Happy Holiday’s Sober Warriors! Analisa the resident astrologer here to talk about something more personal, and less astrological. Going home for the holidays can be stressful. It has been something that in my adult life I have not been too inclined to do. Over the years, this time of year has been painful, but it wasn’t always that way.
The holidays growing up for me as a kid were about as classic as they come. Even though my parents were no longer together, we always spent the holidays at my grandma Donna and grandpa Jim’s house. Growing up in a small rural town in eastern Washington gave the perfect winter wonderland backdrop for the holidays. Endless amounts of sweet treats, cozy fires, and never ending meals. I loved the holidays when I was a child.
Growing up in a small town was great until I entered adolescence. From an early age I knew that I wasn’t an “in” crowd kind of kid. I was bullied often and entering middle school changed my relationship to everything. I began despising the town I grew up in, questioned everything about my family and why we were there, and began resenting every family function. The traditions that once felt warm and inviting began to feel uncomfortable, outdated, and the divide between my “blended” family became more and more obviously uncomfortable the older I got.
I was now more aware of people’s intoxication at family functions, as well as people’s interpersonal dynamics. Picking up on these subtleties in my family tainted holiday environments for me. I was no longer the innocent child that was running around. I was the bored, awkward, angry, punk rock teenager that wanted out of rural eastern Washington.
At 14 years old, my mom would move us to Seattle with my siblings and my step dad. Eventually I began avoiding family functions, and refusing to go back to my hometown.
The first time I remember getting drunk with my family was Thanksgiving of 2009. It was the first holiday season that my grandpa Jim wasn’t with us. He died in May of 2009. I never really put together that my family was most likely experiencing a lot of grief that year. Personally, I had a really terrible year in 2009 and was so numbed out from everything that I couldn’t really fathom how anyone else was feeling. I was only twenty years old at the time, and remember stocking up on wine and IPA with my dad at the store.
Back then I used to smoke Camel menthol “crush” cigarettes, the ones that had the little menthol ball in the filter. I remember walking down to the end of the block away from the house so that my grandma couldn’t see me smoking. I knew my grandma at that point was aware that I smoked, but I still couldn’t bear the thought of her ever seeing me do it. My grandma always had that effect on me, if anyone in my life made me want to be good in the world, it was her. That year was my first time seeing my grandma get buzzed from wine. I am kind of shocked that I never put it together that she was probably experiencing a lot of pain around having the first holiday without her husband.
I don’t look back at getting drunk with my family that Thanksgiving as a negative thing, but I remember it feeling weird that just a couple years prior I never would have told them I was drinking, and here I was, what felt like overnight, an adult that could sit at the big kids table of intoxication.
There’s something about losing your innocence in this way that for me was sad. It felt like I was no longer pure. I could feel the poison I was putting into my body, and the way it helped me stuff down the feelings of grief, loss, and heartache. I felt like everyone around me was doing some version of that for themselves. However, I found comfort in the connection we felt at that time. I remember wondering if this is what being an adult meant. You just drink to cope with the feelings, and avoid confronting the issues you have with each other.
Sadly, I have lost a lot of people in my life, many due to alcohol and substance abuse. As a musician, it has been my experience that addiction tends to be an underlying thread in this profession. So many years I continued to cope with the loss of loved ones by having a drink on their behalf, drowning away my sorrows, chain smoking, and recounting memories.
After I turned 21, I stopped spending the holidays with my family. It became painful for me having to decide what side of my family to spend it with. Drinking and coping with nostalgic pain through substance abuse became a regular way for me to handle seasonal depression. I preferred spending the holidays with friends and my husband, as it was easier than going home. I was healing a lot of trauma from my childhood, and the holidays seemed to always bring that up for me.
On December 28th of 2015 Lemmy Kilmeister, the singer and bass player of the band Motorhead, died. I had just seen him play a few months prior at the Warfield in downtown San Francisco. I remember leaving the concert that night telling my husband that he looked like he was about to die. The day when he did something completely shifted in me. I went out that night with a friend to a bar and had a couple of drinks “for Lemmy.”
That night I felt my brain slow down. I could feel myself behind the drunk observing how dumbed down I was getting with every drink I slurped of my cocktail. It felt out of alignment in a way I had never felt. I didn’t want to feel this way, nor continue to cope with loss like this.
The next day I decided to give alcohol up for good. It was a painful decision at the time, but the best decision I have ever made in my life. Less than two months later I quit smoking for good as well. I remember calling my dad and telling him that I had finally quit drinking and smoking. His response was something along the lines; “well just wait until someone dies, you will probably smoke again.” This made me extremely angry. However, the “I’ll show him” rage, that he often has induced in me over the years, has helped me stick with things in a way that I am forever grateful for. I refuse to show that kind of weakness, as I can’t bear the idea of him being right.
December of 2018 would mark my first Christmas returning to my hometown for the holidays as a sober person. It is a Christmas that I will never forget, because it was my last Christmas with the aforementioned grandma.
There is something about going home sober for the holidays that allows you to connect to your past in a more direct way than when you are drinking. I think that drinking at one point was a coping mechanism for leaving my childhood behind, as well as a way to connect to the adults around me. The loss and grief I had around becoming an adult felt like something I needed to drown. But once I became sober, I suddenly had a new sense of admiration for my childhood as well as my adulthood.
I no longer felt like I was grieving, I was ready to embrace where I came from. There’s been a deeper sense of strength going home sober has given me. It felt like a task or a mission I needed to accomplish in order to heal another layer of myself. The years I spent drinking perpetuated the trauma and made it feel like an inner wound that got deeper and deeper each year that went by. My grandparents never seemed to have this issue, and they never seemed to have issues with drinking either.
I knew that it was important for me to heal my relationship to my hometown before my grandma left the material realm. That Christmas I felt a part of my innocence return. Being in my grandma and grandpa’s home for the first time in years was really good. I no longer had the adolescence angst to escape. Instead I felt home. Home in myself in a way that was not traumatic.
Being sober enabled me to connect to my hometown as an adult in a new way. I embraced the snow and cold weather. I enjoyed decorations and the reminiscent small town smells. Despite the adults around me drinking wine, I focused more of my attention on the kids. We played games, went on walks, did kid stuff, which was extremely refreshing. I returned to California that year with a sense of love and reverence for my family.
The interpersonal dynamics didn’t bother me as much anymore. Mostly due to the work I have done on myself in creating healthy boundaries and leaving situations that felt uncomfortable. Removing myself from dynamics where family members were drinking too much, going to bed early, or redirecting my energy towards animals and kids at family functions has been a healthy way for me to be in that environment.
Flash forward one year later to Thanksgiving of 2019. I am in Joshua Tree, CA spending the holiday with friends when I get the call from my aunt that my grandma has passed. Even though I could feel it coming, it didn’t make it any easier. Thanksgiving and Christmas were probably my grandma’s favorite holidays. Her passing on Thanksgiving felt oddly perfect, but equally devastating. I spent the remainder of the evening in my hotel room crying. I didn’t smoke or drink, Nor did I even think about it.
My grandma would not want to be remembered in that way. I would never dishonor her like that. I think my grandma’s love is what kept me from going down a darker path in my life in general. At the height of my addiction, I often would get a card from her with money in it and her telling me how much she loved me. These gestures went a long way with me and made me angry at myself. It made me want to try harder in my life.
I would end up back in her house for Christmas just a month later. This time she was physically gone, but I felt her presence in every corner of that house. I got out all of the Christmas decorations and decorated the entire house the way she had me do when I was a little kid. I made an altar for her with family photos so that we could feel her energy. Sleeping on the family room on the floor, and despite how hard I tried to keep it together, I lost it and cried myself to sleep every night. I knew it was the last holiday I would ever spend in that house.
We had an amazing memorial service in town for her, and also said goodbye at her gravesite. We spent so much time honoring her with ritual, conversation, and family time in her house. I don’t know if I had been drinking if any of these memories would have happened the way they had. In fact, I probably wouldn’t remember any of it. I don’t remember most of the holidays I had when I was still an addict.
In many ways my sobriety allowed me to be a rock for both my dad and my aunt. I felt that the spiritual work I was doing in the house was helping us feel more grounded. Despite all of the grief, there was a warmth and a unity we felt as a family. My spiritual practice in my sobriety has helped me cope with death, loss, and family dynamics more than alcohol or cigarettes ever could. I wish I would have had that strength for my family when my grandpa had passed in 2009, but I was young and only knew how to cope the way I had been shown, which was drinking.
Thanks to these experiences, I have a new reverence for the holidays. The feelings I used to want to avoid through drinking, I now embrace. Christmas and Thanksgiving at my grandma’s house when I was a kid never revolved around alcohol and I think that is why I had so many great memories. It wasn’t until I was older that the influence of alcohol began to taint the purity of childhood I had felt. I feel a sense of duty to myself to create this harmonious environment in my own home.
In the tarot, the card that depicts this energy is the 6 of Cups and is ruled by the sign of Scorpio. It is in this card that we learn to enjoy memories of the past. We can tap back into the innocence of childhood and regain that sense of wonder that is often lost in adulthood.
I was fortunate enough to inherit some Christmas decorations from my grandma, who will now live in my house. Holidays have a new meaning for me, they are a time to honor my family and to create memories that connect me and my loved ones to our inner child. Sobriety has gifted me that wisdom.
Sobriety has also given me the wisdom that the innocence we are born with in childhood, the sense of wonder, is something that we can continue to create into our adult life for ourselves, as well as others. My grandma truly modeled this in her life, and it is something I will keep with me forever.
Wishing you all a safe and happy holiday season,
Analisa Six
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