I just returned to the Bay after an involuntary period of travel mostly related to a death in the family.
It is strange how I have allowed myself to get wrapped up in family affairs. I never reconciled myself to family or more bluntly I resolved myself to not family and then equivocated. I did this because I got along so fabulously with my mothers sister (not my mother, not my aunt’s family, but my aunt). We laughed together, she respected my path, and she had advice to offer me from a direction I don’t get enough of it (elderly, native, & rural).
Now I have paid the price for this and the price was family. I am not going to be overly dramatic about how the true lesson should be that I fucked up by deviating from my hard, true, line and how I’ll never do it again, but it’s not. The lesson, if there is one, is that bending to the people and circumstances around you without breaking, or becoming something you hate, is a central theme to a radical life. It is the lesson that I am not better because I live a nearly robotic life of ideas, conflicts, & travel but I would be worse if I had to settle into a life of micro compromises and infinite small talk.
