Part of what makes growing up in an abusive home hard is the difficulty of assigning blame. On one hand, my parents (especially my dad) deserve enormous blame for the harm they caused, and I have a small, dark part of me that wants to absolutely shred them for it. This part of me sees itself as a great arbiter of justice. It likes to imagine itself privy to all the necessary context and nuance to perform the solemn duty of eviscerating two failed souls, which it would do in the greatest blog post ever written, with all the flair and grace and subtlety the task demands.
This part of me is dead wrong, and I constantly fight to kill it. Justice is not about evisceration. Justice is compassion, forgiveness, mercy. Justice is stepping back to look at the vast gulf between myself and my parents -- the generational gap, the cultural programming, the historical inequality -- and realizing just how little choice they had. The suffering contained in each of their childhoods would bury mine in a landslide, with a little dirt left over for the laundry. I have enormous admiration for both of their stories, and their quartet of well-adjusted children speaks volumes about the strength of their characters.
But this landslide leaves me at an impasse. Experiencing harm does not justify inflicting it on others. And while I want, desperately, to forgive them for all they've done, I can never bring myself to do it. Even imagining myself doing it dredges up a profound sense of disgust from that same dark part of me I'm constantly trying to kill. I know I should do this thing, but I can't. The result is a confused, deeply ungratifying, festering bitterness.
This situation is made even more frustrating (in the same way getting annoyed by a totally irrelevant thing that really shouldn't bother you makes the situation even more frustrating) when considered in context. I live, by any metric, a fantastic life. Just yesterday, I was reflecting on how I spent every minute of the day doing things drenched to the point of dripping with meaning, every one of which I loved and wouldn't have traded for anything else. These kinds of days are not at all rare for me, and I am painfully aware of just how few people share such privilege.
So here I am, living a phenomenal life. The abuses of my past wither in the light of my present joys. I've won. I've tangibly and obviously transcended every ugly word and angry beating my parents inflicted on me. And yet they fester nonetheless. My default state of being is so good that it's jarring whenever the bitterness creeps in. For the most part, I succeed in quashing it, but I never know when it'll next come calling.
Here's another unfortunate thing that occasionally creeps in unless I resist: Sometimes I feel like I like my friends too much. See, my only family here is my mom and dad. I don't talk to them much. I don't talk to my siblings much, either. As relationships go, my friends are all I really have. And that's a scary thing.*
*One of my worst fears: dying suddenly one day, and my friends finding out only long, long after I'm gone.
Friendships function best when everyone feels equal. I usually feel equal to my friends, but a noticeable exception occurs whenever I hear stories about their wonderful families and strong support systems. It produces a soup of mild jealousy, awkwardness, and inability to relate.
It's just a soup because the main course is what's actually important. See, I actually can't get enough of these stories. I can't get enough of any story where my friends succeed and flourish. They are my favorite stories in the world, in part because they're true. The main course is delicious, but I still have to have sip that soup.
All of this makes me feel silly. There is no shame in loving your friends too much. If anything, I would prefer to love them more. And they really are better then family, because on closer inspection, the human devotion to family is a strange, evolutionary house of cards. Family relationships are totally arbitrary. Whether you get really unlucky and have horrible family members, or get lucky and have the best family in the world, you didn't do anything to deserve either. Why should I care about random people in my life I had no say in? Contrast this with the incredibly empowering ability to choose your friends, and be chosen by them -- not just once, but continuously, in ways that grow and deepen. The relentless agency inherent to friendships makes them so much more fulfilling.
Yet the beauty of family is incredible. When my family traveled back to China after a full ten years of absence, I still remember the vivid expressions of my uncles and aunts and cousins jumping up and down in the airport, waving their hands up, crying from eager anticipation. They'd never even seen some of us before. There were hundreds of people I was connected to by blood who invited us in for tea without a second thought, a community I didn't even know I was a part of even while I was apart from them. It was a sort of unconditional love everyone should have access to.
I often tell people that trip was when I first started to understand what "family" could really mean. I'm still trying to untangle the full meaning.
There's this oft-misinterpreted Bible quote: "Blood is thicker than water". A lot of people think it means family (i.e. blood) relationships should supersede all other relationships; i.e. can't be washed away by water. But the full quote actually has the opposite meaning: "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb." The promises and bonds -- the blood covenants -- we form with our friends can often supersede our family, water-of-the-womb relations.
I like both readings of the quote. Both can be true. Both family and friendships are incredibly powerful and meaningful for different reasons. And I've had more access to one than the other, and I feel simultaneously blessed and cursed by that.
This post was brutally hard to write. For the most part, I don't like telling people about this stuff. I don't like seeing the naked pity writ large on their expressions, nor do I like hearing the hushed, meaningless condolences that quickly follow. I don't see myself as a hero or a victim, so I don't want other people to see me as a hero or a victim, either. I don't want to be praised, and I definitely don't want to be pitied. I want to be judged on who I am now, not what happened to me a long time ago. But after you read something like this, your opinion of its author changes. It's inevitable. I wouldn't write it if it weren't.
So how do I want your opinion to change? I'm going to answer that question in two words: It's complicated.
That answer might initially seem like a cop-out, because you can use it as a valid answer to almost any question while also not actually answering the question. But it's not a cop-out, because I don't mean the answer is complicated. I mean what I wanted to communicate in this post is just how very complicated we all are, how complicated the people who've wronged us are, how complicated the people we love most are. We are, all of us, roiling landslides of happiness and suffering, ceaselessly picking up dirt and leaving other dirt behind as we cascade down the mountain of of time. We only collide with each other in the most ephemeral ways. Let's make the most of them.
