Rejected Yet Remembered: What the Holidays Don’t Heal — Part 1

Rejected Yet Remembered: What the Holidays Don’t Heal — Part 1

Note:  This is the first instalment of a three part series.  You will find links to the others here:

Part One                Part Two                Part Three

The holidays have a way of exposing the cracks you’ve been trying to hold together.
Everyone else is talking about miracles and family and peace on earth, while you’re just trying to make it through the longest nights of the year without falling apart. Christmas used to mean something to me. Even during the years when my ex tossed the holidays aside and tried on a new identity like a coat that never fit, I still held onto the music. Maybe that’s why “Last Christmas” keeps following me around this month. It’s not just a song anymore — it’s a reminder of everything I’ve lost.

Rejected, Yet Remembered.
That’s what this season feels like after incarceration — the world moves on, people disappear, and you’re left carrying a story no one wants to hear. The lights come up, the music plays, and you still feel like you’re standing outside in the cold, watching life happen through a window you can’t reach. 

This is Part 1, because some wounds don’t close in a single telling.
Some holidays don’t heal anything. They just reveal what’s still bleeding.

The Season That Doesn’t Let You Hide

Christmas is supposed to be about warmth, connection, and belonging — all the things you lose when your life implodes. I use the term implode, because, although to others, it looks like an explosion — it's not. My world collapsed and fell into the void created. After you get out, you think maybe the season will soften some of the edges. Maybe people will remember the good in you. Maybe the lights will feel like hope instead of headlights from a past you can’t outrun.

But here’s what nobody tells you:

Holidays amplify everything you don’t have.

Every empty seat.

Every silence that used to be a phone call.

Every family photo you’re no longer in.

You try to hold it together, but the smallest things hit hard — a commercial, a carol, a couple holding hands in a grocery store line. It doesn’t take much to knock you off balance when you’re already carrying years of shame, loneliness, and the constant fear that maybe the world hasn’t forgiven you… and never will. Last Christmas, I was still in a prison dorm in Florida, counting down the days. It was still fresh that I’d been told I wasn’t coming home. I should’ve seen it coming, but seeing something coming doesn’t soften the blow. You still feel it in your ribs.

“Last Christmas, I gave you my heart,
but the very next day you gave it away…”

It’s cheesy until you’ve lived it. Until you’ve trusted the wrong people. Until you’ve tried to come home to a life that isn’t there anymore.

Vulnerability that Doesn’t Make the Highlight Reel

After incarceration, you’re vulnerable in ways most people never have to understand.
You’re rebuilding from zero — sometimes below zero.
You’re trying to show up to work smiling while your chest feels like it’s caving in.
You’re trying to stay grateful while your life is hanging together with temporary fixes and late-night prayers.

This year I’m “free,” but freedom feels thin when you’re spending Christmas alone. I’m without my ex — good riddance, honestly — but I’m also without my kids, and that’s a different kind of lonely. My oldest barely speaks to me now. I don’t know if I can fix it or if the damage is already done. Last year she and I talked all the time. Now I get scraps of conversation from #2 when she has a moment, and even then I can’t tell if she’s actually busy or quietly drifting away. Part of me understands she’s living her own life. The other part wonders if she’s learning how to live it without me.

People assume that when you’re out, you’re “fine.”
But freedom without support is just a different kind of prison — one where the bars are invisible and nobody acknowledges them.

Some days you walk into the cold evening air after work and it hits you like a gut punch:

You’re doing all of this alone.

And yet, somehow, you keep going because stopping isn’t an option.

A Season of Mixed Signals

Last Christmas didn’t save me.  It didn’t even ease the weight; it made it sharper. The music felt off-key. The lights felt too bright. The joy around me felt like something happening in another country, behind a border I couldn’t cross.

But I also learned something I didn’t expect: God doesn’t disappear when people do.
Even when you’re standing there feeling rejected, forgotten, and out of place — there’s still that quiet presence cutting through the noise.

“When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.” — Psalm 27:10

That verse wasn’t a comfort at first. It was a reality check. I didn’t feel taken up.

I felt dropped.

But it stayed with me — and slowly, painfully, it started to feel true.

More to Say...

And maybe that’s why this story needs a Part 2.

Part 1 is the surface — the holiday loneliness, the ache of distance, the memories that don’t loosen their grip. But there’s more underneath that I haven’t said yet.

Because the months after incarceration aren’t just about surviving Christmas.
They’re about navigating the empty days that come after it — the days when routine replaces adrenaline and every quiet moment forces you to face the pieces of yourself you’re still trying to hold together.

Part 2 is where I’ll talk about the stuff people don’t see:
the financial tightrope,
the emotional fallout,
the constant worry of losing what little stability you’ve built,
and the faith that tries to anchor you even when everything else feels unsteady.

There’s more to this story — more truth, more mess, more of the fight to stand back up when the world expects you to fall again.

Part 2 isn’t about the holidays.
It’s about what happens when the lights come down and the world stops pretending everything is joyful.

It’s about what happens next.

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