The Brilliance of Resilience

As a gesture of interest in people bringing their, "whole selves," to work, my company has revamped their employee spotlight articles and replaced them with questions that are much less interview-ish and much more conversational. The articles always highlight a single word that encompasses themselves and the work that they do, and it always leads with, "My work is a story of..." Because I have spent the last two years being really self-centered, I thought immediately what my word would be and if I wanted to volunteer to talk about my work and my personal life through the lens of seemingly informal atmosphere. I definitely do want to do that (see above: self-centered), but not on that platform. When someone struggles with the things that I have struggled against since forever, people in a professional "career," setting often use those stories, those emotions and those experiences as fodder for labeling in whatever terms would suit propelling their own car...

I used to really love Christmas. I collected a ridiculous amount of Christmas decorations, especially the vintage plastic, kitschy stuff, and I hung it up and had, "Christmas in July," parties and loved giving gifts and making ham or whatever. And it seemed like the world was bright. Then, I had the worst Christmas I've ever had when my exhusband and I began the slow descent into the end of our marriage the November before the Christmas season of 2014. That Christmas Day my mother had too many Christmas-themed drinks and was so hungover she couldn't get out of bed. We took our laundry to my parents house and spent the day in opposite chairs watching things like, "The Price is Right," at an ear-splitting decibel level with my deaf father, eating a shitty meal and opening gift cards to each other and from each other. When there are no kids to celebrate, Christmas becomes oddly unimportant and when you have the beginning of no marriage, it seems even ...