Family Ties

A Close Encounter With Reality

What happens when you visit your family

The worst thing about visiting family is seeing how successful they are. Seeing their nice houses, their good jobs, their cute kids, their fancy cars, their tennis partners, their golf clubs, their firm beds, their New York-style kitchen. Their poise and their confidence.

That’s the worst part for me: the poise and the confidence. That ability to appear so at ease. To drift through life without a care in the world, as though the entire planet was set up for their very existence.

It makes me feel terrible.

Suddenly my own reality isn’t good enough, and I start craving theirs. Why can’t I do a yoga course at ten o’clock at night after a full day's work, a meeting at the Rotary club and a parents’ evening? Why can’t I do that?

Why can’t I visit my family — be it cousins, brothers, or sisters —without feeling jealousy and envy — even hatred. I should be enjoying myself and their good fortune. After all, they are my family.

But I can’t. Because within minutes of me walking through the door, my senses are assaulted by an enormous feeling of injustice. The injustice that they understood how the world worked from an early age, and I didn’t.

I blame my father.

The worst thing about fathers is that they think the reality they represent is right, and everything outside it is an unattainable utopia. And therefore wrong.

My father’s idea of reality is then passed on to his children, and his reality becomes their reality. When I went to my sister’s this Christmas, I wasn’t stepping into her reality, I was stepping into my father’s reality he had created for himself over forty years ago.

When I was 18, I didn’t accept my father’s version of the world, and set out to forge my own. It sounds very grand, but it isn’t. I didn’t do anything special, I just did things differently. But in my family’s eyes, I was considered weird.

Still am.

My father’s dead now, but he lives on in the convection ovens, high-speed internet, BMWs, and game consoles of my siblings. Which is the reason I find going back so hard. Because every time I step into that reality, I see a version of myself on the soft, comfy sofa looking at me and saying, this is what you could have had if you hadn’t been such a loser.

Of course, all this self-loathing is terribly unfair and destructive, because my family’s lifestyle is a facade. Both my siblings are mortgaged up to the hilt, and by mid-January, will be relying on overdrafts to pay their bills.

I won’t.

I have zero debt and no mortgage. I don’t even have a credit card. True, the cottage I live in feels like it’s from the Middle Ages, but at least it’s warm and cozy, if not luxurious. I like it. It’s my reality.

Truth is, you can create any number of realities, but the only reality that matters is your own. And the worst thing we can do is to want to fit into someone else’s reality. Because after a few days, you’ll realize that one reality doesn’t fit all.

Thanks for reading. For more realities, check out: