Surrendering to the flow of things feels impossible most days. 

I know I'm out of alignment with myself and my values when I forget to approach the world with a sense of wonder and whimsy - ie Play. I get caught up on an end result and my oh-so-perfect plan to get there. At my core, I know none of this is worth it if I'm not laughing, embracing, and smiling my big dopey "there is no place I would rather be" smile every step along the way... but I'm still new to connecting to these values. I only identified them earlier this year, and we haven't quite clicked yet. I know them, but they aren't part of who I'm being yet. They aren't alchemized. Some days are easy for some values and not for others. It's how it is. It's the process. 

Deep breath.

The learning process is necessarily messy. 

At the core, it's my old control issues. I want my world and people in it to work on my timeline, my steps, but my plan doesn't leave room for the beautiful, unpredictable side quests and scenic routes that the Universe, or God if you prefer, builds into every journey. I convinced myself at a heartbreakingly young age that if I could just make the perfect plans and stick to them that I could fix my family. Kids don't know that adult problems aren't their fault. Adults don't usually do a great job of explaining that well enough for a kid to fully understand. Besides, kids learn 70% from what other people do and 30% from what they say. Even if you could explain it perfectly, if how you’re showing up isn’t consistent with what you try to teach them, you’re teaching them to be like you - both in the sense that they’ll do what you do instead of what you taught them but also in that they’ll become people who say one thing and do another. Every parent marvels at how wise kids are about stuff that adults over-complicate, but few like it when the kid tries to help out with "bigger" problems after being praised for seeing a different perspective (read: problems adults aren’t ready to uncomplicate or explain in depth, but could. I'm not suggesting you kick questions about calculus or sex positions your kid's way, bestie.). 

I was praised just enough for my perspective to be absolutely convinced in my little kid brain that if I could just learn enough and teach my family how to treat each other better, we could all be happy. Safe, finally. Unfortunately, my family members needed something I couldn't provide - motivation - to start that collective healing process. You can’t force-feed people motivation, and any efforts you make to salvage a personal relationship are doomed if you aren’t on the same team working toward a common goal. So, after 2 decades of spinning my wheels in the mud, I gave up. It didn't take long to start going no contact with almost all of them over my frustration and over broken and bent boundaries. I felt like a failure, but I decided I’d rather be a failure living in something like peace than keep playing the role of Sisyphus - intergenerational trauma edition.

This year, at 26, I learned that love is just radically accepting people for who they are. I was worried that meant I'd made the wrong choice at first, but it didn't take long to internalize that sometimes acceptance like that requires you also to accept that some (or most) people aren't a fit for you.

Today, I feel more connected to and at peace with my family than ever - the feelings I most wanted as a kid - but it looks nothing like it did in my perfect little kid plan. I'm much closer to 30 than I am to 15, for starters, and I'm still No Contact with all but one of my family members with no plans to reconnect. When I connected to what my actual values were - the why behind my decades of effort to fix everything for everyone - it became super clear that those black and white options I gave myself weren’t going to cut it. They weren’t a real limitation. I decided that they were my only options. When you connect really solidly to your why for achieving a goal and drop your need for a specific plan to achieve it, you open yourself up to a lot more flexibility and joy. I needed to let go of the desire to keep my family close so that I could love them the way they deserve - letting them be who they are without trying to change them - and also to love myself how I deserve. I couldn't claim to love myself while I held on so tightly to people who told me in the same breath that they love me and also that I needed to be someone completely different. I needed to release my vise-like grip on either being one big happy family living in mostly harmony or being unhappy, lonely, but comparatively peaceful in No Contact compared to the stress of getting random calls/texts when members of each generation of our family freak out again about how unfair and unkind it is that their adult kids still don’t live the way they want them to (never mind that each of these people also confuses and frustrates their own parents - I wonder where we all got that trait lol).

More importantly, I learned none of us are broken. Not one. My family isn't broken. We just aren't compatible as people… and that's okay. By extension, nobody in the world is broken. There are just a lot of people who live in ways that don’t jive well with what you’ve got going on. It’s bound to be like that when there are 8 billion of us and everyone is unique.

I'm glad I let go of my little kid plan for my family. I'd rather be happy for them from far away than tear my hair out from the stress of living in the same place or stick to being bitter about a perceived failure.

Today, I keep my core values written in big letters on a whiteboard in my room. It’s the first thing I see every day and invades my vision every time I enter my room. Other values I don’t want to forget get the felt-marker-on-a-sticky-note treatment and are stuck to a highly visible surface so that I read them when I’m nearby (not many to avoid overwhelm). It’s so easy to forget and make choices out of alignment with my values when things feel high-stakes or emotionally charged, but I want to make it impossible to forget what’s important to me. I can give up some wall/mirror space for that.

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