Like many of my sisters with c-ptsd, I came to hate the holidays. Especially “The Holidays” – the ones at the end of the year when families are supposed to come together, your house is supposed to be all decorated and cleaned and smell amazing, and love is supposed to abound. Your mom is supposed to bake goodies and your dad is supposed to, I don’t know, go out and chop down a Christmas tree and bring it home roped to the top of the car.

Contrast those expectations with a family that’s barely making it financially and people who are barely able to function emotionally, and you are bound to end up feeling cheated and disappointed.

As a kid you make the most of it. But as an adult the bad memories can really get you. The sound of carols can send you into flashbacks of trying to get your mom out of bed to see her presents, or of screaming matches on Christmas morning. 

Then you do the worst possible thing – you try to go back in time and fix it. If only I’d known… If only I hadn’t told them…Etc.

It took me forever to figure out this is a losing game, a futile exercise. It only makes my flashbacks worse and deepens depression.

So what can we do, us kids who were left out of “what the holidays are supposed to mean?” Slowly, I am realizing the answer lies in letting go of those expectations and focusing on what they really mean.

I identify as Christian in faith. I believe that Jesus left heaven and came to earth. He spent his whole life helping other people, and he never tried to decide whether they “deserved it.” He just gave. He just was kind. He just shared his love – fully, and with all his heart.

Many of us, myself included, find it hard to share love without reservation because life has taught us this is the way to get your heart broken. Well you know what, your heart can’t get much more broken than people mis-taking your love and killing you for it.

But Jesus endured all that because he knew he could show us a better way. And lately I find when I push past the fear of being hurt and share my love, which includes my time and resources, with people, a stronger Force takes over. I feel bolstered with the strength to endure it if the person I am trying to love rejects me, and even to rejoice in spite of that rejection. Why?

Remember the Grinch? His heart was two sizes too small, right? As long as we hold back love because we fear being hurt, our hearts will be stunted. Ever meet a real-live person who has lived this way their whole life? They live like a wild animal in a cage, looking at you with fear if you get too close, terrified of being touched.

By contrast, when we reach outside ourselves our hearts can grow. I feel mine expanding each time I bake cookies for my neighbors.

But what if they don’t like them? What if they think it’s stupid

Screw you Fear! I choose to love!

In my forthcoming memoir The Locust Years, I wrote, “What happened to you was perpetrated on you. It wasn’t your fault.”

When we were kids, we didn’t have a choice. Now we are adults. What kind of people do we want to be? What kind of world we want to help make? Because the fact is, we do help make it, whether we want to or not. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Science.

As you let love flow through you, your heart becomes a channel. And just like a streambed expanding with erosion, the channel will keep growing larger the more we let love flow. This holiday season, I choose to let my heart be filled with love and not bitterness. What about you?