I meant to write a letter to my aunt (the one who I’ve decided to stay in contact with because she’s been pretty good about everything). I even have most of it written! It’s five pages long, so far. Single-spaced. Which means it’ll get quite a bit longer whenever I edit it. Whenever that happens. I didn’t really choose to stop writing so much as… well, struggle to write it at all. It’s exhausting to talk about family stuff at the best of times and these are not the best of times. So I sporadically worked at it for a while, went on vacation, got sick, and now it has been a month and a half, at least, and I’m finally turning my mind back to it (assuming, of course, that my brain fog continues to diminish). I wish I’d been able to focus on it more. I wish I’d been able to spend more time on it. I wish a lot of things, to be honest, and none of them are going to happen. All I can do is carry on from where I’m at and hope that I can get it written by the time you’re reading this [which I’ve managed] so I’ve got time to edit and then print it before I leave my workplace for two and a half weeks. That’s the only place I’ve got access to a printer, you see, and there’s no way I’m writing all of this by hand. I lack the strength-of-writing-hand for that in any kind of quick or even legible manner. So I’m on a bit more of a deadline unless I want to let this time grow into two and a half months. I didn’t even want it to grow into three weeks back when I was still working on it, and yet it did. You would think that, given how much writing I do, something like this would be easier, right?

Turns out it is difficult to focus on proper ccomposition when you’re constantly fighting the anxiety inherent in breaking down boundaries you’ve held firm for years. I’m choosing to trust my aunt with information no one but my two siblings have and I’m incredibly nervous about that. I don’t want to put my aunt in a position of needing to keep things from the rest of her family, but I do also want to show that I’m open and receptive to further communication. I also want to be able to write to her without needing to check my P.O. box, which is a thing I’ve got so none of my extended family have my address. It’s a bit paranoid, I’ll admit, but I’ve often thought myself paranoid and wound up being entirely correct to do what I did more times than I can count, so I’m content to continue spending the money. That does not help the fact that it would be a huge breach of my own boundaries to tell my aunt where I live so she can mail me directly as it would give her the ability to spread that information to the rest of the family. I trust her not to do it, given the contents of her letter back to me, but anxieties aren’t rational and reasoning with this one has met with incredibly little success.

It’s also difficult to contact a member of your family when you’ve spent years redefining what “family” means to you since this requires grappling with the conflicting definitons that you’ve rejected and adopted. I can aboslutely choose members of my biological family to be a part of my current concept of family, but it does not change the fact that they’re still connected to the members of my biological family I’d prefer to avoid or never speak to again. It requires thinking about words like “aunt” and “uncle” and “cousin” in ways I’ve avoided for years now, as I’ve worked to process all my biological-family-oriented feelings so that I can decide how to handle them all, and it’s difficult to dredge all of that up while I’m still dealing with the burnout, exhaustion, and mental fatigue that’s been building up in my life for the last few years. It’s just so much and it remains unfortunately true that it’s so much easier to not do anything with any of this. It is so easy to just ignore it all, procrastinate, and make excuses about why I wound up staying silent. It’s so easy to find reasons to be mad or upset about my family that would stand up to any level of scrutiny and it is so much work to set that all aside so I can salvage at least something out of the wreckage of my childhood and family connections.

All that, plus actually needing to dig through all my trauma to pull out the relevant bits and reduce down to something that fits in a letter really takes it out of you. Ideally, I could have had this talk in person, but we live too far apart for that to be something that just happened and it would raise too many questions if I tried to meet my aunt around the family holiday celebration. Plus, this way I’m at least in control of how much gets revealed, how it gets shared, and whether or not I need to take a break before continuing. In person, I’d feel very pressured to get it out in a single conversation and that’s asking a lot of anyone. Frankly, it’s more than I can ask myself, what with how worn out I already am. So I will continue, I suppose, carefully picking through the miserable memories of my past for the bits that feel important to convey to a woman I’ve know my whole life who didn’t do anything to help me during the traumatic periods of my childhood but also didn’t do anything to add to them ever. And, you know, was often too far away to even attempt to do anything at all. Just normal things. Totally normal things that don’t have me wondering what it would be like to have had any other kind of life that was less miserable than my own. Sure would be nice to be able to experience what that was like, or even just communicate the fullness of that horror without needing an entire novel of text. Sure would be nice…