I started watching Spy x Family recently. It’s a wonderful, warm show that I find positively delightful. I sincerely hope everything works out for everyone in the show. I’m also absolutely terrified that it won’t since I’m only a few episodes from the end of the show and there is still plenty of time for things to go bad. By the time this goes up, I’ll have watched the remainder of the show and had plenty of time to rue my optimism, scoff at my fear [this is the one I wound up doing], or spin my wheels pondering a cliffhanger. Normally, for a show with only one season that is such a joy to watch, I’d have watched my way through it in a few days, staying up later than I should in order to cram in a few extra episodes every day. Instead, I’ve been watching this for over a week because I’ve been careful to only watch a few episodes at a time.

I wish I could say I was savoring it, but the opposite is true. This show is actually emotionally difficult for me to watch, despite being so lovely. Not because I’m lonely and jealous of the budding family depicted on screen (the only thing akin to jealousy I feel is the broad and fun kind that grows from seeing something you like and wishing you were a part of it; a wistful “if only I could be a Pokémon Trainer/Jedi” kind of thing), but because this is a show about “family” and that’s a topic I have a difficult time engaging with these days.

These days, I reflexively flinch away from the topic any time it comes up, like I’m standing near an electric stove and I know one of the heating coils is on but not which one. I’ve been burned by the idea of “family” so much over the last few years (and this last year, especially), my mind automatically drops thoughts related to it as soon as they work their way into my head. Hell, it took me two hours to make a terrible first draft of this blog post. I was only able to organize and then finish what you’re reading right now because I stopped trying to write and spent an entire day working through how I felt and why I felt this way before spending another two hours working it into decent shape.

It is frustrating to find myself reacting this way to a show I’m enjoying. I see myself reflected in all of the characters in this lovely anime and I feel like this show should be an incredibly cathartic experience for me. It’s all a bunch of traumatized people who accidentally created what seems like the perfect family unit for all three of them, after all, which is something I’ve long desired for myself. Despite this, I find my mind flinching away from thoughts of it after I’ve turned the show off for the night. I’ve struggled to think about it in a critical sense, to grapple with the characters and how I feel about them, to the point where I’ve mentioned I’m watching the show to only one person I talk to regularly and only then because they were the one to recommend it to me.

This same pattern of conscious and unconscious avoidance is true of topics related to family in other media as well. Books I’m reading, video games I’m playing, movies I’m watching, even conversations with people. All things I’ve set aside or worked to avoid because of how uncomfortable I fell when family comes up. There’s no definition of the word that I can make my peace with. Found families, biological families, adoptive families…It all just causes my mind to jerk back like I reached out to grab something off the stove and wound up grabbing something that was sitting on a warm heating coil.

This whole experience just feels so foreign to me. I’m a very self-reflective and introspective person. I’m not typically one to flinch away from difficult topics or uncomfortable modes of thought. I frequently push myself to dwell on things I find painful or upsetting as a form of self-punishment (less these days, thankfully) or because I’m trying to work through them to the point where they’re not difficult to handle anymore (which is what I had to do to get this post written), so flinching away from something against my will, even when I’m actively trying to focus on it, is a strange and nerve-wracking experience.

To be clear, these topics aren’t painful for me for me to think about. I just expect my experience to be painful, so much so that I flinch away from the topic before I can ever tell if the metaphorical burner is still warm, let alone hot enough to injure me. None of this writing or reflection was painful (though reading through yesterday’s horrible draft definitely was), just difficult because trying to get my brain to focus on this is like trying to force yourself to touch an orange heating coil on a stove when you know the burner is only orange because it got painted that color at one point. It’s not hot and it doesn’t even really look like a heating coil would. It just sorta does and that’s enough to make you reflexively avoid it.

It’s just so frustrating to feel an emotional reaction to this concept that is the opposite of what I want to feel. I want little more than to have some type of a family connection with people I care about. I want to feel the trust and closeness that I lacked for most of my life, but I’ve just felt so very distant from most people I know these days. I want to have a group of people I can depend on, that I feel capable of calling on when I am in need of support or assistance. I want to have any kind of family and it is upsetting to have to fight down a feeling of reactive revulsion every time the word comes up without qualification. I want to be able to enjoy seeing families without feeling the familiar bitter bile rise up within me. I want to be able to read or watch or hear a story about family without thinking to myself about all the qualifiers I would need to feel something similar.

That’s the only way I’ve been able to think about family stuff for a while now. With heavy qualification. There’s always a silent prefix in my head whenever I say the word, or any related words, these days. I’ve struggled to define what the word “family” means to me over the years and, as my life has unfolded, it has gone from being a single, concrete idea (such as “biological family” or “friend family”) to being a category that needs a qualifier to be useful to me. Things like biological or emotional or social or adoptive are the ones I use the most, alone or in combination, and I’ve been using them for years now.

For instance, all of my younger siblings count as biological family, but only one of them (my sister) is also emotional and social family. One of them is social family as well as biological, but the nature of our relationship over the years has meant that our emotional connection is complex enough that I’m not comfortable claiming that degree of closeness. Two of my local friends, who have warmly brought me into their homes and lives during holidays and in general are emotional, social, and adoptive family. A distant (geographically) friend and his wife, and his wife’s biological family are all social and adoptive family, even if we’ve been distant for several years (due to the pandemic and some emotional issues between this distant friend and I) after they took me in when I showed up, in 2019, to be his Best Man (back before I was out). I have a friend group with whom I’ve vacationed that used to be part of a D&D group I led, all of whom are social family, though one of them is also emotional family.

All of these are people I care deeply about, that I would extend the benefits of “family” to without a moment’s hesitation. However, the emotional complexity of my life, of the shifting ways I feel about my biological family and the way we use one word to encompass so many different things, means that I need these little personal appendices to keep track of which is which. I mean, I absolutely wouldn’t drive multiple hours just to be there for my parents or my elder brother. I’d just ignore them. I’d also probably just try to remotely support the rest of my biological family (immediate to distant) with the exception of my sister and one of my younger siblings.

There’s only one person in my life who gets the appellation of “family” without qualification, though there are two more who would also get it if it weren’t for some extenuating circumstances. One of them is married to the guy who gets the unqualified “family” label, so she gets a tiny little “in-law” note tacked on. The other is my sister, who gets the whole set of qualifiers I outlined above because she’s the only biological family (what my society considers the “default” for the word) who gets it and I need the qualifiers just to, like, keep my distance from the societally defined version of the word. Not that I’ve got a better definition of the word. I just know that it’s the right one to use with these three people.

All of this is something I’ve been thinking about pretty much non-stop since I started doing family therapy with my parents back in November of 2022. With very little success or progress, I’ll admit, since my subconscious is one slippery asshole when it wants to be and I’m way too good at not thinking about things. Still, it has recently come to a head. Between the family motifs in Demon Slayer, this one book I’m reading that I’m gonna review once I’ve finished, the entire premise of Spy x Family, and the Found Family undertones and musical theming of Cassette Beasts, it has been inescapable for weeks now. Not to mention the inverse of all this, where I’ve been feeling cut off and distant from a lot of my various “family” folks. Sure, it’s just a natural lull in my communication with most of them, but it is difficult to not feel anxious and worried about that after the ghosting that’s happened this year.

I don’t know how I’m going to resolve this, but at least I’ve been able to work through it enough to start actively reflecting on it. I’m not sure how I’m going to feel once I’ve chewed through it all, but I am definitely relieved that I can finally start working on it without it slipping out of my grasp every few seconds. I’ve already figured out what my next reflective post will be, in regards to family, which is usually a good sign. If I can write about in a way that feels orderly, satisfying, and personally meaningful, that usually means I’ve gotten it to the point where I can passively work on it rather than it fleeing to a dark, unexplored corner of my mind every time I lose my grip. At this point, I’ll take what I can get. Which, you know, is also a pretty accurate summary of how I feel about “family” as well.