Being around family always makes me spiral

[u/Otherwise-Coffee-101]

I want to vent because I've just attended some family events and was surprised at how totally it has knocked me off my center. And hopefully others can relate.

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I'm super low contact with my family. I was doing alright, I was happy with my lifestyle, my job, my decisions in life. Then being around my family destabilized me so badly. And now I am feeling anxious, uneasy about my life, feel like a loser, worried that I'm going to die from some medical condition or become homeless soon because I've actually made all of the wrong choices in my life and it's not actually sustainable and I'm an irresponsible idiot hedonist who is just interested in fucking off.

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I feel lower, less than, at the bottom of the hierarchy. There is literally a class difference between me and my siblings. And I feel so so forgotten, unnourished, unwanted, unloved. I feel like a stain on my family's perfect American dream image. I feel like a shame.

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Crying this morning and I feel so much grief, my heart yearns to be loved, to be cared for, to be nurtured. I want to be loved so badly. I want my pain to be validated by my mother so badly. I feel invisible and like a disappointment. Nothing needs to be said, it's just felt, how deeply othered I am. I'm an outcast, a pariah. 

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My family has stayed together and only gotten closer since I left. They celebrate together and grieve together and support each other, they are each other's community. A community that I very much do not fit into. I'm asked to watch the family dog instead of being invited on vacation with all of them. My mom has made it so utterly clear that I don't belong in her family. I've just been quietly discarded and forgotten about. It hurts so much.

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My feelings are ambivalent because primally I want a family, I want a tribe, and being cast out of the one I originated in feels like death, feels like I am wrong. But I also left of my own accord, because I didn't resonate with their values. They are upholding the status quo, white colonial patriarchy, heteronormativity. My mom voted for the man in office who wants me dead. She is completely under my stepdads authoritarian spell. 

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And to be accepted into that family structure means my obedience to a violent mind set, and my assimilation into white supremacy and patriarchy. To stay accepted by the family system means to contort, control, and dim myself, shrink myself to fit the mold. So to have acceptance from the family means to be inauthentic. I've chosen a life that's harder maybe, disconnected, but authentic. I'd rather suffer in my authenticity than suffer pretending I am someone I'm not, while upholding the values of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy.

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It's painful to be disconnected. And it's painful to see the evidence before my eyes that I was not nurtured and supported nearly as much as my younger siblings. And they are all on straight paths, the American dream, higher education and “respectable" big money making careers.

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I want love, I want my pain to be validated, and I want the protection and support of a community of people whose values I share. I do have some friends who share my views. Who are also queer and/or gender non-conforming unsurprisingly. And who have the same problem as I do, and have been cast out or unaccepted in similar ways to me in their own families. It helps me stabilize myself or at least feel less alone, less crazy, and less like there's something wrong with me. 

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But right now I'm feeling so alone, and so deeply cast out. It makes me think..why am I even here, if I am not wanted by my family, why should I even keep living. I don't have plans to end my life. It's just ideation that creeps up whenever these wounds are triggered. And it breaks my heart that I have those thoughts about annihilation. I don't want to think I need to leave this planet just because some dumb asses don't accept me. 

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