Inner Peas: 2013: The year of the Epiphany

Three years ago, I spent Christmas curled up in my mom’s bed, doped up on Xanex. I made it out to finish the Christmas shopping, and then prepared dinner. Then I medicated myself so heavily, that I didn’t care about anything else. NOTHING ELSE. I didn’t care about the food or how it came out. I didn’t care about the family when they came over. I didn’t care about the dishes piling up in the sink. I didn’t even care enough to take my son out to ride his new bike. I just laid in bed, waiting for it all to be over. If I hadn’t been high on sedatives, I might have cried. If I could rub a thought or two together, I might have asked the universe for forgiveness. If I had have cared about anything except not feeling, I might have been able to care about what was going on around me. But I just didn’t care. All I wanted was to be numb.

Admittedly, the last two Christmases haven’t been too much different. I have been more cognizant and functional than I was that first Christmas. But, I still just wanted it all to be over. I just wanted to forget the year passed and ignore that the year to come was looming, and it was probably destined to be as bad as the couple of years that had just passed. I know. I’m a shining image of optimism. But my life has undergone a lot of changes in the last three years. Changes that were a departure from everything I had known my entire adult life. And the holidays that were once celebrated and cherished, because tiring and tedious. Even more, they became filled with trepidation. The holidays scared me. I didn’t want anything to do with them.

This year was kind of shaping up to be the same way. I was at the grocery store, a week before Thanksgiving, and the kind people at Safeway were already concerned with how my holiday shopping was coming along. I pretty much had a meltdown in the deli. I started hyperventilating. I got real claustrophobic. When I finally pulled my shit together, I left my cart in the middle of the aisle and left. I left. I got the fuck out of there. Then I drove home. And I didn’t leave for two days. That’s when I realized how terrified I was of the holidays. It wasn’t because of the people, the places or the pressure. It was because of repetition. If there’s one thing that I know about the holidays, it’s that it’s the time of year we are the most introspective. It’s the time of year we think of what we did right and what we did wrong and what we didn’t do at all. And nobody wants to think about that. Nobody.

But we do it anyway. Because we are human. We humans have been graced with a giant brain that we only use a fraction of, on most days. Ask the average human to explain the theory of relativity or to quote the Gettysburg Address, and they’ll give you a haphazard attempt at both. Talk about the global economy or local politics, and most of us can make one or two statements about something that may or may not be true in regards to either one. But if you give us a night alone, with nothing more than a quiet room and our own thoughts, we use 100% of that brain to think about ourselves AND to over analyze what we are thinking. I think that is just proof that we think more about what we feel than we think about what actually is.

When it comes to thinking, I’m the worst. I don’t actually think about real things. I don’t think about science or math or world peace. Ok, sometimes I think about world peace, but then I get real overwhelmed, so I think about other things. I think about perceived things. Things like thoughts and feelings and emotions. That’s what I spend most of my time thinking about. Things that have no definite answer. Things that are subjective. I think about things that I can speculate about until my head spins and I feel crazier than I have ever felt before and then, finally, my subconscious tells me “shut the fuck up. This is too crazy, even for you.” That’s what I think about. That happens on a normal day. But at the holidays, it’s even worse. So, as you can imagine, this year at the holidays, I was terrified. Fucking terrified. But somehow, I let it all go.

Instead of lying, listless, in my bed, (or in someone else’s bed, for that matter), I went out and embraced it all. While I was out buying gifts for the people I love the most…While I was out shopping for Christmas dinner…While I was actually making Christmas dinner, I had an epiphany. Not like the regular “this will change your life epiphany.” It was a “moment of solace” epiphany. I was standing in Ulta, with my mom and my six year old. And my child and my crippled mother were behaving better than the seven adult/able bodied people in line in front of us. Uh…wow. My kid is six. There were other six year olds (or similar) there. They weren’t behaving. My mom, easily, was the sickest person in the building. Her peers weren’t behaving very well either. If anyone should be tired and hostile in the marketplace, two nights before Christmas, it should have been them. Instead I saw a handful of grown people who were stomping their feet because they had to wait in line and throwing fits over nail polish and lip gloss.

When we all finally made it to the car, I couldn’t stop telling them both how proud I was of them. Then I had to laugh. They both looked at me like I was crazy, but I laughed anyway. That scene in Ulta was what I had been dreading. That was what had made me so anxious. Assholes . At Christmas. People fighting over an $8 bottle of nail polish. If you need to spend eight dollars on a bottle of nail polish, then fight away. That’s not what’s important. I don’t care if it’s platinum gold or gold gold. That girl actually said that. Is that what we have come to believe the holidays are about? Either “platinum gold” or “gold gold”? I don’t even know what that means. I don’t even care what that means.

Anyway, we picked up a pizza on the way home that night. We ate our pizza, together, and laughed and as I watched them both doze off, I thought about how the holidays are a time of introspection. I thought about how at this time of year, we either find success or failure in what we have had in the year that just passed. And for the first time in many years, I see more good than bad. And because I’m feeling really introspective, here’s a brief recap of my year:

The first vacation I’ve had in three years: