Ironically, C talked about not wanting to get old, but in her non-chronological age she was probably aged about 5. Her story made me sad, but maybe not for the same reasons as everyone else. I wished I could know a bit more about how she ended up in so much emotional pain she felt her only course was to abandon not only her children, but to abandon herself.
My sadness was that I believe C could have been truly helped, gently. She could have discovered how lasting joy comes from connection to the people you love, which is often gritty, opaque, frustrating and granular, rather than full of "sparkle".
C's rock-bottom misery, far from being a sign of her cartoon-like superficiality, actually showed she was awakening from the trance of grandiosity in which she had spent most of her life. (There are lots of people who spend their entire lives thus and never "wake up": the social pages are full of them; they wear a lot of jewellery and maybe do stand-up paddleboarding yoga. Yes, apparently it's an actual thing.)
But here's how waking up to reality works. What you get when you let go of grandiosity is despair. Which sounds unremittingly grim. But it's not! This is where the good stuff lurks. There is hope skulking within despair, because there is no coming to consciousness without pain. Freedom is possible.
Yet, like the social x-rays of C's world, we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns, blithely unaware. Carl Jung said neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. I never used to understand that, but now I think what he meant was if we can't process our legitimate sorrow and rage at how we have variously been shamed, ignored and used, usually as a child, we will act out that pain in other ways. (In C's case in spending, drinking, love-making, you fill in the blanks for your own displacement activity.)
This probably sounds pretty obvious, but the bit I only recently comprehended is that some suffering is too excruciating to face on our own. Sometimes you literally cannot remain present with waves of intense feeling as trauma and insecurity come to the surface.
You need someone to help you bear the pain so the feelings can have their time and you can let them go. CS Lewis: "It takes two to see one." (And please, don't get me started on the cutting of state funding for therapy for our most vulnerable people.)
To change, you first have to be able to feel; you will have to tolerate uncomfortable feelings. Even if we knew the facts about C's childhood, it may not tell us much about how it felt. Some wounds a child receives are invisible or received when they were pre-verbal, the rejection of their authentic self.
Whatever happened to C - and sometimes we don't even have the words to describe our feelings, what the Greeks called alexithymia - she certainly didn't seem to have mastered the skill of self-regulation or found reliable sources of comfort and strength.
Sometimes our home and our marriage, the place where we want to belong and find refuge and nourishment, can be the most dangerous place on earth. Jeez, that's not exactly a sparkly note to end on with season's greetings. So, instead of sentimental cheer for this season, what I wish for is to be truly awake.
The most wondrous parts of Christmas will come when you wake up, look around and see not only what is missing but what is there, including the messy, annoying, ordinary parts; for they are the mundane tokens of normalcy that tether us to existence.
