It probably seems weird to start out a year this way, but I’ve been thinking about grief a lot lately. I lost a grandmother last year and its almost exactly five years since I said my final goodbye to my grandfather a few weeks before he passed away. However, since I’ve had time to mourn and process the loss of my grandfather and had already begun to mourn my grandmother before she passed (since I have been estranged from the family for almost five years and hadn’t seen her since my grandfather’s funeral), there’s all sorts of grief mixed up in there as well. For instance, I grieve the way things are with my biological family. I don’t regret the choice I made (nor do I doubt that I made the correct decision), but I grieve both that I had to make this decision at all and that things might have been different if my family had, even once, done the work they needed to do to show my they could change. On a less dire note, it has been just over ten years since I moved to my current city, a place I expected to be for five years at maximum before I finished paying off my student loans and left to go pursue a post-graduate degree in some form of writing or English literature. I am still paying off those loans and have given up on pursuing a higher education because there’s likely no financially viable path forward for me down that route. I also thought I’d be in a committed relationship of some kind by now, living in a house, and surrounded by my adopted family made of friends and the biological relatives I’ve chosen to carry forward into my future. There are a lot of things I thought would someday be and that now might never come to pass, and I grieve those too.
Continue readingFamily
The Difference Between Mourning And Closure
Content warning for discussions of death, grief, and childhood trauma.
I wrote about some family-related stress a couple weeks back. I spent my therapy appointment between then and now working through my feelings on the matter and what I’d do in the future, which turns out to have been particularly prescient of me (and seems even more so when I add that my therapist was ready to cancel our usual every-other-Monday appointment for the week I wrote this since it was a federal holiday and I instead suggested we reschedule for a few days later that week, which turned out to be the day after I wrote this). My grandmother began to fade earlier this week and passed away today. I’m, of course, still processing this. All of the emotional preparation and complex feelings of relief and grief intermingled don’t make this any easier. Even my complex feelings about my family and how I have processed my feelings for them don’t really help since, ultimately, this moment is when it all goes from being abstract and self-enforced to being incredibly concrete and real. No matter how else I feel about her, my grandmother was a major part of my life for my entire childhood. She is in many of my oldest memories, even if they’ve taken on a more bitter than bittersweet cast as I’ve come to better appreciate the horrors of my childhood and the way my grandmother served as a source and focal point for much of the generational trauma in that side of my family.
Continue readingA Faint Connection In The Isolating Distance That Is My Family
Ever since I separated myself from most of my biological family, I’ve only gotten news from two of my siblings. Which isn’t that different from before, since most of my family doesn’t really share news so much as need to have news dragged out of them. All they really share without extensive prompting is silence or gossip. I got all the silence I wanted by not talking to them and I have historically had zero interest in family gossip, so I never really got news about the extended family outside of holidays or the rare time something was important enough that my mother felt like she had to call people to tell them. Now, though, my siblings are my only sources and they can be unreliable about the family as a whole because one of them doesn’t really talk to the family either and the other just forgets to share stuff until I ask (which I almost never do as a rule) or until something major is happening. All of which is to say is that I learned that my grandmother had a health scare recently (that looked like it could be fatal when I got the initial news but turned out to be decidedly not even potentially fatal by the end of the following day) and that one of my aunts was homeless and in the process of falling out with most of the rest of the family for reasons that, as far as I’ve gathered, are entirely of her own making.
Continue readingSometimes, There’s A Little Too Much “Cult” in Midwestern “Culture”
There is a strange religiosity applied to the concept of family in US culture. I originally started writing “Midwestern US culture,” but most of the examples that come to mind aren’t confined to the Midwest. There’s an entire line of movies (The Fast and The Furious) that is all about the primacy of the family unit, though they tend to define family a bit more broadly than most. There’s entire cultural background covering the importance of The Family as it relates to organized crime. One of the most popular types of stories these days is about found family or the lengths to which one might go to return to family. Family, regardless of how it is defined, is seen as something worth everything and valuable beyond measure. What makes this somewhat more sinister and unpleasant, though, is the suggestion that anyone lacking family is a bad person. Villains are frequently loners. The philosophy of those we’re supposed to dislike is often depicted as favoring isolation and a lack of attachments. Hell, all you have to do is look at advertising and media around the parent-oriented holidays (Mother’s Day and Father’s Day) to see the subtle suggestion that choosing to ignore your biological parents, or otherwise hold the way they treated you against them, is a moral failing. It’s pervasive.
Continue readingI Spy, With My Little Eye, Something Weighing On My Mind
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.
Continue readingFresh Burnout and Emotional Exhaustion
After an incredibly exhausting start to my year, things are starting to calm down. All of the major events that showed up in the first weeks of this month have passed and I’ve had at least a couple days where very little has happened. Additionally, I went to my most recent session of family therapy, reflected on how it had gone for a few days afterwards, and decided that it would be my last. It was only a single hour every week, but it took up a disproportionate amount of my idle thoughts and most of my active ones as well, so I’m looking forward to thinking about things I enjoy again, such as my various writing projects, fun video games, and the other aspects of my life that I want to work on to improve myself rather than attempting to lead my parents toward growth. Hopefully I will have a chance to rest and recover from everything that’s been going on so that I can once again enjoy myself rather than continue the staving off of misery that I’ve been doing lately. And while I have made little progress on any of my major worries for the rest of 2023, I’ve done what I can for now.
Continue readingIntentionally Past Tense
Content Warning: This poem references loss of parents, grief, mourning, and also non-specific references to childhood trauma.
I speak about my parents in the past tense.
It is an old habit,
Hard-won as the only measure
I could take to build the distance
I needed to feel alright,
But this years-long practice
Of linguistic intentionality
Has served me well
In more ways than this.
God of War: Ragnarok – Not An End, But The Beginning of Something New
Content warning: this post will touch on themes of trauma in general, alcoholism, abusive parents, loss, and grief.
Spoiler warning: everything after the first paragraph is going to have spoilers for God of War: Ragnarok’s main plot thread and conclusion, including major twists along the way and the conclusions to character arcs.
Continue readingTrauma, Healing, And Family Therapy
Content Warning for discussions of trauma (non-specific), family therapy, and personal therapy.
Continue readingHoliday Preparations
I just spent most of the last three days cleaning my apartment. Got everything sorted out, finally, before I sat down to write this post following my post-cleaning shower (I tend to break out pretty bad if I don’t shower right away after doing all the vacuuming and similar dust-disturbing chores). My apartment is clean, tomorrow is a holiday, and I have zero time-sensitive obligations. I’m on my own for Thanksgiving this year, but that’s fine. I’ve had practice the past few and this means I can eat whenever I want, don’t have to get out of my pajamas, and can mix up the mashed potatoes with a bunch of little extras just the way I liked it. It also means I’m going to have a boatload of turkey since I bought a turkey breast (bone-in) and then a frozen boneless turkey breast as a backup in case I mess up the bone-in one. I usually do ham because it’s easier and doesn’t require the delicate finagling that a whole turkey demands, but I figured I’d just do a more simple version of turkey this year.
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