When I composed the list of potential poems to use as the
subject of this year’s essays, I knew The Toy would be the last. It fit my sense
of the season in some backhanded way.
So many people want this time of year to be their idealized
version of what they think it should be. Something Norman Rockwell filled with happiness
and light. For me, it never will be. I have too many memories. The scars, some
specific to the holidays, cut too deep.
Here’s a secret many people recognize but fewer want to
admit. For many people, this time of year is more painful than joyful. Too many
old wounds that gathered family sometimes seems to delight in reopening without
enough balm of love to make the pain tolerable.
That is why I adopted a particular piece of psychological
advice a couple decades ago. Make the holidays your own. If certain things give
you comfort, do them. If meeting a particular societal or familial expectation
doesn’t then don’t. It really is that simple. But admittedly easier said than
done.
We enacted that advice in celebrating the longest night of
the year rather than Christmas. I’ve written about our candle vigil in other
Winter Solstice messages. It took time and a long transition before we were
brave enough to admit that we don’t celebrate Christmas, that there’s just too
much overburden with that holiday for us.
We have tried to share our holiday with other people with
limited success. Because we celebrate 3-4 days early, most people we know are
still in a frenetic, pre-Christmas rush. They just don’t have time. Or choose
not to make it.
Instead of giving each other a host of things we might not
want, we limit ourselves to one (hopefully) meaningful gift for solstice and
then choose a number of things we want to order to enjoy together or separately
throughout the year, mostly books, music, movies, games, graphic novels, and
lecture series. It is much less stressful for us which means we enjoy our time together
more.
In the past several years, that advice has extended to
Thanksgiving as well. In an ideal year, the week of Thanksgiving and the week
between Christmas and New Year are the times we watch a movie marathon, set up
some long games we normally don’t have time to play, read books and graphic
novels on the porch while I can enjoy being outside, and listen to some music,
classical or contemporary, that is piped throughout the house. We try to fix
some foods we don’t eat normally, a duck, a lamb, a roast, mashed potatoes,
spinach-cheese pasta, butternut squash. Plus we indulge in a few luxuries we
don’t always have on hand, exotic coffee, imported tea, English muffins, cookies,
spices, dark chocolate, maybe a moderately expensive wine, brandy or cognac. For
me, a little black Cavendish pipe tobacco.
So what does any of that have to do with this poem?
Someone asked me a few weeks ago how I thought this year’s
essays and poems were going. The response has been hit or miss. I think many
people view this year’s offerings as my dwelling too much on the past. While I
can understand that point of view, what I have tried to do this year is be
honest about the way I feel, in the same way I was with a few essays that
recounted incidents in my past a few years ago. I firmly believe that poetry
more than any other writing demands that honesty.
But we as a society and as a species rarely reward such
honesty.
I’ll give you another small piece of it now. This year the
poems and related essays, which I knew would never be a favorite, were all I
had to offer. I managed to complete one story before my world continued to
unravel. An unraveling has gone on for just over two and a half years. An
unraveling that has ground me down and at times seen me shut down every
unessential activity to focus on pure survival.
Very few people know all the details of that unraveling. In
fact very few people want to know. Many have made that painfully clear. A few
have said it quite bluntly. Watching people I thought were friends retreat when
they began to learn exactly what was going on did nothing to improve how I felt
about myself or about my situation, even though I knew from experience it was
likely happen.
Ironically, a particular meme has made its way through
social media all this year. Something to the effect, “I am posting this number
to the suicide prevention hotline to let my friends know I am listening, and I
challenge you to do the same.”
While that’s a great sentiment, let me respectfully point
out what’s wrong with the execution. If you really care about a friend’s
psychological wellbeing, the first thing you should say is, “Talk to me. I will
always be here to listen.” Only after establishing that should you add, “And if
you aren’t comfortable talking to me or another friend, here’s a number you can
call to talk to people who can help.” And that you say offline.
Now unless you’ve ever spent several hours talking someone
off the ledge, or been talked off the ledge yourself, you likely have no idea
how important that initial statement is. It says you are not passing off their situation
to someone else, thinking someone else will handle it. Thinking you really
aren’t that close and don’t want to intrude or pry. Thinking there are
professionals better equipped to deal with it. Thinking there is nothing you
can do. Most of those are just excuses because you feel uncomfortable and don’t
really want to get involved.
Adding that initial statement, and meaning it, says you
really care. There are moments in this life when that tiny addition makes all
the difference.
Which circles back to what I had hoped to generate from this
poem and essay: empathy and understanding. Not so much for myself as for the
people who remain silent, struggling with experiences and emotions they can’t
always put into words but perhaps I can. Understanding that many, many people
struggle this time of year, whether they choose to share that facet of their
lives or not. The empathy of knowing that not all scars fully heal.
So how can you help those people you think might be
struggling? With some, inviting them to be a part of your family celebration
might be the right idea. While others might find the situation exceedingly
awkward for reasons that have little to do with you or your family. Not
everyone is looking to be included in someone else’s family. Many cannot help
but be reminded that your family is yours, not theirs. Most just want to be
remembered as a friend.
You can rarely go wrong by making a little one-on-one time
for that person. A lunch, a dinner, a coffee, a dessert, a drink, a movie, a
game, a concert, a lecture, a walk, a quiet conversation. Some small amount of
time to show them that you care. Time that says, I was thinking about you. I
value you. Thanks for being around. Just time. That is often the greatest gift
of all. Not only in this season but all year long.
In the end, no matter how you celebrate the season or which day
of the season you celebrate, that is what it is supposed to be about.
And no matter who you choose to mark it with, may your
solstice once again be warm and bright.
© 2017 Edward P. Morgan III
--------------------------------
ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
--------------------------------
I revised this poem more than any other this year, mostly formatting, and changing and rearranging a few words. I decided that the events that inspired the poem are spoken for well enough in the poem itself. As are the consequences. This poem began brewing sometime after my grandfather’s suicide, which I alluded to in the Samhain essay. That and Karen revealing her situation five years earlier began a cycle of re-evaluating and coming to terms with the dysfunctional interactions of my dysfunctional family. This poem was one expression of that. And like the poem itself, apparently a work in progress.
If you want a broader context, wiki Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. Or watch Nadine Burke Harris’s TED talk on that topic on YouTube. My score is 5 out of 10. A score of 1 is not uncommon. Long-term adverse health effects begin at 4, including increased disease risk and shortened lifespan (which got my attention). It gets worse at 6-7.
I know we are not the only ones who heed that initial piece of psychological advice. For Thanksgiving, a friend of ours ran down the street to an Italian market, picked up something special but pre-made, stayed home alone, played some computer games and watched videos. For him, that was more relaxing and made him more thankful, I think, than accepting a dinner invitation he’d been offered.
In my experience, Americans divide into three groups. Roughly a third have significant problems with one or several members of their families that prevent them from having meaningful interactions; about a third are ambivalent, having problems but interacting anyway, some almost as a duty; and about a third have or want people to think they have an ideal and idyllic family. It’s the last third that creates our societal and familial myths.
Those myths can be dangerous. They can create unrealistic expectations of both human nature and the capacity for happiness. Those myths can add a great deal of weight onto already fragile psyches. Even the strongest structures eventually buckle under enough weight.
Too many people think of a suicide attempt as either a stigma or a sign of weakness. In general, I think it is more of a sign of being completely overwhelmed. If, as the psychiatrist Rollo May said, “Depression is the inability to construct a future,” I think suicide is the result of the inability to even conceive of one.
I am glad this year’s essays are at an end. All but a couple have been harder to write than anticipated, as were this summer’s poem postings, if only because of the feelings and memories they brought up. Not that I have much psychological reserves at this point. This year especially, I’ve been reminded of how I felt during the worst times growing up. As well, I’ve been reminded of the lesson I learned back then, that when you share things people give you strange, shocked looks before they turn away. Easier to deal with now than then, I must say.
Next year will see a new direction for the holiday postings. I have a couple different ones in mind. And, yes, I hear you rejoicing as though you just ate Sir Robin’s minstrels.
Picture Notes:
ReplyDeleteOur choices for this image were a picture of a real ambulance, or a picture of a toy ambulance. But we didn’t have a toy ambulance. Amazon to the rescue! Next I needed some ivy. I have a number of plants in my office. This picture was taken under my bankers lamp on my desk with some ivy cuttings that have been rooting in a cup for a while. The harsh light overhead filters down to the ambulance through the leaves. Once I had the shot, I cropped it a little, edited a few brown spots and hot spots on the leaves, and added a little more blur for depth of field. I like the closeness of the shot and the feel that the toy is hiding among the leaves, hoping not to be noticed.