For anyone hating the most wonderful time of the year

*Rather hear this post than read it? Access the audio voiceover on the Substack app.*

Years ago a mentor told me to prepare for December. She said, “Your own life will be stressed and strained and your clients will need you most just as you are most in need of a break.” As she celebrated Hanukkah, she would laugh and grumble, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!”

When I am tired, I can collapse into temporary hopeless and helpless. Today is one of those days. 

Commercial Christmas feels like so much that is wrong with our culture except in capital letters with a big red bow.

Commercial Christmas sells us a story that all families are physically and emotionally safe.

A story suggesting religion is as simple as a baby in a manger, as opposed to a tool for great love, but also great violence and repression. Commercial Christmas stories hand us a fairytale about rich white people who have more than enough food and more than enough presents getting more food and more presents and also everyone feeling loved and accepted as they are. Commercial Christmas is rich white people donating to the food bank once a year while voting for lower taxes and defunded community services and community safety nets.

I’m probably too indoctrinated in the white lies of this season. I’m trying to grasp for a deeper meaning, but the bottom line is that sometimes it feels so painful and unfair that everyone who didn’t get these promises is gaslit into believing it is their fault, that it is their lives that are broken. As I wrote in The Ballad of Burnout, “look at the Constructor shirking blame.” Look Kerry. Look.

Is it a blessing or a curse to see things as they are, instead of as we wish them to be? I hear my mentor laughing in my head, “It's neither darling, this is called adulthood.”

This imbalanced culture also birthed a wellness industry.

This imbalanced culture birthed Commercial Christmas. It also birthed a wellness industry (including many facets of psychology and therapy culture) that promote the ideas that change is an individual accomplishment, that our sicknesses and emotions are problems to be solved.

What does it mean to make my living from hearing people talk to me about things that society has taught them to be ashamed of? We are taught trauma is our fault, that if we are injured we are broken, and that our grief and sadness mean we are doing life wrong… as opposed to the most normal and understandable reactions in the world. What does it mean that I continue to make my money on the injuries of these lies?

When my clients say “thank you” I say “it is a great privilege.”

Part of me doesn’t want to write this. It feels like a betrayal. When my clients say “thank you” I say “it is a great privilege”, and I mean it in every single cell of my body. It is a privilege to hear people’s secrets, to earn their trust, to be a clear voice speaking a different truth above the mayhem, validating and normalizing their experiences, bringing them back to a wider, supported world, and yet….

And yet. I just want more for all of us. I want to gift each of us a culture and community that holds us with grace and love. I want to weave a world where tweens cry and their parents hold them softly. Where emotions aren’t considered “drama”, they are considered as normal as air. I want to breathe life into a vision of neighborhoods standing together against the racial slur; a world where people are motivated to great anger, advocacy, and justice in service of health care for all, not parking spaces for all.

Here is my Christmas wish.

So maybe here is my Christmas wish, inspired by Langston Hughes’ poem on America,

“O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be”

Here’s to a world that has never been, yet must be. Here’s to a counterculture dedication to speaking new truths (actually very old truths) against a specific brand of saccharine-filtered life.

To those who are heartbroken and lonely,

I am so sorry. This can be a miserable time of year. Take small comforts where you can, in the memories of sweet past love, even if now gone. Inhale the mince pies or bursting lemons, observe the tree branch frosted like crystal. Look for small evidence you are still one within a vast net of interconnection and even as you grieve, there are others in pain as well, you are not alone even there.

May your own pain fruit compassion, for yourself and others (but gently and only when you are ready.) May you feel the warmth of love and connection again and soon. And when nothing works, take comfort that this horrible season will be over soon.

To the helpers,

who are depleted and feeling helpless, keep going. Slowly with rest. Take a moment to breathe, we must dig with teaspoons until we die, and yet. And yet, the sea stars still grow, the anemones reach their sticky hands toward food, and the tides coax us back.

Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us,

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”

To my clients,

thank you. Thank you for being the reason I can do work I love and still buy groceries. You feed my family and keep us warm. I promise to keep working myself out of a job and to walk with you until you are ready to say goodbye. I’m cheering for us both.

(Oh! To Aotearoa New Zealand tax payers, thank you! Your money supports publicly-funded care for sexual trauma survivors which also buys my groceries. Ngā mihi nui.)

Love, Kerry