What a Christmas Ornament Taught me About Radical Acceptance
I wrote this a year ago and pitched it to Huff Post. Since they didn’t take it, I thought I’d share it here.
“Could I get your address please?”
As hard as it was for me to type those words, it was beyond time. After all, here it was, the week after Thanksgiving and my younger brother had moved in April. More significantly, he bought a house with his fiancée - an event one would think he might want to share with his only sibling.
One would think.
I only found out about it in September, and only by asking when he and his fiancée might decide to close the gap of the one-hour drive between them.
“Oh yeah…well…it turns out, we bought a house.”
When he added that the happy event occurred five months prior, I suppressed the ache in my heart and offered my hearty congratulations. What else was there to do?
I haven’t spoken to him since.
And here comes Christmas. Christmases have been rough for me for some time. In my family, there’s always been a sense of desperation to keep everything the way it always was, even as time was forcing us all forward. Not to mention, the way it always was was pretty exhausting. We’d have to do all the things, even though we no longer had the energy or desire. Nostalgia warped reality. Festive decorations and sugar-coated treats concealed the dysfunction underneath.