Havelock Ellis once said, “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” It seems like the further you go in life the more you are faced with the decision of what to hold on to and what to let go of. It becomes more and more important to consider what you need to keep and what you need to change.
Maybe it’s part of getting older, but lately I’ve been trying to put more effort into getting along well with my family. It can be a lot of work. It’s been my experience that your family knows you in a way no one else will ever know you. In family there is an intimate knowlege born out of spending your most important and difficult years with the same small group of imperfect people. It is not a comfortable intimacy by any means. You love your family yet they are the ones who know exactly how to get to you and how to move across your boundaries. You cannot fool them with your different costumes and personas. They will not buy into your reinvention. It’s almost as if they preserve an original image of you, which you are unable to change. This is frustrating if you’d like very much to change who you are.
Your family can be an anchor, yet it can also be a smothering sea of quicksand. I’ve found this to be this case with relationships in general. What happens when you start to change who you are and the people around you do not welcome the change? What happens if you realize that you no longer want the same things as the people around you? This is a difficult realization. In the end you have to do what you need to do and hold onto the belief that everything else will fall into place. The people who love you will always stick by you, in one way or another.
This is exactly what I’ve found with my family. I’m trying hard basically to overcome the way I was raised, although it’s difficult (particularly when it comes to my obsession with having enough money, since I’m terrified of being homeless again someday.) That makes it tough to talk to my mother, who sincerely believes that she never made a single mistake in raising us. Still, at least she is content to let me live my life and even expresses pride in how far I’ve come.
On the other hand, my sister, who knows how to push buttons I didn’t even know I had, constantly accuses me of, basically, not “keeping it real” in terms of our culture and way of life as a family.
And that hurts, since I am very consciously trying to create a family life for Sarah that reflects both her cultures…which means holding on to the things I believe were positive about our upbringing, and letting go of the rest.
So she hasn’t really bought totally into my latest reinvention of myself any more than she bought into the others. In fact, it always seems like she’s trying to strip away the layers of reinvention I’ve built up and turn me back into the scared little fat girl who cried all the time that she was always so contemptuous of and knew she could bully with impunity.
To make a long story short (too late), I know what you mean.
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