Conflict Resolution
I preface this with “I am a child.” It’s a very important meme to hold. It recognizes the fact that though I may have knowledge and solution sets, or suggestions, I have no power. The thing I hold the most is love. More often than not, when parents go to war, they solicit alliance. Children are always collateral damage in family feuds. Winning battles is not winning wars. The war gets raged over the lifetime. Childhood is gone. Adolescents is dark. If you survive long enough in early adulthood, you might be lucky enough to find some peace when you’re older. Unless, even though you spent your life in the pursuit of peace, the leaders of the world persist in family feuds.
Photos, staged and real, are memes. They are likely unfair. Words are often unfair. I am a child and easily influenced. I have an idea of right and wrong. I have idea of fairness. I will abandon these concepts when I am afraid of being abandoned. I have heard holidays are the hardest seasons for people, where depression and suicide goes up. Am I a sampling of this? I have certainly experienced this. There were times when family was so unreasonable, I was contemplating self deletion as an escape. I took the harder route, and suffered in silence, trying not to pick sides. I love my family, imperfectly. I sometimes took sides. There is a perverse pleasure at throwing stones in glass houses.
People suffer with fighting families, and they suffer in isolation. I have tasted this meal, as well. Though isolation has been preferable, it lead to another kind of suffering. How many of us return to families to be ridiculed, to a partner that hits us, to a family gathering where one is intoxicated, and someone is so doped that they’re at risk of accidental over dose, or grandmother has once again discharged a firearm in the house to get people’s attention, and all because we’d rather have that than no sense of love at all.
A general rule of thumb, we love others the way we most want to be loved. It’s a terrible formula for relationships, as that nurturing sort of love that I craved, and want to give to others leads to relationships where I am more likely to find another child that also needed that. They, too, are so desperate for that love I want to give that they talk it all and leave me depleted. This…
