Family. A complex topic for some and a fairly simple topic for others. Why is that? Well, I think there is a pretty straightforward answer to that...everyone’s family is different. Whether that be the situations that you experience with your family or that your definition of family is different.
For years, I was someone who struggled with figuring out my definition of family. Was I supposed to call every person that I, just so happened, to be blood-related to family, even if we had no relationship or if there was a huge strain in our relationship? Was I allowed to consider friends to be my family? What if I thought of someone as a family but we didn’t have the same definition, how would I handle that?
Because I spent so much time filled with doubt about what family meant to me, I would later lose so much time with who I figured out was actually my family.
I took my family for granted, and because of that, I believe that no matter what you think a family is, never take anyone for granted because they just might be that family you were looking for all along.
A common theme that I tend to see with people who express hesitancy toward letting people in, is forgiveness and trust. Trust me, I would know.
There was a point in my life where I accepted everyone with open arms and considered everyone to be my family. As time went on, more and more of those same people would leave me, constantly lie to me, or worse. I kept forgiving them over and over, just wanting to be able to have that picture-perfect family no matter what. Eventually, it was too much for me, and my trust issues started to skyrocket when it came to the idea of letting people get to know the real me.
I went through this slump for a while and lost a lot of time that I could have been spending with the people I love, whether I considered them family or not. Fortunately, I realized that I was going about life all types of wrong and ultimately decided to live in the moment more.
If people were going to let me down then I would have to deal with it. That is just how life is, and no matter what, no one should try to protect themselves from these experiences by shutting the rest of the world out. You think it will make it all better, but in reality, it’ll do the complete opposite.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I am still in this mentality. I do not regret making this decision at all, what I regret most is thinking that I would be able to thrive successfully in this world with the mindset I had before. As I said earlier, the outcome of isolating myself was very contradictory to what my ideal outcome would have been. Had I continued to disconnect from everyone and everything else, without a doubt, the state of my mental health would be ten times worse than it is now.
But as many have said before, no good deed goes unpunished. Even though I started to let myself be me and let people in again, I still suffer the consequences of shutting them out for so long.
In just these past two years, so many of my family members that I was just starting to get close to had unexpectedly passed. I spend every minute of everyday regretting taking them for granted because I feared that they would do what so many other people I considered “family” had done to me in the past.
It isn’t a good feeling to have. It truly is heartbreaking to be reminded that all that time is gone and there is no getting it back. For me, it has made holidays very hard to handle. I want to be grateful for the people that I am surrounded with now but I can’t help but wish the family members who passed were there with me. You don’t want to ruin your whole day by dwelling on that but sometimes the thought of “I could have done more” overpowers any other thought. If I had just had the courage that I have now, years ago, I would have been able to have tons of wonderful memories with them. But, not everything is able to go the way you wish it would.
It’s a lesson that I had to learn the hard way, but I hope that my story is able to encourage others to let go of the past and just look forward to the future. The future, which I promise has much more happy and auspicious moments that you will be able to look back at with joy.