Family Picture Together.

When your perceptions change, when your beliefs no longer stand, when your life is turned completely around, it leaves you standing awkwardly at times…backwards in your old life.

I realize that I am the only one who has changed…and I am not expecting the others to change, but it feels extremely awkward to me.

Lots of unspoken undertow swirling around…many agendas and expectations crashing into reality.  

In the past, when I met up with controlling energies, I would try and appease them.  Now, I feel the urge to back up and away.  It almost seemed like there was a play director, and we needed to act a certain way.  Our real selves were not to be put on display, but the 'social' ones.  Every now and again, a real self would poke out.

The strain of holiday and extended families is the 'getting along' for the Holidays, when the rest of the year our lives don't intersect.  A formal family.

What I had felt and envisioned is the child who didn't fit into the formal family play, where your life scripts didn't match the tone they wanted to portray.

I totally get now how the black sheep feels.  How my beliefs, my pathway and my life situation doesn't fit into the choreography of their expectations or ideals. How a family picture can eclipse real life.

I can see how a child would become scarce…how rebellion erupts…how it would be easier to be absent.

It is like reality doesn't fit into nice outfits and set table.

I dare not bring in anything to upset the stage laid out.

The strain of matching and withholding or doing social niceties leaves me drained.

When your life is brimming with real life and its awkward truths, it is very hard to return to social graces.  I can totally see how a child who has been abused has no place to set down there reality.  They must continue on pretending the family picture hasn't been torn.

It is no surprise to me that children leave and seldom return home in these homes.  I can see how awful it is to feel that your truth isn't to be brought up or spoken about.  How they simply keep you in your old mold even if all the insides have changed.

The main focus is to hold the family picture together.