I have no shortage of blog entries declaring my love for and appreciation of my family. I really am lucky in that department and I know not everyone gets the same kind of support I do so I generally don't let little nagging things some of them say about the way I live my life get to me. But the one thing that is not at all a strength of my family (and I'm talking pretty much up and down the entire line) is discussing our feelings. I'm not sure if it's just that everyone assumes no one else needs to talk about how they feel and so we don't or if we all seek those conversations elsewhere. But from what I can remember of my childhood, I never really felt like I could 100% let out how I was feeling about anything. However I don't think that's because we were discouraged from doing so (if that makes any sense). I can remember the night my grandma died and walking the halls with my aunt in total silence. But to her credit she was trying to get me to talk about how I felt that time, so maybe it's not the entire family. Making this whole thing even weirder is that we're generally a very loving and affectionate bunch so you'd think feelings talk would be no big deal.
Never was this lack of discussing our feelings more apparent than in the aftermath of my accident. I remember waking up after my two weeks in limbo and sensing this weird vibe in the room, nothing I can even really explain. It's like I knew everything had changed but I couldn't comprehend what that meant yet. But as time went on I realized that my accident and the personality changes it brought about were like the elephant in the room. Every time I tried to bring it up, people had somewhere else to be or something they needed to do so they could avoid having that convo with me. Some family members I can't blame at all though. The stress of my accident sent my sister into premature labor so while I was lying in a hospital bed unconscious, she was two floors down in the NICU (and my mom was between the two of us so you can imagine how hellish that was). Because no one wanted to talk to me about it, I internalized a lot of my feelings and I wrote a lot. What I didn't know at that time was that writing things down was no longer enough for me to work through stuff, I also needed to talk about how I was feeling. But instead of speaking up and saying I was in pain and I needed to have those conversations, I just decided that if it made them that uncomfortable to talk about, I just shouldn't bring it up. Even now, that period of my life is sort of made to feel like some big secret that we're not supposed to talk about.
I was explaining all of this to a friend the other day and after taking it all in she said she felt like I was let down by my family in the aftermath of it all. Nobody knows how to talk about something like that, even now a lot of people don't know what to say when I tell them about it so I can imagine what it was like right after it happened. But her point being that there are ways to get educated about how to have that conversation and how to help that person through such a tough time. When I first heard her say this I was totally taken aback and my first instinct (of course) was to defend my family. But I didn't do that. I stopped for a second and considered what she said and I've been thinking about it ever since. And I've come to the conclusion that she's right on some (and maybe all) level(s). I mean, the first person I really truly got to let everything out to was an acquaintance who didn't even have to show up at the hospital at all (and I am eternally grateful for her lending her ear). If not for her then I don't know with whom and when I would've been able to get that stuff off of my chest. That doesn't seem right somehow. And I think that not being able to be open about what I was going through at the time still affects me in some key ways.
It's crazy how stuff comes full circle and this little realization about having been let down comes at a time when I'm pulling my hair out over the laundry list of bad decisions a cousin is making. I've written about him before (including my last, scattered post) and how we've always had a complicated relationship but I think our troubles really started after my accident. He was one of those I thought was down for the ride, no matter what the ride entailed, but he went MIA post-accident. Most of the fam did what they could to help me during my recovery, but he suddenly didn't come around anymore and didn't call much. This went on for about a year or so before we finally started connecting again. Then we had another falling out which was completely unintentional on my part but I think he perceived it to be my getting back at him for not being there for me. So we didn't talk much for another six months and that was tough because it was at a time when I was telling everyone how I felt (good or bad) cuz I had learned life was too short. For a long time I really wanted and tried to form a close relationship with him again. But then I realized that he is set in his ways and his views and his opinions on how I live my life are almost always negative. It's never, "I don't agree with your decision but I support you" like the majority of the family, it's always, "I think this is wrong and if you do this I might not talk to you". Meanwhile, I'm always supportive of his decisions even though I don't agree with most of them. Maybe that's just how it was always meant to be, I'm slowly starting to accept that now.
So I guess my point is that yes, I do think I was let down in many ways by my family during that time. But I'm not bitter about it (I don't do grudges, they're a waste of energy), and I don't blame them for the downward spiral I ended up in. That was a nightmare largely of my own making. It's all kinda water under the bridge now for me because it's not like we can change how things were handled. I see how it could've been handled and how it was handled and I wish they were one and the same but they're not and that's just how it is. Can't change it so I might as well accept it. I guess there are just so many more dimensions to the accident and the fallout than I still realize there could ever be and it's interesting to think about.
