Who’s to say exactly how I am supposed to feel about the relationship I have with my family? It’s a question that’s confused me for years, and yet I don’t feel any closer to answering it now than I did when I first asked myself. Time’s passed, my relationship with each of them has dwindled. Every couple of years I feel compelled to show up to one or two gatherings, usually for a while, and that’s enough for me. It makes me uncomfortable. I don’t think I knew who I was when I was around them all last, and it feels like I’m expected to be the person that they remember me being.
And what if it weren’t that? What if I didn’t have that projection, or assumption about their feelings? What if I remove that completely, focus only on how I feel about it? When I sit with that, it becomes abundantly clear that not only am I not comfortable being myself around my family, I don’t want to show that side to them. It feels like I’ve had unspoken expectation requested of me, and that’s never changed from the other end. What I’ve gathered is just how effective removing yourself from a system that isn’t working for you can be. I’ve never so viscerally felt the power of that until I’d been fired from my previous employer, and hired by my current one. For the first time I understand how to act on that calling I feel — the calling to be partially a leader, but more so an example & presentation of a way of ‘being’ in the world that others’ might not know is an option. An individualist to a fault.
