I was a living, breathing mousetrap over the holidays \u2013 ready to snap with the slightest provocation.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t mean to be that way.\u00a0 I was cool as a cucumber while packing, Zen as fuck on the drive. Opened the door to my sister\u2019s house, and my eyebrows climbed into my hairline. My tear ducts went wasabi mode.\u00a0 Hello, I am Anne, not even slightly crazy WHY DO YOU ASK?<\/p>\n
The holiday itself went like holidays do \u2013 boring and exhausting, suddenly painful and then sweepingly sentimental.\u00a0 It was bewildering how angry I was at everyone.\u00a0 They were all players in that HANDY DANDY DYSFUNCTION FLOWCHART, you see.\u00a0 And since I\u2019d read up on it, I understood how they had colluded to allow bad things to happen.<\/p>\n
It hadn\u2019t pissed me off to know that, when it was a theoretical idea in my head.\u00a0 I believe none of us had a good grasp of what was happening, myself included.\u00a0 Can\u2019t blame people for not doing any better than I did in the same situation.\u00a0 These were the people on my side.<\/p>\n
When I actually saw their faces, I wanted to punch them. It was a little shocking.<\/p>\n
Instead, I excused myself early and slept a lot.\u00a0 When I rejoined the group, I could feel the occasional tendrils of messed-up interactions, prodding at me and getting under my skin, making me feel hopeless and trapped — \u00a0\u00a0Hey, you want to play that game we\u2019ve been playing the last twenty years?\u00a0 Here\u2019s an easy lob to get us started<\/i>.\u00a0 OK, now you go.<\/i><\/p>\n
By day three of the holiday, I was writhing with the pain of interacting with this group of needling jerkwad jackholes, who (I had recently discovered), had actually been (however subconsciously) colluding to dick me over for decades.\u00a0 It was really easy to stay pissed forever.\u00a0 And super powerful too, to be righteously furious.\u00a0 Fuck all those fuckers, right?<\/p>\n
And this is totally corny, but as I was curled up on my sister\u2019s guest bed, seething, I thought, \u201cIf this was a really great movie instead of my suck-ass life, what would I want the hero to do?\u201d\u00a0 And while burning all my familial bridges to the ground while I cackle madly in the flames would be simple, and dramatic, and satisfying, in my case, it\u2019s not particularly heroic.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not surrounded by super villains.\u00a0 I\u2019m related to a bunch of imperfect people who are trying to do their best with the skills they have. \u00a0Sometimes, their behavior sucks ass.\u00a0 They have bad patterns that need to change. \u00a0They love me.\u00a0 And God, when I tally it up, there are not many people on earth who love me.<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t figured out how to stay in this family and not get sucked back into dysfunction, but it would be amazing if I could.\u00a0 I think if I were the hero in my own story, I could fix myself and be strong for them, too, without giving up on them. If I were heroic, I would see they are struggling in the wake of these changes, and I could let them struggle without getting scared and running away.\u00a0 I would be strong in my own decisions and let them move around me without wavering myself.\u00a0 If I were good enough to do that, maybe I could help everyone get better instead of taking what I learned and fleeing.<\/p>\n
Or maybe that\u2019s na\u00efve.\u00a0 I dunno.\u00a0 Maybe we\u2019re broken in a way that won\u2019t ever look the same again.\u00a0 But we made it through the holiday.\u00a0 So that\u2019s something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was a living, breathing mousetrap over the holidays \u2013 ready to snap with the slightest provocation.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t mean to be that way.\u00a0 I was cool as a cucumber while packing, Zen as fuck on the drive. Opened the door to my sister\u2019s house, and my eyebrows climbed into my hairline. My tear ducts …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-mission-impostible"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5304"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5307,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5304\/revisions\/5307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}