Family be tricky for me. It hasn’t gotten easier to call one my own because the concept of family is illusory. My mother was considered a black sheep and the dismissal, berating and shaming of her that was generally accompanied by other violence helped me peep game early. She was despised for being a childhood victim of rape and mother of many too soon, being strikingly beautiful, aware of it and saucy, and no one ever let her forget her failures, especially her blood. So to me, oftentimes, family ain’t shit. It’s an aspiration, sure, but never a fixed home or without major anguish or sacrifice. I find myself uninspired by it. Both longing for it like an orphan and terrified of being received. Losing parents has both gifted me more of my people and weirdly reduced my access to my lineage. I haven’t felt like I belonged in decades, if ever. Always a visitor, a guest, a charity invite among my own kin. Add my queerness, radical politics and direct conflict style, and it shrinks even more.
For chosen family, I at least understand the arrangement. Yeah it’s more fluid and engaging, I get to be a bit selective, yet it’s still temporary. All of it. People be outing their true selves and acting up. Still I strive towards it, scrapping for what I can hold onto. Aiming to craft my little area of safety and acceptance. Love. But them niggas got they own kin and cliques, and holidays and milestones spell that out. So I drift again until someone notices I’m gone, if they do. Walking between the Venn diagrams of my crews, never really feeling a part of anything. As a kid, I maintained relationships through constancy and dogged dedication, something I learned from being parentified early. But that was one-sided and exhausting. And we know what happens when the glue stops sticking.
So I’m journeying to me to examine this abandonment and hopelessness. I’ve got much to be grateful for, no doubt, because help has usually come and love ain’t far. I just hate the fickle bitch and this persistent ache. Jagged holes carved out early. Loneliness is quite the abuser as she force feeds me self pity and low self-concept. Yeah, I’m not all alone, but tell my heart that. And find my family, my tribe.