The secret joys of estrangement

Things we keep on the down low; or, the post with all the links.

“They” don’t tell you this when you set out on a no-contact journey; but, being out of contact can be a blast. And why shouldn’t it? We had to get here the hard way. We wanted to repair things with our families, and we toed the line for years. Until we didn’t.

We forged a new path, sometimes getting snagged by the brambles of other people’s opinions, plus our own guilt, grief, and self-flagellation. We picked the nettles of ick off our vestments, continued to climb the mountain of self-awareness, and after much descent, finally found ourselves in the valley of peace.

There are literally hundreds of posts that soothe you through the pain, embarrassment, grief, loneliness, and fear of cutting contact with toxic people. There are even more that will advise you on building bridges with them so you never have to cut them off.

This is not one of them. Obviously!

(Also, be right back, I need a shower after that paragraph.)

These are a few of my favorite things (no cream-colored ponies or crisp apple strudels) about estrangement.

These are things that people don’t tell you, because they engage in respectability politics to strive for legitimacy.

1. You can hold on to your customs and culture, which are larger than your living and immediate ancestors.

   I might have lost Uncle Pasta, but I will always have pasta. In fact, this estrangement has brought me into a deeper dialogue with my cultural heritage on both sides. This has led me into inquiry about immigrants vs. refugees (which ones were my ancestors, anyway?) as well as the ways my ancestors practiced estrangement from their parents and old-county left-behinds, whom they often disparaged. I am unpacking their stories, and using what I know to create a rich future.

2. It’s really peaceful.

   You can celebrate holidays by sitting naked in a kiddie pool in the middle of your living room, eating chicken wings and watching Philosophy Tube, and only your chosen family will stop you. You don’t have to see Aunt Dolce look at you with that face that people make when they smell bad cheese. You don’t have to pretend to like things that you find gross, like brine shrimp. You can travel to all of the “shithole countries” that your dad buys his cheap, poorly-made Christmas presents from. You can spend your entire life without holidays. You can vote your way without some oily goat bleating over your shoulder. You can never read another book by a man for the rest of your life. You can learn archery. You can paint all the trim in your house purple. And you can have ice cream every day for the rest of your days until your body tells you that you are lactose intolerant and just because you’re grabbing joy doesn’t mean you need to blow your bum out farting. And that too, is peace.

3. You can figure out what you actually like and don’t.

   Take that, Pasta Con Sarde! No, I don’t think that bell peppers are going to be a part of this new world order, thanks. And while I feel sorry for those of you who can’t properly enjoy cilantro, I revel in your ability to jettison coriander from your life. Imagine my surprise when I grew up and realized that I am a dog person, I was only afraid of dogs because my father said they don’t belong in the house. Color me relieved when I could play the Grateful Dead in my own home without an older sibling non-consensually grabbing my arms, forcefully waving them in the air and screeching “I’m freeeeeeeeee!” in their most incompetent impersonation of a Deadhead. (That would be you, Melvin and Jacky Jr. Consider yourselves on notice for painfully snapping my first bra when you were grown men and I was thirteen.) The point is, it’s tough to get to know yourself when you are protecting that very self from an onslaught of abuse. Stop that flow of abuse, have that energy for you! Use that energy, and realize, wow, I am a dog person, I don’t like grown men who pick on teen girls, I think I might want to reduce my meat consumption, or meditate, or go on a trip without a bunch of negative, judgmental commentary. Maybe I realize that my co-workers are chodes and I laugh at their jokes out of politeness and not because they’re funny. Maybe I decide I only want to laugh at funny jokes from now on, and that I want to be around people who make me feel happy when I am around them. Or maybe I will join a revolution or three.

4. This gives rise to more self-awareness.

   So maybe, just maybe, if Melvin and Jacky Jr. snapped my bra and made fun of me all the time, and if the same brothers often told me they loved me, maybe their form of love is bullshit? And by that token, also my dad, Uncle Pasta, those chodes at work, and several exes? Perhaps, there’s a pattern that I could shift, by engaging in radical self-love and self-acceptance! Perhaps, that joy that I feel at being myself is a natural inoculation against being around abusive people! Could it be…..that I am delightful? Yes, yes I think so. Perhaps I could even use this newfound skill of discernment to lo-find people to be in my life that actually love, respect and treasure me! Perhaps, I could deserve this joy? Perhaps, I could, I don’t know, cultivate even more joy by having even more tight boundaries, more self-love, which in turn would give me more energy to learn advanced relationship skills, communication, and empathy in order to get in right relationship with those who do show up for me?

5. It gives you more time for chosen family, who start to shine like lighthouses after you have been bobbing in a seat of bullshit.

   Yeah, sometimes I have horrible misunderstandings with Husband based on my knack for choosing the absolute most uncharitable version of anything anyone says to me. I come by it honestly, if I didn’t assume that my male relatives were making fun of me, I ran the risk of believing that they took me seriously, which would lure me into a false sense of thinking they respected me, only to have that dashed whenever they decided it was time to knock me back down into my place. The thing about it is, Husband, with his relatively normal childhood and loving parents, is usually aghast at my interpretation of whatever he said. (For example, he says, oh, the dishwasher is still clean and I hear, “what the fuck is wrong with you for not emptying the clean dishes?” He will say something extremely grounding and helpful, such as, “what the fuck? did you really think that’s what I meant? How could you possibly think I could say something like that?” And even though that sounds fairly unpleasant, working through a misunderstanding like that and coming out the other side, and being able to apply it to the next time the dishwasher comes up, is gold.

   

   Photo by Jonathan Meyer on Unsplash

6. Chosen family are dope. (see above example). They do such edgy, kooky things, like, celebrate your wins, be happy when you find a good partner, listen to your ideas, call you in instead of out, and even treat you like a person. What’s more, they somehow know when it’s time to leave your house at the end of the party without you slapping your knees and saying “welp.” Chosen family have the added benefit of wholeheartedly accepting your sexual orientation and gender identify, supporting your reproductive freedom, and not doctoring up the perfectly fine Caesar salad you’ve offered for the potluck because they want to impress their bougie friends. And if they do something thoughtless, you can gently call them on it without worrying about them saying something like “OH MY GOD I KNEW YOU WOULD SAY THAT,” or “I GUESS IN ORDER TO BE FRIENDS WITH YOU I HAVE TO BE PERRRRRFECT.”

7. You learn resilience. Sure, we might be masters at spinning trauma into truth, avoiding toxic relationships, and repairing our souls, but have you tried actually being in a healthy relationship? Hoo doggy dang, it is a lot of work. Have you tried parenting children without fear, threats, shame, or guilt? Also; lots of work. Work you can properly do because you aren’t spending every available iota of emotional energy suffering the slings and arrows of the unfortunate assholes that had you surrounded. This is the true resilience we need in the world, relational resilience, so we can create the love we didn’t get and spread it through the world, starting with ourselves. We parent from that place, break cycles, and work towards a world where there will be less estrangements, because there will be more respect.

8. It influences what you take on in future relationships.

   And that’s a good thing. The more of us who do that, the more that toxic people will have to sit with the consequences of their actions without a spare bunker of narcissistic supply at their disposal. Yeah, it can seem like a game of whack-a-mole at first: distance yourself from one toxic person, and then like that new Tesla you used to want but changed your mind about because you don’t want to drive an actual clown car, all of a sudden, toxic people are everywhere! In your family! Among your friends! At the gym! On Rotten Tomatoes! Push one away and another pops up! Bap them all and win a giant stuffy of the ‘this is fine’ dog!

   It ends. You really do find your people. It takes time. It goes slowly. Discernment is good. Quality wins over quantity. Never underestimate the quiet odd ducks. (I love me a quiet odd duck. They are often the funniest, kindest, most authentic people in the room.)

9. It helps you set boundaries in current relationships. See also #7. I went through a period of time where I expected boundary-setting with normal human people to be as difficult as it was in my family of origin. “I’m telling you, it’s YOUR TURN to unload the dishwasher, it says right here in binder 3-A of my marriage dossier that I did it last time,” I would infer. Over time, I learned, “hey-could you get to the dishwasher?” did the trick without all that feral stress on my nervous system. Inversely, I can decline an invitation without a power point presentation of why I can’t make it and all of the very important reasons why. I don’t have to go to outrageous lengths to set boundaries with people (say, cutting contact, if you will) because I’m less likely to bring tricky people into my sphere. I am more likely to have well-tended relationships that are worth the uncomfortable conversations.

10. You can do whatever the fuck you want! including #1. But if holding on to the culture of your family isn’t your trip, we can do what our actual ancestors did, and make shit up. (Credit to my teacher Nikki BlaK and my non-blood sibling Meagan, for drilling this one home.) Our ancestors, those of us who draw our self-portraits with the peach-tinted crayons, made shit up constantly, much of it horrific. Case in point: Eugenics. An entirely made up pseudoscience with deadly consequences. If our ancestors made up Eugenics, surely, surely we can dream up an existence and supporting culture that is actually generative, liberatory, compassionate, humanizing, and meeting the needs of people? (Shout out to author Ruha Benjamin’s book Imagination for this idea.) If you are like me, and several hundred thousand other people currently living in the Western World, eugenicist ideation—people claiming that certain kinds of people are better than other kinds of people— was possibly your first inkling that you were living in a toxic family. Since eugenics has wiped it’s diseased, boogery hand all over Western Culture, we have all been infected. We deserve to create healing spaces where we undo the white supremacy culture that allowed our family members and toxic friends and lovers to be blatant assholes in the first place. but also dream better futures for us all. More importantly, we deserve to create healing spaces for us that can be the incubators of a better future for humanity. We hold the sacred fire of change within our broken cycles and made-up new traditions.

Have a trailblazing, cycle-breaking, self-adoring week, readers. Thank you so much for being here.