The Christmas Crash

It happens to me every year and seems to get more and more pronounced as I get older.

On Christmas day, I am hit with excruciating, agonizing pain that is centered along the middle of my rib cage  just below the heart and above the solar plexus. I think it is located between two chakras. Sometimes it feels like somebody is hitting me, repeatedly, in the stomach. Yesterday, it was more like a 5-inch stiletto heal was  being pushed and poked deeper and deeper into my body. Luckily, yesterday, it didn't hit me until about 1:30 in the afternoon. Only a few hours of primal screaming and howling and I only had to hold myself back from committing suicide a couple of times. A successful Christmas, really.

For the past few years, I have felt it best to be locked up, away from everybody else, so that I don't ruin their holiday, too. Right now, being homeless and in a town 2000 miles away from my closest relative, that isn't difficult to achieve. However, now we are all connected by Facebook and other forms of social media. So, I can still be a cybernetic buzz-kill, if I so choose.

As I do, every year, yesterday I tried to dig into the pain to determine its origin. I know it goes beyond the expected "mother never loved me and drunk daddy left when I was 5-years-old" bullshit. I know it isn't about being poor, or being mistreated and forced to do housework on the holiday. I also know it isn't just about feeling lonely and isolated from family. It is all of those things, and more. Over the years, I have tried to create my own traditions and joy, like the new-age "happiness-is-where-we-put-our-intention" people say. I have accepted kind invitations to join in with friends and their families on Christmas, but that usually is just a reminder to me that I am a tourist in somebody else's  holiday. Doesn't matter how kind they are or how magical their family tries to make the day. And, I have beaten myself up for not being able to enjoy their generosity, "like I should". My sisters gave up on me, long ago. For some reason, they have been able to forget the past and create happy new traditions and I applaud their efforts.

I may have gotten closer to discovering the cause of my pain, yesterday, and it goes like this: When I was in my teens, I showed up at my grandmother and great aunt Esther's home, unannounced, on Christmas day, to wish them a merry you-know-what. When I got there, I saw a beautiful tree was all set up, and underneath it were more presents than I had seen in years. Grandma accepted my good will but informed me that my my Aunt Theresa, Uncle Bob and my cousins Susan and Beth, were to be arriving any minute, and I had better leave, so that they could have lunch. In short, none of the gifts were for me or my sisters and I was not good enough to join my own relatives for the holiday. (I even remember feeling that I was superficial for wanting one of those presents) My mother's tantrums and cruel behavior had ostracized us from my own grandmother and aunt. So, I had to go back to my mother's house, where I would be forced to do more housework and feel jealous that my younger sister was able to spend the day with her boyfriend's family, who always gave her a stocking loaded down with gifts. Christmas was (and is) a reminder that I was not loved, and had never been loved, and that my presence was not wanted by those that I loved. I try and remember if my sisters were with me on that day, or if it was my friend, Bo, accompanying me (since he could drive and had a car). I can''t recall. Maybe my sisters don't feel the annual grief that I feel because they were not there. Or, maybe they were and have either suppressed the memory or did not come to the same grim conclusions that I had. I try to remember, but I can't.

Perhaps, now that I have committed this memory to my blog, I can finally be healed?