I’ve spent the past 27 years telling myself that my family were the odd ones. Every relationship (romantic, platonic, or familial) was laced with dysfunction and I assumed my family was one of the few that lived this way. I was certain that lacking emotional stability, vulnerability, accountability, self-awareness, empathy, communication skills, etc was abnormal. While I still believe my family has a level of dysfunction a bit more absurd than average, it pains me to realize that rejecting this dysfunction and wanting to heal from it at a young age is what’s abnormal.
As I’ve grown and continuously put in effort to build healthier relationships, I’ve attracted people much kinder than my family. I assumed the average person’s kindness meant that they had the ability to pursue a healthier life in the way my family did not. In reality, my family might be blatantly meaner and angrier than most, but their decision to live unhappily is painfully ordinary.
Since, I’m able to understand the world more clearly now, I do think I’m a tad strange for constantly pursuing growth and healing in a system designed to keep us from doing exactly that. I can really only attribute it to being so sensitive that it’s often felt like my greatest weakness in this lifetime. I just don’t have the bandwidth to make choices that are “good enough” even if I’m not happy. But it’s not lost on me that being able to “toughen up” and survive provides a surface level layer of comfort and stability that’s hard to turn down.
I’m disappointed, but I don’t feel hopeless in the way I probably would have if I’d had this realization sooner. More accurately, I feel like I started seeing evidence of this realization since I was 17 but I’m finally accepting it now. In the past decade since then, I’ve mostly attracted emotionally unavailable people in relationships and at the time it made sense to me to believe I simply wasn’t healed enough to attract better. However, this doesn’t really make sense when I’ve always been the vulnerable and communicative one in a relationship even though I definitely haven’t been perfect.
Perhaps, the shame of a hard childhood made blaming myself seem like the best answer to cope with a cycle I felt like I couldn’t escape. In actuality, it was likely just important for me to understand the struggle of being human from mulitple perspectives so that I could feel more connected to the world. Being able to meet so many different people that appear to be living completely different lives with completely different personalities/beliefs that come from a wide range of backgrounds and watch them somehow have similar insecurities, similar issues in relationships, and persist despite similar levels of dissatifaction with the life they’ve built fostered an understanding of humanity I couldn’t have gained without the experiences of this past decade. I may be the weird one, but I prefer it that way. Being “weird” doesn’t always mean being alone.
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