Growth, Change, and The Illusion Of Both

It has been a bit over a month since I first wrote about it, but I haven’t stopped thinking about the Ship-Of-Theseus-Of-The-Self in regards to myself, my biological family, and my experiences with them. It’s not really an active, all-consuming thing, but the entire train of thought hasn’t been far from my mind in a while. Historically, summers have always been rough for me, especially in regards to family issues, due to a string of birthdays and how often the worst events of my childhood happened during the summer, so it’s not surprising that I can’t really get these thoughts that far from the surface of my mind. I’ve also been encountering a bit of family issues in media recently, what with watching Fruits Basket and finishing Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker expansion, so that certainly hasn’t helped keep it off my mind. It was actually the stuff from Final Fantasy 14 that prompted the latest branch of this thought tree. In Endwalker, there’s a difficult family situation that is resolved by the end of the expansion and, as I played through the post-expansion patch content, the thought occurred to me that the family member causing problems in the expansion “lived long enough to grow into a better person.” Which got me thinking about my grandfather, who probably did the same thing, and my parents, who might never. It’s a grim thought, that, and one that filled me with a great deal more grief than I expected it to when it popped into my head, but I genuinely have no idea if my parents will accomplish that particular feat or not.

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Familial Separation Around The Holidays

This is my fifth holiday season since I separated myself from my biological family. It is also the first one where it has started to feel like my two siblings and I have started to build some kind of tradition around our celebrations. Things haven’t changed much, between the family holidays of years gone with our larger biological family and how we celebrate them these days: we gather at someone’s residence, bring food to share, cook a bunch of food for the event, and then eventually separate. There’s usually more stuff in there that we’re still kind of working out, though. We try to gather for longer periods of time, spending at least one night wherever we’re celebrating, so we can spend time with each other outside of the harried cooking, eating, and then cleaning of the larger holiday meal. We also try to find other little things we enjoy to include, like watching movies or TV shows (which is our primary form of social contact for most of the year: gathering on discord to watch a movie or some episodes of a TV show), or bring forward other traditions from our mutual past that we want to be able to still enjoy, like taking the time to build Lego sets on Thanksgiving morning or eating sugary cereals on Christmas morning. We’re still very much figuring out those kinds of particulars, but we’ve hit the point where we’ve at least settled into a couple options at most and are, as far as I can tell, just waiting to see what sticks.

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