It makes sense that I would cry at the sight of her signature. The encouraging words my great aunt cared enough to scrawl on Hallmark cards and snail-mail from Chicago to Philly have helped keep my blood pumping — at a 0.0% BAC— over the past 4+ years. To see them jumping off the wall on Nov. 14, what would’ve been her 91st birthday, stretched my heartstrings to the breaking point.
“Can’t wait for Christmas” popped a few of them, I think.
I taped my entire collection of recovery support cards to the mirror in my bathroom, as positive affirmations to start each day. Since Auntie Mickey passed away back in July, I’ve found myself staring at her handwriting, and, like Proust’s madeleine, it’s sent me spiraling into an emotional rabbit hole of family memories. Misty red-and-green-colored memories, now that the holidays are here.
“Auntie Mick” was our annual Christmas Eve hostess, as iconic as mom’s patchwork stockings, dad’s retro bubble lights, or the mysterious cookie crumbs that covered the special Santa plate on the most wonderful morning of the year.
I guess it also makes sense that every flippin’ Black Friday commercial on TV or wintry ad on Instagram has been triggering my tear ducts of late. I hear jingle bell sounds on a podcast break or see a flash of twinkle lights in my neighborhood — there was a truck loaded with pre-cut evergreens, riding down the road the other day! — and I’m suddenly all up in my feelings. ’Tis the season for existential distress!
This empty ache I feel inside has been bubbling up around the holidays, ever since I was a little kid who believed in jolly ’ole Saint Nick. The big moods have only grown bigger as I’ve gotten older, and moodier, now that I can no longer find magic in a bottle of booze.
Thanksgiving is still a week away. A hectic month stands between us and our traditional year-end pilgrimage home — which, gotta be honest, I have mixed emotions about, given that it’s the first Christmas I’ll ever spend without Aunt Mickey. Still, the frost is on the grass and there’s fireplace smoke wafting through the air, and there’s no escaping the bittersweet melancholy that always hits me this time of year.
It’s hard to put the experience into words. Nostalgia on steroids? Acute sentimentality sprinkled with high-octane death anxiety?
It’s a mixture of grief and gratitude, for life lost and life unfolding. For harsh truths accepted and dreams that will never die. For love and the searing pain and sublime pleasure it brings, all at once, at any given moment.
It’s a deep longing, for a place, a time, a version of myself that maybe (probably) never existed in reality the way it’s painted, Grandma Moses-style, in my mind. 🥹
I’ve been working as a drug and alcohol counselor for 10 months, and if I hadn’t already been through the shitstorm of addiction and roller coaster of early sobriety, in the midst of several career transitions between 2018 and this past January, I would confidently call 2023 the most difficult year of my life.
It’s hard to describe what it’s like, as a highly sensitive and emotional person, to do a highly sensitive and emotional job. Or what it’s like to be an introvert who prefers expressing yourself in writing, going into a field where you have to work closely with people, consoling and confronting and absorbing their energy, and doubting every day whether you made the right choice.
That’s why counseling school doesn’t really prepare you for being a counselor. Your own experience in therapy, or with addiction, does not prepare you for being a therapist working with other addicts.
You just don’t know how deeply the stuff you hear/witness will impact you until you’ve heard/witnessed it, then gone home and cried yourself to sleep over it. Or sat on your couch or in your car, silently dissociating to block it out. Or wandered off in the woods for hours on end, trying to get as far away from it — from all human beings — as you possibly can.
I highly recommend that last strategy. Just don’t pick my same forest, OK? 🙅🏼♀️
I’ve written ad nauseum about my relationship with nature, and with my husband, so I won’t go off about that now. I will say, again, that where I live and who I live with are the two biggest reasons why I’ve successfully stayed away from alcohol for nearly 4 1/2 years, thereby giving myself a chance to grow, mature, find peace and balance, and chart a new course for the future.
Aunt Mickey called me “strong and determined,” and yeah, you’ve got to have some guts and grit to go against the grain in a world where drinking is ubiquitous — especially during the holiday season. Recovery is about staying away from the substance, yes, but to do that, you’ve got to figure out how to weather the emotional blizzard of life and work, day after day after day.
All you’ve got to keep you safe and warm is your small network of sober supporters and the toolbox of coping skills you’ve filled with time, therapy, the 12 steps, and lots of trial and error. It’s like being on “Naked and Afraid,” all raw and exposed, having to build your own shelter to protect you from the unforgiving, unpredictable elements.
The whole point of drinking, for me, was to escape discomfort. And with its combination of painful personal loss and unprecedented professional challenges, 2023 has taken uncomfortable to a new level.
It’s tempting to look at the holidays as a finish line or port in the storm, where all negative emotions — sadness, fear, anxiety, resentment — will vanish like ice off my windshield with one punch of the remote starter. I used to view the liquor bottle on my countertop the exact same way; it was a fast-acting antidote to reality, a comfy, cozy fantasy world I could melt into at the end of each day, where I was set free from being me.
Through recovery, I’ve learned that all-or-nothing perfectionism, the perpetual pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, is a prescription for deep, enduring dissatisfaction. And if I want to truly enjoy the life I’ve fought to reclaim, being fully present at family gatherings and in sessions with clients, I can’t afford to buy into that “never enough” ethos anymore.
I have to overcome my allergy to the middle ground.
I have to stop running from real life — and my real self. My only option is to inhabit the anxious, fearful, neurotic, sensitive, creative, passionate, deeply emotional, and cautiously hopeful person I am/was born to be.
If I can learn to accept or even embrace that person, then use what I have for a greater good, even on a small scale, I think Aunt Mickey would consider that a pretty nice birthday/Christmas present.
Funny; of all our family members, she was always the most impossible to buy for. I’m glad I got to gift her with a glimpse of “the old Jen” while I had the chance.
Jen Wielgus Journalism 
You have such a gift for expressing the complexity of an inner life. I appreciate you writing this, it helps.
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