kyl3 (the band)

I have felt quite tired the last few days. I am feeling like I am in a funk and can’t seem to find my way out. I think it has to do with the fact that I have seen my extended family a lot lately. I always feel as if I cease to exist around my family. I am so different from them. They don’t appreciate this difference. Normally if I choose to be bold and speak up it is met with them making fun of me and or taking offense to what I just stated I believed or think. Due to this fact I usually just remain silent and try to appear like a good daughter. This starts to erode me on the inside. If I have seen my family to often without being able to build up my insides then it all just keeps eroding until I feel empty and hollow and I just feel like giving up and just being like them. I have to keep reminding myself that I have tried and tried to be like them and it was never a good outcome on those rare occasions. It did not make them like me nor did it make me feel any better. I am not saying that my family does not love me, they love me. It’s just that they don’t like me. I love them a lot, but I also don’t think I like them. We are just too different.

I know I have written about my family probably too much lately but that is who I have been around. Lately I feel claustrophobic and as if I may suffocate. Between trying to make them all happy and trying to carve out my authentic path there is just no way to win. Normally what I feel happens is that I do something to appease them which makes me feel bullied and manipulated and then it backfires because I did not do exactly what they wanted. I tried to come up with a compromise between what we both want. They just see it as me being an asshole because I did not do it their way. My opinion is that if I was always going to do it their way then what is the purpose of me existing. I wish I could find a way to stand up for myself and express myself without hurt the feelings of my family.

Since Rog3r’s Mom moved we have not got a chance to visit her. I was thinking today that flying out to see her for Thanksgiving would be fun. But I have decided to go over the pros and cons below.

Rationally it seems like an easy choice; we live near my family and see them very frequently and thus since it will have been 10 months without seeing Rog3r’s family it makes a lot of sense to make the trip out there.  It is also something I would like to do.  Rog3r and I would have a lot of fun making the trip and I know his mom would enjoy having us there for a few days. 

What I will not enjoy is how my family, especially my Mom will interpret this as rejection and will assume I am just being an asshole. 

Your parents interpretations of your actions should not be a factor in what you do when you are an adult and living on your own and paying your own way, but we all know how parents are in reality.  Rog3r’s Mom recently called us at midnight and left a voicemail half joking saying we had abandoned her by not answering.  She had failed to configure the time difference while it was early to her around 9pm it was late to us and we were asleep.  I mean seriously what is with parents.  They spend our whole childhood working until 7pm and being too tired to play with us except when they get their whole 2 weeks off for vacation (if they are lucky) so we grow up and do our own thing and then they get mad at us and feel abondoned and rejected when we do our own thing.  Baby Boomers really are the “me” generation and us “latch key kids” have grown up into our independence and don’t remember Joan Cleaver in Leave it to Beaver so we think this is how its supposed to be until our parents leave voicemails and get mad at us for abandoning them.  We are just the baffeled independent adults that can hear the entire conversatin before it starts and know we won’t be heard or understood because we are just big assholes. 

So I maybe should have put more “me” s where I put the “we” s in the above paragraph but I know I am not at all alone in this feeling.

So my brother was in town for the weekend which brought its usual mess of shenanigans, that I will post about later, but after he returned to his home on Sunday night he sent me the email below in italics.

kyle,
  not sure where you are with thinking about buying a place.  but, marissa is going to vienna for two years and is selling her condo.  sounded like the price wasn’t too bad.  i think 125,000.  not sure if that is good for around here though.  the link is below.  if you guys are interested let me know and i can talk to marissa.

I will admit, I had a rather gut wrenching reaction to this email.  Some of it was an overreaction but as I thought about it a little more I decided that it really wasn’t.  First I must preface that my family is very different from me as far as interests go.  So I understand that they have no frame of reference when it comes to the things that I am really interested in.  Due to this acknowledgement I choose to forgive the fact that they don’t listen to me talk about what I am into and I let it go…well mostly anyway.  I even let it go when they come right out and say that they want me to stop talking about my stuff.  Normally they usually just start talking about what they want to talk about and interrupt me instead of that one time that they were quite brash.  I let it go.  I realize that if they are not interested then they are just not interested.  I can’t make them care about what I am interested in.

What does bother me is that they expect me to be into what they are into and partake in it with them.  And if I don’t, then they assume that I am just being a jerk.  I am sorry I don’t think sitting in front of the TV and watching a football game should count as family time.  I think that if you are serious about spending time together then an activity that everyone likes should be chosen.  But I am the only one who appears to not like watching TV.  I mean, I only watch TV when I am bored and lonely and it usually just makes me feel more bored and lonelier. 

I should stop before this becomes a long tangent.  Basically my interests differ from my families and they don’t acknowledge it.  Back to the email from my brother that really turned my stomach.  It turned my stomach because I thought he listened when I speak but apparently he does not.  I distinctly remember have a few conversations recently with him regarding my future plans.  These plans happen to be in the exact opposite of buying a condo and staying in my current geographical location.

My first impulse was to bury my hurt and frustration deep and not reply to the email and just move on.  Clearly he does not listen nor care so why bring it up and expose my hurt even more.  That rational has not got me very far with relationships within my family.  I don’t get it.  I let them win, I give what they want yet still they are never happy with me.  I have finally decided that I should just do the opposite of my original instinct when it comes to my family.  At least this way if they continue to be not happy with me and consider me an asshole at least I will have expressed myself and stood up for myself.  So this is what I did I sent the following email reply in italic below. 

What? Are you serious with this? Do you even know me?

Last Friday night my husband and I were telling a friend about a geographical location that we will be going to some time soon.  This friend proceeded to speak very negatively about this geographical location.  He went on and on about how bad it was.  Then with his last sentence he said something like, “well I have never been there.”  I did not even have to ask that obvious question he just ended the rant with it as if it were a punctuation point. 

The next time someone takes aim at a geographical location that I am looking forward to visiting I will just deliver a swift upper cut to to their jaw.  This will stop them from talking out of their ass about something that they usually know nothing about.  Thus I will aleviate myself from listening to their five minute rant and I will also save myself the agrivation of trying to make sense of their maddness.

Ok, you are right.  Violence is not the answer. Next time I will just get up and walk away.