Well, I turned 40, and then I disappeared for a while.
Let’s rewind a bit.
Christmas messed me up. I have a hard time with holidays. I wish it weren’t so, but I really, really struggle. I hate how dramatic that sounds, and I don’t want to be all “poor me,” but it’s my truth. As a child, holidays were hard because I was passed from parent to parent. Holidays were marked by “his” or “hers,” and I always felt insecure and lost. I would often act out and throw fits about stupid things like how my name was spelled or not wanting to turn ten because I didn’t know how to cope with what I was feeling. On top of those complicated emotions, my step-dad would trap my mom in a room and yell at her for hours and hours pretty much every Easter and Christmas (and often on birthdays, too) and my little brothers and I would just sit there with all our newly opened presents having to listen to the raging lunatic in the other room and wonder when we were supposed to call the police.
Holidays weren’t the only time he would do that - he did it all the time - but holidays were a guarantee.
Several years ago, after my step-dad was finally out of the picture, I went to see a therapist, and she labeled my experiences as “trauma” and diagnosed me with PTSD. That felt a little extreme to me because the things I went through were so mild compared to things other people who have PTSD have been through, but as years have passed, I’ve come to recognize my symptoms, and I can see that I do have it, albeit mildly so.
The holidays set me off a bit, and after Christmas, I was in rough shape, and I just really needed to shut everything out for a while. I was grateful that we had a vacation planned - a family trip to Disneyland - from NYE to January 7th. I thought it would be just what we needed, and how awesome would it be to celebrate my 40th birthday in Disneyland? (we weren’t going to the parks until the day after my birthday, but it still counted as my birthday according to me).
It turns out, a trip to Disneyland was not what we needed. I don’t want to use adjectives that are too strong, but Disneyland was, in a word, horrible. Enough so that we went and talked to guest relations about getting our money back (we knew it wouldn’t work out, but we tried anyway. Our compensation was three lightning lane passes per person).
I’ve debated over the past week whether to write anything about Disneyland. I don’t know if I want to go into great detail, but Disneyland is not what it used to be, and I feel like it no longer provides my family with what we love.
I can’t say with any surety that I’ll never take my family to Disneyland again. It’s kind of like child birth - you tend to forget the awful parts and find yourself wanting to do it again, but even with child birth, I knew when I was done. So maybe I really am done with Disneyland. Right now, it’s very fresh in my mind, so at this moment, I don’t want to go back. I wrote a very thorough “note to self” in my journal to refer to if I ever start daydreaming about Disneyland again.
So suffice it to say that Christmas + a bad Disneyland trip = one out of whack Britt.
I need… something. Some kind of recovery. So far, five days hasn’t cut it. Sometime soon (maybe tomorrow), I’m going to write a post about Disneyland, and it will mostly be positive because I want to document the good memories. But this post bares the truth - Christmas followed by that vacation left me damaged.
Thanks for being honest and vulnerable. I agree with you about Disneyland--it is not what it used to be. I would love to read your thoughts about how it has changed and why you are done with it. Sorry you had a lousy birthday.
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