Family is a strange construct—an emotional maze where bonds are forged by blood but tangled by misunderstandings, expectations, and a strange alchemy of love and resentment. It’s not clean. It’s not a sitcom with perfectly timed apologies or a redemption arc that everyone can cheer for. It’s messy, like unopened mail piling on a kitchen counter or half-empty coffee cups scattered across a room.
It’s not a sitcom with perfectly timed apologies or a redemption arc that everyone can cheer for.
There was a time when my family felt like a loop—an endless rerun of mistakes, silence, and words said too late or not at all. We were tangled in dynamics where love and obligation blurred, where the past sat at every dinner table like an uninvited guest. For a while, I thought that was just how it had to be.
But somewhere along the way, I stepped away and got a new perspective on things. It wasn’t my choice, and it broke me to reach a point where I wasn’t allowed to go home. Years later, when I revisited my family, it was different. Not because they were different, but because I had changed. Many of them are still stuck in the same loop, but I now see things from the outside.
I wasn’t alone in this. The people within my family that I am closest to now are those who also took a step back, whether by choice or due to our messy, chaotic family dynamics. We didn’t untangle the knots; instead, we acknowledged them and wove them into something new. The family I have now isn’t perfect. It’s a family that admits where we went wrong, takes the past out of the shadows, and holds it up to the light—not to erase it, but to learn from it.
We’re messy, sure, but we’re moving forward.
We’re not stuck anymore. Those of us who took space away aren’t looping through old patterns or waiting for some big redemption moment to fix everything. We’re messy, sure, but we’re moving forward. We’re building something imperfect, something honest, something ours
Because family, I’ve learned, isn’t about getting it right. It’s about showing up—again and again—flaws and all. It’s about forging a new path together, even when the road is uncertain.