Family and Career

Who would have thought looking for a job would bring me closer to my family?

If you haven't read about it already, I have some depression issues. I was on medication for a while, but had to stop because I just don't have the means to access them anymore. I don't really know when I really started being depressed, but I only started treatment for it because it started to affect my school life. Of course, I completely ignored all the emotional stuff going on in the background. Well one of those emotional things had to do with my feelings of isolation. I never really felt like I belonged anywhere or to any group. I was always cobbling one together. I don't think I mentioned this elsewhere, but I'm the youngest of like four other kids. And I'm the youngest by like a little more than a decade (I was my parents' surprise). I always felt left out and different from my siblings. Granted, age probably played a role in it, but for the most part they really don't contact me or talk to me and it makes me feel pretty ignored and abandoned. So I put all my energy into friends with whom I've played out this same scenario. Needless to say, I was pretty unhappy about with my life.

Fast-forward. I graduate and the blues are kicking my ass pretty hard. I don't tell anyone about my graduation until the very last second. Only my mom and two brothers were able to come to the graduation, but I got congrats all around. There was also a little episode that I could mention here about a post-grad party with my friend/fellow grad that pissed me off some, but I'll save that for never. Anyway, I break and freak out for a month, work like crazy for a month, and here I am now trying to figure out my next steps. In one way, things have been much more frantic because I'm regressing back to my old habits, but in other ways things have gotten a bit better. For starters, something is changing about me socially and personally. I'm not sure what. I spend more time with my friends because I have more time to give them, but it feels like people invite me to more things too. I feel like I'm meeting more people who I can have fun with. I'm growing more of a personality. I found out that I like rpgs and trip hop....

In the midst of all this, my sister actually talked to me today. This is the same sister who tried to prematurely out me to my family a few years ago. I'd always been okay with my sexuality so long as it was private. At that time I was just getting the feel a public sexuality. (The sad thing about being anything other than straight is that your sexuality becomes an open forum of judgments, false information, well meaning allies who end up being incredibly hurtful people, etc.) I'd rather not go into it here, but let me just say that at the time that was the single worst type of betrayal I could imagine from anyone. You can understand that I was feeling very much ostracized (a scenario that replayed itself again a few months later). Well she called me today and we had the longest conversation we've had since my freshman year of college. It was all because I needed a job.

I don't know if I forgive her. I can give her second chances all day, but forgiveness is something that's hard for me sometimes. I can hold on to stuff, especially if I don't get the chance to get my side out and make whoever see how they hurt me. But I realize that this is something that doesn't or can't always happen. It does make me view my relationship to my family differently though. My sister only called today and talked to me because for that brief instance we actually had something to talk about. It was one of those rare times when our two worlds intersected. I think I can understand why my other siblings don't exactly talk to me. We don't have anything in common. I'm a pierced, socially liberal, precocious queerosexual who wants to get into entertainment and hang out with hot tattooed girls who want to make out with me. They're... everything but. They're more standard edition types and the ways that they deviate from that don't interest me at all. Talking between us (including my mom) is more of a battle than I ever recognized.

So there's that. It makes me feel a little better to think that the only reasons they didn't talk to me or even try was because they wouldn't have known where to begin. I mean I wish they would have tried more. I would have tried with them and I probably wouldn't feel so much like this, but there's nothing much I can do about the past. I can only try to make the present better.

~R.