what it is, and to sit powerfully in that truth seeking no escape or respite from it.
Savoring each moment and decision that has brought me to the mindful solitude of true peace.
