One for the long haul

“Family can never mean friendship because friendship is a choice and family isn’t.” a friend of mine recently declared.

And it makes sense to me,having blamed my family for my very existence for a long,long time.My obsession with my family’s dire predilection was so much that I din’t realize that my life could revolve around anything otherwise.Not until a friend pointed out to me that my family being screwed up did necessarily not equal to my life suffering the same consequence,too.I will not lie,it’s not easy.It’s bloody difficult to cope up with dysfunction,I think I still get by with defence mechanisms,and the bottled emotion bottlenecks itself out in rather inappropriate moments.A  host of disorders making you their home.Call me narcissistic,but I like to imagine scenes of my future life being summed up,narrated to a group of people sitting around a table.
Don't know about you,but my family's funny predilection makes it  this way.Apply a base coat of trust issues,gently dab with mild commitment phobia-Ah,does the trick,viola!

And yet,and who knows,maybe because..I have all these freeze frames in my head,of expectations I don't expect.Of hurt I din't know I could feel or was supposed to be feeling.
A penthouse of pent up love,never revealed,waiting to be tapped.

And even today, when I’m angry, agonized, embarrassed, annoyed beyond consolation,it’s my family I first turn to blame.Simply because they’ll take the blame targeted  at them ,partly because they deserve it .I might sound childish and patronizing at the same time,but  even if you chose to ignore your past, you’re only suppressing the pain further,it will find a way out when you’re not paying close attention-acceptance is never as easy as they say.

I might come off as sounding desperate or deranged,but the truth is,I have all these silly things messing up my already neurotic brain when my family decides to go shopping together.Haha.Shopping..
Leo Tolstoy began the book Anna Karenina with the lines “All happy families  are the same,but all unhappy  families are unhappy in their own way.” At first,it seemed absurd,but think about it..how many unhappy families sit around a campfire and talk about their unhappiness? How many  even talk,persay?

I don’t know what’s harder,trying to understand the people you love or giving up on them completely.Whoever  concluded love can exist temporally ,unconditionally has never endured or witnessed a bad marriage,a broken home,a depressed parent,or death .Why even strive for a love that involves no struggle,no fight,no resistance? Maybe they were not even human.To know pain,is to be human. ”That’s the thing about pain,it demands to be felt",as the overused quote from Tfios goes.

Why do I complain then? Because I expect,it’s as human as feeling pain. Time is a test to every relationship,and what if it’s all actually getting better? What if it’s getting much worse?

The most intense electricity manifests itself into a resistance,maybe the same goes for families,maybe the  love itself resists its flow because of intensity.

You know how you listen to a new song and it sounds like nothing you've ever before? Like rainbows in your ears,and then with time,it grows familiar and you still love it,maybe even more?
But never the same way?
That's how I feel about family and family life.