As the blog so clearly shows, a lot of things I care about have fallen victim to neglect these past weeks. More realistically, over the last month or so. I have been so consumed in personal frustration that I have lost touch with everything and everyone that makes me happy and keeps me sane.
My house has never before been such a disorganized terrible mass of chaos - none of the times I have moved can even approach this level of discord.
I have left many blog friends hanging in the ether of webspace without contact for months. Unbeknownst to them, they are often in my thoughts ... but my fingers never quite manage to communicate those thoughts in their direction.
Phone call after e-mail from family and friends go unanswered. None of them needs to take the neglect personally, but several if not many of them have. It is a growing mess I can't bring myself to clean up.
Graduation and my trip to NYC were a believable excuse for a while, but their effects have been much longer lasting ... and somewhat more detrimental...
In true mid-20s fashion, the dysfunction between my family and me is rampant, if not unbearable at times. During the later part of May, I saw all their worst qualities...
My brother, the epitome of insecurity and weakness, lashing out in anger at the hint of a challenge ... walking around on a pedestal of his own making, yet relying on the fragile world he created to validate the existence of his pedestal.
My father, second only to my brother in weakness of character, just broke my heart. Our communications have grown superficial at best. The belief that follow through or support will come from his direction is gone.
Spending two weeks with my mother almost destroyed any relationship we managed to build over the last 5 years. I saw in her the worst kind of selfishness and self-interest ... a fundamental lack of respect for others and an inability to understand the impact of her actions.
And before people go pointing fingers about being ungrateful for the money spent on my education ... I am thankful that my parents paid for college and helped me in part with graduate school ... but we all know the cliché, "money can't buy you love." Instead, I'd like to ask, where was the attempt to understand what I study, or why I studied it? I am the single, sole departure from medicine. Where is the curiosity about how I developed such a different passion? No one asks how I walked away from my previous passion so easily? Money will never answer those questions for me and could never keep me from asking them.
I suppose I am as lost and frustrated as you're supposed to be in your 20s, but when it comes to "finding myself" I believe I'm well found. I know what I believe in and I know why. I know where I want to go and I have learned many of the painful and necessary lessons from where I've been. I know that there is a world out there larger than myself, one that will keep spinning even if I fall off, that can still be influenced if I put my heart into making it a better place.
But when I am as secure as I about myself as I am, yet still find such little emotional support from my family - the people that are supposed to be your cheerleaders because they love you that much - how am I supposed to have faith that I will find it anywhere else in the world? How am I to believe that our society as a whole isn't made up of hopeless, weak, self-interested characters? Who else will do the right thing even when they must do it alone?
Yay, Chaos!
Hope that made you smile and not completely hate me for all time. :)
And you will find that most of society IS made up of hopeless, weak, self-interested characters. Guess you learned somethin' in that fancy school there, huh? The trick is to surround yourself with those who are not and simply ignore the others. The idea that it's your family, well, I think you've already seen the answer yourself, as unfortunate as that may be.
Posted by: Ogre at June 12, 2006 12:10 PMCat,
I need to call you, and will do so when I recover from my own trip "with family". Here is something to put in your pipe. Relationships with family, and the complications related to those relationships, well in my opinion. They do not change much. I have learned to handle them differently. Sure the relationships wax and wane, but there is simply "something" about family.
Posted by: armywifetoddlermom at June 13, 2006 09:13 AM