I was looking back through all the years on the day after Christmas (don't worry, NOT going there) and thinking wow, I've come a long way.
I think the most negative day in my life has always been the day after Christmas. I loved going to work the day after Christmas just so I could get out of the house and be completely distracted with all the exhausted angry people yelling at me. I actually reveled in being put on the front lines in returns for years, even won customer service awards over it. That alone speaks volumes about Christmas in my life without having to say another word about it.
People who know me from the old days know I can be excruciatingly thorough when it comes to documenting how a day goes down, blow by blow. I have Christmases on record going back years. The amount of misery and unhappiness I recorded going on all around me on Christmases past is such a drag that even I can barely bring myself to read back through it.
And today, the day after the reason for the season, the world around me is dealing with all the bitter disappointments in return lines and counting down to the next hangover in a few days. Time for New Year's parties and determinations for the next year to be better than the last.
General statement- most of you really suck at making the next year better than the last. Most of you never notice you trudge through another year of drudge not making much in the way of personal progress and emotional growth at all. Some of you actually escape that gerbil wheel and life really does get better, but usually only because you've had to make drastic changes in your lives anyway because of cancer or marriages hitting the rocks or losing someone you were very close to, most likely a parent or a child. But some of you just keep sinking further down into depressions and caves and cap it off with booze, drugs, meds, gaming, or some other distraction that helps you keep lying to yourself that everything's going to be ok.
What if it's not going to be ok? What if this is the year you die? For realz. Because that actually happens, doesn't it? YOU DIE. You don't want to, and you're not planning on it, but something goes terribly wrong and everything's too late and YOU DIE.
I came back out public very quickly after a scary night driving home from an ER thinking I was going to be ok, and was very nearly plowed in what would have been one of the nastiest car wrecks ever seen in my county. We were actually run off the road and just missed a head on collision doing 60+ mph from both directions. The place we ran off to avoid it by sheer millimeters was the only spot for miles that was flat enough not to send our car rolling, and we might not have been found for hours because it was pitch black and the highway was empty, except for that one car heading straight for us.
I will never forget those moments. Time didn't exist. We didn't scream or even brace for impact, it was that fast. We KNEW we would be dead in the next few seconds, and when it didn't happen, we were completely numb for several hours wondering why we weren't. It took awhile for our heads to readjust back to the reality of walking around our house, because we were that convinced we were dead. We even wondered if we might be ghosts like Adam and Barbara were in Beetlejuice, and we just didn't know it.
We all know people who go through terrible accidents and their lives change forever. We all know people whose families are devastated when a rabid cancer rages through and no one can stop it. We all know that frightening thought during illness that we could lose a child or a pet.
We live in cushions. Stuff like that happens to other people. Stuff like that isn't happening to us right now, so we're having a good year, knock on wood. Stuff like that has so little chance of happening in our immediate vicinity because we're being cautious and following some kind of guidelines and having our little faiths that it's all good.
And then if the least little thing pulls a rug out from under our feet and we have a bad day, we whine.
I turned off DMs and PMs for most of you 3 months ago. If you're going to follow Pinky, and you know me well enough to quote me (some of you do), then you know I'm going some place really hard and when I get there, there will be no going back.
I got my best traffic on Pinky blog for the entire month in the last 48 hours because I showed you guys real life in my house. And I will be showing you more. If THAT is all it takes to double and triple my traffic, imagine a book coming out. You guys are barely seeing the tip of what I've learned about surviving as aspienado.
I spent many, many years whining underground on private blogs until I couldn't stand myself any more. No one else could stand me like that, either. I was alone. I struggled for several years to change my attitude and write nicer, and it kind of started working, but everything changed in an eye blink when I wound up in the alt Earth where I DIDN'T die in a head on collision that would've flung our body parts around like a bowl of cereal getting knocked out of someone's hand.
You like the truth? Buckle up.
It was New Year's Eve. I was in my first marriage and about 6 1/2 months pregnant. I rode in with my mom and sibs to a New Year's church party and we had a great time playing board games. We left shortly after midnight.
Not one mile out of town, we rounded a sharp bend, and there was a vehicle flipped over on the side of the road and the wheels were still spinning. It had JUST HAPPENED. There were no cell phones back then, no houses within viewing distance. No one had seen it happen and we were first on the scene.
That wreck was so violent that one girl's head had been decapitated going through a barbed wire fence. Another girl had been flung up into the air so hard that she nearly broke a tree 12 feet up and bounced off like a busted up ragged pulp doll, still breathing that awful raspy drowning kind of sound where you know they're drowning in blood. I knelt and held her head (I knew her) while she finished bleeding out, stroking her hair, knowing there wasn't a thing I could do and that she had bare minutes left. God knows how many lambs and calves I'd helped hold down all my life while they bled out, so I automatically just gently held her head letting her bleed all over me. I still very vividly remember how her blood smelled, how her breathing sounded. To this day, I cannot bear to hear that kind of breathing being mimicked on TV shows. The smell of gasoline was overpowering. I can't bear to get even a drop of gas anywhere on me while I'm filling up my car, and even all these years later will go into a panic attack if it does.
Another girl dressed in black slacks and a beautiful blood soaked white blouse came walking toward us on the highway, so delirious that we couldn't tell if she even knew she'd been in a wreck. We could smell alcohol, maybe being really drunk saved her, but it sure didn't save the rest. When EMTs finally arrived, they found other bodies strewn around, and we found out later that the vehicle was so smashed and damaged they couldn't tell if it was a car or pickup at first, and then they found another body inside of it smashed to bits when they got it flipped and winched to haul it off.
That is my first and foremost memory every single New Year's Eve. I have never gotten past seeing all that, smelling all that, feeling someone I knew personally bleeding out in my arms.
Add that to several Christmases with people I love in hospitals, some of them being saved from the very moments of death, all of them in agony.
I'm going to be very plain about this- I do not care if you think you are having a bad Christmas. If someone isn't dying and you're not dealing with massive amounts of fear and spiking medical bills, YOU ARE NOT HAVING A BAD CHRISTMAS. I'm saying this as kindly as aspienado knows how, which means I'm being blunt and honest. Also, we all know that Christmases suck on general principle and it's never like the movies or the commercials.
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| click for Christmas blogger with good advice |
As hard as I tried not to let it get to me, I failed, and now I own that it's my responsibility to explain why, and I feel I have to come out and say once again- I suck as a friend. While the rest of you moan about Star Wars spoilers, I'm growling around my house about people dumping their junk all over my head on the holidays. I'll take Star Wars spoilers any day over getting dumped on. I totally understand depression, but I am the last person who can handle truckloads of other people's depression dumping on me. If the reason I'm on this earth is to dump your bad day, you're completely misunderstanding the whole Pinky thing. I'm a depression blogger, yes, but I'm neither certified nor qualified to handle your emotional crisis. I've spent several months talking about my triggers, so most of this is public now.
You know that saying- Every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings. Well, let me put a new saying into your head- Every time a person whines about a present or a relative or social obligaton, another person is getting beat up and raped and killed somewhere in the dark all alone with no one to save them.
I spent many years on underground blogs whining until the day I was nearly wiped out in seconds on a highway. My whole life changed that night. I realized I had wasted YEARS of TALENT being very selfish and negative when I could have been using my talent to find the other people in the dark and tell them I love them, I care, they're not alone. But that doesn't mean Pinky is the trash can that people dump into while they keep oscillating back into not finding other ways to deal with their depression.
The best way to have a good Christmas is to find other people who are having a hard time and let them know they aren't alone. The best way to have a great New Year is to let go of the little crap and think THIS MIGHT BE THE YEAR I DIE.
For realz. Because it could be.
And now it's very seriously time for me to GET TO WORK! >=l FOCUS!!! I have a world to break in the most evil villain way possible, as a total loser.
I haven't made it this long on this earth to not do spectacular things with the rest of my life. Who's with me? LET'S DO THIS.
