Month: December 2019

I don’t like Christmas, one might say I’m a bit of a Grinch. Ironically, I happened to watch the 2018 rendition of “The Grinch” on the plane over to celebrate Christmas with family this year. I cried.

You see, my enjoyment of Christmas has steadily decreased over the years. My distaste for it started as a child, back when I was about 10 years old. My parents divorced when I was 9 and the settlement mandated that us kids were shunted back and forth between two families every alternating weekend.

For me, this caused a lot of stress during “handover” periods. I couldn’t really put a finger on it as a kid. Thinking back, I think it boils down to three things:

• The sense of “divided loyalty”, needing to intentionally sever feelings of affection for one whole group of people and re-imprint on another group of people, entirely based on some arbitrary schedule
• The social effort required to engage with my father’s social circle, his extended family and suchlike
• As the peacekeeper in the family, I personally felt a strong need to always intercede and make everything OK, especially when there was tension between the two camps.

This stress as a child manifest in a lot of “avoiding” behaviours. My sister and I would hide out in the kitchen from strangers, or spend extra time in bed to avoid engaging with the day. Preferring quite moments to big social events.

This “alternating” visitation thing happened for Christmases as well. Every second year we would celebrate Christmas with my father and his family. We weren’t really allowed to avid socialising in these situations. Understandably, my father wanted us to enjoy our time with him and his family, to engage, especially over the festive season. The big social events were unavoidable.

I don’t want to make it sound as though I had a horrible childhood, far from it. It’s just that Christmas in particular I associate with:

• a deep sense of social obligation to people I don’t know very well
• the requirement to perform a sense of happiness and togetherness in the context of being actually separated and uncomfortable
• a sense (as the peacemaker in the family) that I could never possibly make everyone happy even though I wanted to

This general sense of Christmas being an uncomfortable time only became more intense when I grew up, came out and met a number of other queer people who didn’t have any kind of family to rely on. So many people I know in my life now are depressed over Christmas because for various reasons they can’t engage with their birth family and members of their family of choice are busy with their own Christmas things.

Chloe, my ex, would endure Christmas like a soldier hunkering down in the trenches of the first world war, and I think that feeling of being embattled kind of rubbed off. In the past I have hosted “orphan’s Christmas” for my social group of people who have nothing, but it’s always a mixed bag.

I brought these complaints up with my psychologist, Chris. I didn’t want to go to Christmas with my family, but they expected it. In the spirit of me being more assertive, shouldn’t I just eschew this time period and go do something else?

Chris’ advice was, “well, if you’re just going to be at home being grumpy, you may as well spend Christmas with your family”. I relented and so here I am, and I’m sure I will enjoy it. I am sure it will be a good time with good memories. It’s just this is not my time, this is not for me, this is for someone else, and having lived a life in service to other people for so long, it especially grates this year.

The other part of Christmas that irritates me is the forced consumerism. The news here in New Zealand reports how busy the shops are and how much money has been spent in retail as if these are metrics of interest to everyone other than shop owners. The commodification of every kind of cultural or interpersonal experience into something that can be turned into cash makes me kind of sick. I pride myself in being able to find the most ideal gift for people, but like most people I genuinely dislike how cheap, tacky and performative Christmas is.

I’m not sure if I will have the same epiphany the Grinch had and suddenly have a love of Christmas, but I do know how important it is to others, especially my mum.

So Merry Christmas, Mum, I’ll keep my humbugs for later.

“Well, the good news is it appears your grief is not pathological” my psychologist, Chris, said in that unassuming manner he has.

It’s been well over 5 months since Chloe dropped the bombshell on me. Her plan to move out slipped from August, to September, till finally on the 4th of October (2 days after my birthday) she moved out. “I’m going to miss this place” she intoned before she gave me a hug and was out of my life for good.

“Not pathological.. that sounds good, I think I’ll write that down”.

It has been a bumpy ride to get here. I remember quite clearly sitting in a hotel room in Wellington on the 23rd of September. I had an appointment with Chris but had to do it via Skype because I was in Wellington for an important client meeting.

“I turn 40 soon” I lamented, “I’m going bald, my left hip hurts and the love of my life moves out forever next month.”

“So, what’s going well in your life then?”

“…my job” I barely managed before sobbing uncontrollably into the microphone.

It certainly felt pretty bleak and existential at the time, but really the only thing that was missing was a sense of purpose, or a sense of what I wanted out of life, my own goals, independent of anyone else.

Chris helped me come up with a set of values to drive towards, and I turned that into a Kanban board of tasks and priorities.

I didn’t really have much time to feel sorry for myself, because in true me fashion, I picked up a few dependents at about the same time as I lost Chloe.

About 3 months before Chloe moved out, I met Lilith (right). She had been having difficulties which culminated in her being homeless about a month before Chloe moved out, and on pretty much the same day she moved out, Vincent (left) also moved in because he needed a place to stay.

Now I know what you’re going to say, slipping into a “helper” mode is so very classically me.

Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm

And yes, you’re right. Still, it’s a lesson I have to keep learning for myself over and over till I learn how to set healthy boundaries. I think I am getting better. I have this trait strongly in common with my father: I tend to be drawn towards broken things.

Without getting into too much detail, October and November were rocky months for all three of us. I remember distinctly a moment when Lilith’s computer was broken and possibly lost forever by the courier company taking it in for repairs. It was just one more thing on top of everything else and she was beside herself.

“Everything can be fixed” I said as I hugged her tightly, and I really mean that. In fact, “fixing” things has become a theme for me these past few months, and not in a bad way.

For example, take my beloved Nikon camera. I turned it on optimistically with the hopes of taking some photos. Nothing, not even a friendly little light or an error message. Nothing, and that was after charging the battery overnight. I took it in to the repair shop and the young gentleman from behind the counter declared that a camera more than a decade old is not worth trying to fix. “Just buy a new one”. I suppose you could try get a new battery, but we don’t sell those anymore.”

A new aftermarket battery means the camera works just fine. The next challenge was the lens which could no longer focus. I sent it in for a repair quote. The quote came back at $1000, so I declined the repair and thought I might take it apart and fiddle as I had with my other lens.

Simply sending it in to get a quote was enough to get the lens working again. No grand investment required.

The camera has become a bit of a metaphor for me: so often in life, we despair that things are irreparably damaged.

So this then brings me to the title of this post and the subject of the song I have been practising. At first I was practising it so I could use it as a foil to discuss my need to be needed, how I tend to be drawn to people who are in trouble, just like my father was. I was even going to talk a bit more about his own personal situation. But you know what, my perspective has changed.

I don’t think the “you” in the song is about “you” after all. I think it’s about “me”. I think the song is about “me” or the person singing it. At least, over the last few months it has become about me: everything in life can be fixed.

I say everything in life and that does deserve some small caveat. You see on Saturday 14th December, someone in my local community passed away from pneumonia. He was young (34) and it happened so quickly. He is survived by family, friends and his partner who is beside herself with grief. Everything in life can be fixed. Death, however, is something we have no fix for as yet.