My family

My bad day progressed into a bad week. I felt uninspired to write, go out and even talk to people. On my way to therapy this week I had a moment of clarity, my lack of motivation was not PMT, it’s because I am stuck with my emotions.

My therapy has been focussed on my family and this is the hardest subject for me to address. Too much love in a family can cause as much damage as neglect, so how do you criticise and admit to having negative thoughts about your family if you grew up comfortably in the middle of the extremes, in a loving, healthy, free environment. My parents brought me up living by the values that make me the person I am and when looking back at my childhood I am lucky enough to say it was very happy. What the hell have I got to complain about?

I now know if I can not be honest with myself and the other two SLAGS who read this (see ‘A Bad Day’ if you think I am being insulting!) then who can I be honest with?

My parents are traditional on paper, my sister is the same. She lives the ‘perfect’ life; she has the husband, the family, the house, the job and at school I was overshadowed by her intelligence and drive for success. This resulted in me slowly building boundaries around me. The reality was she felt shadowed by my lust for life, my spontaneity and to this day has expressed jealousy of my choices and freedom; so why did I put the boundaries up? Somewhere in the subconscious I saw myself as imperfect because I was gay, this was self imposed and had ‘almost’ no correlation with the reality of how my family treated me.

Now, I realise I am not betraying them by accepting that my childhood was not perfect and my parents should not have been on the pedestal I put them on. They are not perfect and at times their opinions and actions have caused me to lose a part of my own identify in later life, and that’s ok, it is not their fault because they are only human. I understand this clarity is a little naive but until I wrote about it I knew I'd stay stuck!

We have layers of our personality that are ours and some we have absorbed from our parents and siblings. When peeling back and acknowledging the layers we can choose which to discard and which to take forward into adult life to form our own true identify... and then screw up our own children!