138: Are You Alone on Christmas Day?

What is it like to spend Christmas Day alone?

We all hate to be left out.

Today, on Christmas Day, I want to talk with you about loneliness. If you are alone today, and lonely, I want you to know I wrote this episode for you.

1. I’ve experienced deep, dark, terrifying loneliness AND I found a bridge to turn that loneliness into an abiding joy.
2. I’m going to tell you about how one of my clients found their way out of a similar loneliness
3. And I’m going to tell you how I understand my parents’ divorce—the source of my loneliness—differently after finding my way out of that loneliness.

There are many circumstances that would account for being alone on Christmas Day.

Like me, your husband might work in the Emergency Room which never closes, including on Christmas Day. My kids are grown and celebrating Christmas with their in-laws today.

Or, you might be alone because you don’t celebrate Christmas and this is just another Thursday.

But you might be alone because your family is estranged and it doesn’t feel comfortable to be with a friend’s family because you feel like the fifth wheel.

If that last circumstance is the reason you’re alone today, you might feel lonely. Or left out. Being alone when everyone else is together is a weird feeling.

Today, I’m going to tell you the story of loneliness in my life with the hope that, if you are lonely, you will know you’re not alone in feeling that way.

Then I’m going to tell you a story of hope. These days aloneness is one of my favorite things. But I didn’t always feel that way. I found a bridge between loneliness and alone-ness and I healed the brokenness inside me as I crossed that bridge.

I hope to bring you comfort today if you’re alone and lonely.

What is loneliness?

First, I want to dispel the myth that just because you’re around a lot of people means you can’t be lonely. Decades ago, when I was a little girl, I spent half of Christmas Day with my mom and the other half with my dad. There were lots of people and commotion in both houses, but no matter which house I was in, I felt a huge pit of emptiness in my stomach.

Something was missing. Even as a very little girl, I could tell that my life felt broken.

We have all experienced that feeling of something’s broken. Or something’s missing. And you’re the one on the outside, looking into a scene that seems like everyone else belongs.

After those little-girl-Christmases, I spent the next 4 decades healing that dark, lonely feeling. I’m not telling you this because I want you to feel sorry for me, but rather so that you will know that, if you feel this way, you are not alone.

Here’s what loneliness felt like for me. I hope you can hear yourself in my story.

I enjoyed the Christmas decorating and baking cookies with my mom because I never really had a ritual like that with my dad, so I didn’t feel anything missing. But as Christmas Eve approached, I’d feel this blackness begin to coat the inside of my body. It was so empty. Cavernous. That spooky feeling in a cave where you can’t see the back wall because it’s so dark.

The darkness was accentuated because of the spirit of joy and sleigh bells all around me. It was as if the bells were mocking my darkness, taunting me that everyone else is merry and gay.

There were moments of joy. I remember the first year we got candy stuffed stockings at my father’s house. I remember feeling such a bond with my step siblings while we pulled candy bars and books of lifesavers out of our stockings. But there was always the inevitable moment when I would leave those siblings behind to return to my mother’s home. I felt safer with my mother. But I also felt left out, like the 5 of them: my father, my stepmother and my step-siblings were building a family where I was the occasional interrupter to the rhythm they were building.

During the first years I spent with my husband, I warned him about my Christmas loneliness. “I’ve got the lonely feeling today,” I’d say. The lonely feeling wasn’t reserved for Christmas. Sunday evening was another time that the dark cave would descend.

Do you ever feel this sort of loneliness? What is the texture and color of your loneliness? Is your loneliness an empty cave like mine? Or is it more like a drowning feeling under water? Or an untethered feeling like you’re far out at sea and can’t find a shoreline?

Acceptance is the bridge out of loneliness

Our most painful feelings originate because we are resisting something.

Resisting loneliness for example, or resisting anger. Resisting helplessness or even resisting love.

Over and over and over I’ve had the privilege to watch people stop resisting the worst feelings that terrify them, and I get to see this look come over their face: surprise followed by relief followed by surrender. Acceptance. Even a deep sense of belonging.

This lack of resistance—this acceptance—is the bridge out of loneliness and into a deep sense of wholeness inside yourself.

When we don’t look away from our deepest pains; when we stop trying to catch our breath between the waves of overwhelm, we can dive into our own deep sea of belonging.

We belong first to ourselves. To the totality of what we feel.

Cultivate joy inside your loneliness

While it did take many years for my lonely feeling to recede, I can also tell you that it has been decades since my Christmas day has been haunted by that dark, empty cave in my belly.

During the darkest years of my loneliness, both of my parents taught me to practice joy.

What is interesting to me was that, even as a little girl, I could feel how lonely they both were. But I could also feel them reaching for the joy-ladder that would help them—and me—climb out of that pit of despair. I was lucky to have such loving parents.

They loved me enough to include me in their loneliness while teaching me to cultivate joy. When you learn to cultivate joy in the midst of that existential angst that we all feel at one time or another, your joy will become reliable.

When you ignore, bury, distract, or refuse to see your loneliness, that haunting feeling gets bigger and more powerful. Simultaneously, your joy will feel farther and farther away and you will have trouble finding it.

Here’s an example:

You might find beauty like Leonard Cohen’s song, Anthem where he says,
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”

It is enough to search for the beauty in brokenness. Let this be your bridge out today. As you ask your brain to find beautiful broken things, you will, simultaneously, and without trying, heal your resistance to the brokenness inside of you.

When that happens—when you begin to see how beautiful brokenness is—you begin to develop a different relationship with your own brokenness. It feels less lonely and more beautiful.

Nothing would make me happier today than if you texted me a photo of the broken beauty you found. You can reach me at 970-210-4480

A poem to read if you’re alone on Christmas

I’ll end today with this poem from my friend and poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. She was a guest on this show talking about how the death of her son affected her marriage.

Belonging

And if it’s true we are alone,
we are alone together,
the way blades of grass
are alone, but exist as a field.
Sometimes I feel it,
the green fuse that ignites us,
the wild thrum that unites us,
an inner hum that reminds us
of our shared humanity.
Just as thirty-five trillion
red blood cells join in one body
to become one blood.
Just as one hundred thirty-six thousand
notes make up one symphony.
Alone as we are, our small voices
weave into the one big conversation.
Our actions are essential
to the one infinite story of what it is
to be alive. When we feel alone,
we belong to the grand communion
of those who sometimes feel alone—
we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a thrill of dust
the dust that dances in the light
with all other dust, the dust
that makes the world.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
from All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023)

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