Sense of Then

I’ve started asking people how they get along with their family. The answers are almost always some version of we’ve had rough patches, but we worked through it together, or this is just how we are; we don’t know any difference. Sometimes someone isn’t close to one parent, or one sibling — but there’s another parent, another sibling, a grandparent who has their back.

I don’t have this.

I was decided to be the difficult one, likely because my personality was different. And then that was that.

I think what I’ve learned — from other people, and from how long I’ve lived this life — is that my personality is more like my dad’s. I know it’s different from my mother’s. It is different from my stepdad’s, who appeared in my life shortly before I turned 13, and it is different than my sister’s, who I’ve known all my life and whose personality aligns with my mother’s. The difference wasn’t noticeable while my dad was alive. But it’s cost me, over time, trying to fit in with family members who seem to exclude me for their own ease, or to avoid conflict, or maybe they just forget I exist. That has caused me real distress over the years — wondering what’s wrong with me.

My mother has told me a few times that I am nothing like my dad. Maybe that’s protective of her memories of him. But it made me feel even more different. More cast aside. Less like I ever fit originally and more questioning of my memories. I know, logically, that I’m not the problem in every situation, but being labeled as the problem for decades takes a toll.

It comes up when I think about my writing, and about truth-telling. There’s an emptiness in being ignored by one’s family. It’s not that the writing or the truth-telling causes the ignoring — I’ve been ignored and excluded for most of my adulthood regardless of what I say or do. But the feelings are harder to set aside now, as I’ve been working on naming what I feel and feeling it all the way through, instead of numbing it, or coping around it, or intellectualizing it.

It’s lonely to be ignored. But it’s not as lonely as being treated that way in person.