Nothing Bad Ever Happens in Winter

I turned sixteen in a Holiday Inn overlooking I-85 in Commerce, Ga fourteen years ago. I was starting my sophomore year at Jefferson High School wearing a Georgia bulldogs brand polo shirt and flip-flops I bought at Jay’s department store so that I had something clean for my first day at school. They were both slightly too big for me.

I did not live at the Holiday Inn, but I was not sure when I was going back home.

At the time home was my grandma’s office where I was sleeping on my mother’s workout mat that was… old. That was where all my clothes were, too, but I did not have a chance to grab them. It was not like I had too much to begin with, because a couple months earlier my mom told me to pack a bag. My parents were separating. We were going to the farm.

I packed essentially an overnight bag that had been overextended for about forty days and even that I did not grab to bring with me to this Holiday Inn.

My cousin, God bless him, was having a meth-related meltdown and literally embodying “terroristic threat” at my family’s farm. My mom, rightly so, was afraid for her life and we left to go to stay at the Holiday Inn. I brought Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” with me and almost nothing else, and so I bought SEC merch that did not fit.

In hindsight, I handled the situation pretty well, all things considered. For sixteen years, I lived with a rageaholic whose presence felt like a slamming door in my nervous system. My cousin’s meth-rage wasn’t much different—except he eventually had to sleep.

I think about this a lot because hotels have always felt like an escape for me, even before that birthday. Looking back, maybe it all ties back to that night—to the freedom I found, however brief, in their anonymous, transient spaces.

That hotel room, where I celebrated my birthday, alone, reading Sartre was an escape from my chaotic family, just as every hotel room had been up to that point. It did not matter that there was a real and present danger associated with our fleeing through the keyless entry doorway and his-and-her nightstand lamps. It did not matter that back where I was living police were being called and people were being hurt. It did not matter that all my friends were an hour away and they were about to continue their high school journey together. It did not matter that even when I did get to go home I was sleeping on the floor on a used yoga mat.

It did not matter.

That Holiday Inn was an escape from my life.

I turned sixteen in that liminal place. My parents were gone. I did not see my dad again for years and my mom… just… stopped. I had to grow up and so I did, but I grew up in this twilight of reality. I entered that hotel room as a fifteen-year-old kid, and I left stuck somewhere between being and nothingness.

So, while hotel rooms have always been a sort of sanctuary for me, they also provide a kind of mental trap where they emerge as prisons of the mind.

Fourteen years later, as I turn thirty, I find myself in another temporary space—a different kind of hotel room. This time, I’m here by choice instead of having it thrust upon me by circumstances and meth-rage. I cannot help but think about that Holiday Inn being here, now.

There’s no one in my life now who has driven me to this space by their addictions and passions, but rather it is myself who wants to return to where it feels like I never left, to put to rest that which can never be, anymore, and in fact, never was. For almost fifteen years, I’ve tried to make sense of that summer, never really leaving that hotel room. It’s like setting up a bed in a foyer and forgetting you can leave.

I think that there are a lot of us who hold onto certain moments, trying to make sense of them, regretting decisions and circumstances, and not letting go of what has happened or what never could have taken place. Regret is a poison like no other and can pull us into its depths at a moment’s notice if we give in, and it is really difficult to not give in. Regret is a division within oneself, dissecting what could be with what is—and while meth certainly has its habitual properties, I have found the could’ve, should’ve, would’ve thinking as addictive as it is paralyzing.

We all suffer in some way or another, none of us are exempt from suffering, because suffering brings us closer to God. If we did not suffer then we would not need to lean on anything more powerful than ourselves and circumstances, nor would we look beyond them. I believe that this sort of thinking, reflective and void, has been keeping me cyclical for over a decade.

This sort of toxic mindset plants our hearts into the soil of pride that manifests in our life as dissociation and hatred.

That is nothingness.  

Hatred is nothingness. It does not exist in real way, because hatred inherently exists outside of God, Who is love, mercy, forgiveness, being itself. Hate is divisive; it is self-sabotage and the energy that it takes to produce hatred takes from us and while seeming to project outwards inverts onto self. I believe, from experience and witnessing this phenomenon, that we are all addicted to suffering with a popular substance of choice being regret.

Could’ve, should’ve, would’ve thinking.

I don’t want to hate anymore.

I don’t want to carry within myself the poisonous manifestations of nonexistence.

That is why I am staying in a hotel room like I did so many years ago. I’m staying here because I want to give myself the opportunity to leave. I do not think I ever really left that Holiday Inn, or at least, a part of me went in and never made it out. And that was me, everything that was me and everything that I was becoming up to that point as a fifteen-year-old evaporated before my eyes without me even realizing it. Yet, everything that I could now become because that part of me was gone stood before me. And because I did not realize that, either I never chose to do anything about… anything. In that state, we start packing away resentments like we’re going away for a long time.

Now, it’s time to choose. It’s time to leave.

So many people get stuck in the hotel rooms of their minds, thinking they’ve already left. But they stay, trapped in a victim mindset, unable to move forward.

This year, I chose to spend my thirtieth birthday in a hotel room, alone (certainly without Sartre)—but this time, I’m not trying to escape. Instead, I’m preparing to leave for real. To pack my bags and finally move on from that space where I’ve been stuck for so long. I’m choosing to leave behind everything that I was and stepping toward who I am now. This time, I’m packing my bags for real—not just for an overnight stay. It’s time to leave the liminal space behind, where I’ve lived for too long without realizing it, and step fully into what is waiting on the other side.

I am choosing to cross the threshold into being, with clothes that fit and a decision to grow up, not assuming responsibilities amidst chaos and calling it adulthood, that only gives way to resentment. If we give up everything that we think we are, willingly, we can become what we actually are by God’s grace. Otherwise, we will hold on to everything we are not and everything that will never be, driving ourselves crazy, pacing in a hotel room that we are trapped in.

Yet, the door is open.

No one dangerous or destructive is outside the door this time—it’s just you, but the only way to meet them is to leave this nothingness go out and be them.

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ