It went like this, see … I didn’t always grinch about Christmas. In fact, once upon a time I loved Christmas so much I left my apartment decorated like Whoville for an entire year. 

I remember my childhood Christmases were made joyful through the generosity of strangers. I remember opening Barbie’s my mom couldn’t afford because the church or Red Cross or women’s shelter adopted us. I remember going winter clothes shopping with a volunteer from the bank. I loved these Christmases because it was just like the movies — all hope would be lost for this homeless neglected family but at the last minute Santa shows up and brings the magic. Mostly, I was just happy for my little sister; she didn’t deserve to not get presents. 

Later, when things “stabilized,” I remember the fighting and the silence leading up to Christmas. The tension, the fear, the tentative wish to feel peace and love … the crushing fearful hope that I might be loved by a family. Every year, thick with hope. 

Then I had my first apartment, all alone with my cat, and I decorated it like Dr. Seuss Christmas and left it that way until I moved to an island.

Island Christmas was like a different movie, like one about freedom and debauchery. I dressed up in lingerie under a Santa costume with a pillow-belly and strip teased my musician-boyfriend one Christmas. I danced with a broken knee on crutches to live music while my debonair friend held and twirled me around the pool. I toasted the boat parade. I wore bikinis to dinner.

Moving to New Hampshire is when I cite the grinch beginning to haunt me, but now, in hindsight, it becomes obvious that the decay had already begun.

I married for love, and we had a small family, my gods it was finally mine! Except it wasn’t, see, because his child already had a bunch of family … and on Christmas one year between the many houses he had something like 16 Christmas Trees and more gifts than anyone could count … and I was begging my man, my love, to share cheer and to feel joy. To be *with me* in it. 

And none of it came, I mean I baked cookies and watched the movies and thoughtfully gifted as I always do .. I cooked big meals and invited people and tried. But in the noise of 16 trees? What a wasted effort. 

I grew my own baby, added him to our family. Promised he would never have 16 Christmases … started leaning into my own spirit and the old traditions, started creating space where no one else was standing. Made solstice into My Holiday. Still did Christmas, too, for the kids, but my heart flickered at the emptiness of the “holiday joy.” 

My small family didn’t make it, the love never returned to me, or I couldn’t remember how to see it, and I left because that is what I learned to do. 

Six — almost seven — Christmases have happened now, with my even smaller family. Gradually, the grinch took over my glittering joy – I no longer smiled at Christmas commercials, I cringed. The music makes me nauseous. I do not buy a tree. Any trees. 

Two years ago, when I realized my child had uncountable gifts and trees and celebrations to attend with his other family, I submitted my resignation. I quit Christmas. Though the hardness in my heart has shrunken it 10 times, I will not let that dark leech into my golden child. He doesn’t need to sit in the dark in my empty home on The Biggest Holiday. 

Now — before we go feeling bad and inviting me to stuff — please hear that I have been the “plus one” my entire life. I was half an orphan the day I was born and homeless and displaced since. Friends, boyfriends, distant family, and even strangers love to invite me. 

And as much as I appreciate the charitable sentiment, it is not the vision I hold for myself. I dream of *being* a happy family, hosting and attending holidays that feel like … like I’m an integral part of a really big love. Like Christmas. 

Not like the grinch, whom everyone eventually pitied and embraced out of guilt. 

Once upon a time, I loved Christmas. But now … it is a strange time of calendar blackout during which I will someday travel far, far away. 

… one more thing.

My grinchening is not unusual, but it’s a story we don’t tell enough. Not every Scrooge and Grinch we meet is all the way dead inside. Not all of us are selfish. Most of us are glad you like Christmas, even. I’d guess most of us got here like I did, gradually, over the course of a lifetime of rotten Christmases, and that we just want to be left alone about it rather than vilified or turned into your Christmas Charity Project. Respectfully.

Poems like unread letters
Litter the floor in crumpled heaps
Or is that me

Voicelessly screaming in
-to changeless, whipping wind
She’s praying on the mountaintop again

Sunset tears like glittering waste,
Garbage-pity all over her face

Not for lack of candidates
Nor that of gratitude and grace—

How many spells will she speak,
Promises will she keep,
Collapses when she gets weak

Poems will she read
To remind her of me?

“she’s f r a c t u r i n g”

-bb
10.7.24

This happens every time. It took me a while to notice the pattern, but now that I have, it’s impossible to ignore. In Tarot, we call it the Tower – when everything we’ve built catches fire and burns to the ground, crumbling in hot debris around us, leaving us foundationless in the dark. It sounds dramatic, but it is the major arcana of Tarot after all.

I’ve been asking for a shift, begging the gods for a change of direction, a breaking of the dawn, relief. Movement. Change. And I keep asking “how close am I? when will it happen?”

I suppose I should be grateful that the thing I’ve identified as the “change sickness” has come for me at last? This happens every time: a sinus infection (acute sinusitis). Whenever there’s a Tower moment in my life, my head and face swell up from the inside and I spend a couple weeks battling whatever virus is haunting my sinuses, forced to hole up, rest, and contemplate why things are The Way They Are.

There’s a lot of self-blame in all of it, too, because I could have caught the infection sooner and cured it as a cold, as an earache, as a whatever-started-this. But I didn’t. I let it fester and ignored it and pushed ahead until it put me on my ass. Again. Always.

Being The Way I Am, I look for the spirituality in all of it. Sinuses and headaches are the top 3 chakras: throat, third eye, and crown. They’re our connection to truth, intuition, and god. I genuinely keep thinking I have “mastered” these chakras, since I do after all spend the majority of my daily life connecting to and expressing my truth, intuition, and spirituality . . . but the body keeps the score, and right now it’s saying I have fallen way out of alignment.

It’s not as bad as the last couple times, when Big Things Happened. This one, I’m catching early and feeling relatively confident I can fix the natural way . . . but it still hurts, and it’s exhausting, and it brings along with it a myriad of wounded thought patterns I have to continuously correct.

This always happens, and usually it’s during Major Life Change: a divorce, a job loss, family trauma (missing nieces and custody issues and deaths and the like).

This time, I really felt like I had it all under control. It’s been a slow burn, this Tower. Not at all like a controlled demolition – a free-falling mass of steel and glass that stood only a second ago. This has been more like what I imagine would happen if the earth tremored, and repairs were made – but then, a storm came. And then another one. And the foundation was cracked, and the walls lost their sturdiness, and then lightning struck and the fire started at the top until the whole thing finally just fell.

That’s where I am now: in the rubble, trying to salvage the bits that I can take with me into the Next Thing.

I felt the earth shake, I weathered the storms, I put band aids over the cracks, I prayed to the light between the clouds. I saw the Tower crumbling but I thought my faith was strong enough to fix it.

That’s the thing about faith, though, isn’t it? Faith means Trusting, rather than Thinking. I begged the gods to fix the Tower, but they kept telling me there was something on the other side even better than I could imagine. They say I need to let this fall and trust that the Next Thing will be so good, so big and strong and safe, I will never again have to stand inside of a Broken Thing begging it not to fall.

I can’t be totally sure, but I’m beginning to think the sinus infection is their way of making me stop fighting, sit down, and let it happen. The pressure in my head makes it difficult to think, let alone overthink. The congestion in my sinuses makes it tough to speak, let alone scheme and negotiate stop-gaps. The exhaustion in my body makes it impossible to run, to rebuild, to frantically fight a fire that is, after all, dying out on its own.

Know what makes it feel better? Crying. Crying relieves the pressure. And it’s funny, because I tend to wait until the end to cry. Cry when it’s over, cry when the poem is written, cry when you can look back and see the Whole Big Thing.

This happens every time . . . and then, the Star comes out to write a New Story. Then, the day finally breaks, and we begin. Again.

Deep loneliness presents
like a symptom
of something else:
like depression or apathy,
or something like
laziness
or negativity

or, maybe she doesn’t have social skills,
or, something must be wrong with her,
that she’s always alone

or “stop feeling sorry for yourself
and just
go outside,
join a gym,
read a book,
go to yoga classes,
why not try meditation
or hiking or
get on a dating app
or spend time with kids
or volunteer for a cause you care about” —

like somehow the answer
to the sickness
is something you can fix
on your own

But the sickness IS
the being alone

It is hiking every mountain
by yourself
and doing all the yoga-gyms-meditations-book readings possible,
but still being alone in it.

Loneliness is
all of this
and reaching out to friends
… and not getting replies.

Loneliness is
yes she tried the dating apps
and it was terrifying —
not in the ‘everyone is boring’ way,
but more like the
‘that guy is a rapist
or married
or maybe something IS wrong with HIM’
and now she is scared to sleep at night
way —

And all the times they tell her
she needs to just THIS or THAT
or maybe it’s their friend Nick
except Nick has a girlfriend
or a baby
or a drinking problem

— all the times they say
“go outside
or read a book
or try harder
or why don’t you just

ENJOY YOURSELF MORE”

So she goes out
on dates
by herself,
buys herself the nice clothes and shoes,
and wears them while sipping expensive coffee
all alone
(with her book
because we know
she shouldn’t be grasping
for human connection
on social media
all day — that would be pathetic,
wouldn’t it),

she buys herself nice dinners
and takes her own photo
on the tops of mountains
or by the lake with the sun setting in the background,
(she even has a little plastic thing
to set the phone on
so it gets a better angle
with the selfie-timer) —

And then they criticize her
for too many selfies
(she’s self obsessed,
she’s vain)
and for dancing by herself
(she provocative,
she’s asking for attention),
they judge the outfits
and the shoes
(what are you so dressed up for?)
all while they fire emoji
her stories
from the gym —

and they think she’s vain,
she’s an independent woman,
“wouldn’t THAT be nice,
to have so much free time;
of course she has a hot body
when all she does all day is work out,
must be nice
to get to spend so much time
on self-care” —

And when she says
“I’m drowning,
I’m lonely,
I am depressed and I’m scared,”
They just say

“You need to learn to love yourself”

And that is not the same thing
as loving her.

It is not the same.

And all the self-love
in the universe
cannot fill the heartspace
that she has carved out
to love the world

… and to be loved in return.