“Fine, whatever, you just keep playing horn, I give up on you and your school. You aren’t worth it anymore.” That was what my father had told me one night when I had yet again proved myself a failure to him. That moment was when I knew that the idea of blood being thicker than water was true. Yet not in the way that modern society has contorted those words into the opposite meaning of the original phrase.
I believe that the blood of the coven is thicker than the water of the womb, that the bonds between true friends is closer than the connection between two tied by kinship could ever be. There are thousands of memories I could write about to show that this train of thought has been in my mind for years upon years of my life, but there’s no real need for that. It goes without saying that at 16 years of age, I’ve already had those nights. The ones after weeks of ignoring emotions and responsibility, where everything wrong in life comes into a paralyzing crescendo of chaos and pain. At this point in time, I’ve been alone with myself and my thoughts, the words so viciously thrown at me by my parents swirling in my mind, and it’s absolutely awful. I recognize now that my family does nothing for me on those nights, nothing but induce them. I now know that the only people that are still willing to fight for me are those that I have connected with on my own, the incredible people in my life that I am so utterly privileged to be able to call them my friends. They are the ones that have saved me on those awful horrendous nights that I know I shouldn’t have experienced, especially before the point where I could be able to move out.
I’ve read hundreds of papers about how my philosophy is wrong, that family is the most important thing in life and those who fail to realize that are destined for misery, but I can’t bring myself to believe that I have the obligation to buy in to the ideology that family is better. There is little to no evidence defending that statement that I’ve ever laid witness to in my household. One of the main points for these people is that family is what influences a young person more, and they are not wrong. My family has influenced me so mercilessly, to the point where I no longer think I’m a disappointment, I know that is what I am. They have made it near impossible to think of myself in any positive light, even on my greatest days. They have manipulated me in a way that I have such extreme trust issues and an awfully warped self-esteem. Because of them, my own personal pride in myself has been augmented in a way that it is prohibitive to everything because I honestly can no longer truly comprehend that people see more to me than my seemingly endless list of shortcomings. I do not know how they can do that, I have been left predisposed to believe the idea that there is nothing good about me.
I know that my love for my friends is unconditional and that it is true, pure, and good. I love my friends more than anything and I am willing to do everything in my power to make sure that they are thriving and know how much they mean to me. Unconditional love is real, and it’s positively astounding to experience. To put it simply though, I am led to believe by the actions of those who share my genes that their love for me is, in fact, conditional on how badly I’ve messed up and that there is no promise that they will always love me. That’s not the way it should be, but it is the way it is.
