Chosen family vs. blood family…what can we learn?
A peaceful walk in the seaside town of Cascais, Portugal
Your chosen family teaches you about love and care. Your blood family teaches you patience and forgiveness.
With yet another interview out about me, I’ve often been asked about the relationship with my parents.
To be honest, I never had a relationship with them. They did not raise me, and they were strangers to me as a child. They were also terrible parents and highly abusive. But they taught me valuable lessons about myself and the type of person I want to be.
My parents are my greatest teachers. They taught me strength, adversity, empathy, compassion, kindness, vulnerability, authenticity, truthfulness, resilience, independence, and so much more. But most of all they taught me forgiveness and patience. Forgiveness to be able to set myself free from the terrible abuses of my childhood. Patience to allow them to show up as the people they are and understand that they will not change unless they want to. This is what my blood family has taught me.
My chosen family, however, taught me respect, camaraderie, community, confidence, sisterhood, support, overcoming, joy, friendship, trust, loyalty, communication, love, and care. They taught me what it means to have a true bond as either a friend, a partner, or mentor. From them I learned what healthy, loving, caring relationships looks like in the way they show up in the world for their own family, their friends, and me.
Without true love, without knowing someone cares, what do we have? All we want is to be seen, heard, love, excepted, and respected. Without that we have nothing.
So I want to thank both my blood family and my chosen family for teaching me so much about life, about what it means to be human and providing me with so many valuable experiences and opportunities to learn and grow in this lifetime. It’s because of both my blood family and my chosen family that I am a better person today than I was just a year ago.
I’m thankful for the pain and suffering I’ve felt through life because each time I refuse to let it bring me down, even though many times I wasn’t sure if I’d pull through. But I know that I can either allow the pain to help me grow and evolve, or I can wallow in it and sit around waiting for someone to save me.
There was an interesting question I heard yesterday on The Diary of a CEO. And that was, if you had the ability to remove pain from life forever, would you? It took me awhile to ponder this question as with pain comes so much other stuff. Sickness, heartbreak, disease, mental issues, and more. So could I remove those as well?
i came to the conclusion similar to the interviewer. Which is that without pain, I don’t think we’d truly appreciate the joy. It would just be. We would probably go through life a bit numb, because everything is pain free. You must be alive to feel pain, and joy. That’s the balance of life. If I didn’t feel pain or suffering, I wouldn’t be alive. And I truly feel alive.
So thank you to my parents and the cult for teaching me about pain, teaching me about kindness, teaching me about healing. While I may not have wanted those lessons, I feel blessed that I was able to turn them into something valuable and beautiful, and for that I am grateful.