This newsletter is unlike any I've written before. It is not one person’s story, but a composite of sentiments drawn from years of conversations I've had with clients, friends, and colleagues across the country. My hope is that, in its own way, it inspires someone to begin a conversation they have been avoiding.
I love my family. I want to begin there because nothing that follows makes sense without it.
I grew up safe. I was encouraged, cared for, and given every reason to believe that my family would always be there. There was no great fracture, no defining betrayal, no moment I can point to and say, “That is when we lost each other.”
And yet, somewhere across the years, we did.
Not completely. We still call. We still gather. We know where everyone is going for the holidays, what the children are doing, who is traveling, how work is going. We talk about the weather, the traffic, the house project, the flight delay. We exchange information about our lives without really sharing our lives.
Sometimes I hang up the phone and feel lonelier than I did before it rang.
I do not blame them. That would be too easy, and it would not be true. I have contributed my own silence. I have answered “good” when I was not. I have changed the subject when a conversation moved toward something tender. I have waited for someone else to ask the question I was too afraid to ask myself.
How are you, really? Are you happy? What weighs on you; what excites you? Do you know that I still need you?
Distance has not helped. We live in different places now, moving through different routines, surrounded by different people. The family I am building has grown around me, beautiful and demanding, pulling my attention toward the life directly in front of me. The calls become shorter. The visits become scheduled. We arrive, eat, laugh, tell familiar stories, and leave having spent days together without ever quite meeting.
We stay at five thousand feet, sometimes ten; high enough to see one another, but never close enough to touch the ground.
What frustrates me most is that I know I am capable of more. I have sat with friends late into the night and told them what I fear, what I regret, what I hope my life will become. I have allowed them into rooms inside me that my parents and siblings may not even know exist.
There is something heartbreaking about being deeply known by people who did not raise you, while remaining partly hidden from those who did.
I want to know my parents beyond the roles they have played. I want to understand what they carried, what they sacrificed, what they never said. I want to know my sisters as they are now, not as the children I remember nor the adults I imagine them to be.
But I am afraid time has hardened us into familiar shapes. I am afraid we have practiced distance for so long that closeness would feel unnatural. I am afraid that reaching out will expose how far apart we have become.
Still, I want to try. Perhaps it is not too late to say: I miss you, even when we are together. I love you, but I want to know you. I am tired of talking around our lives.
Can we begin again?
If any part of this felt uncomfortably familiar, that was kind of the point. I don't think most families are broken; I think most are just circling each other at altitude, waiting for someone to go first.
Maybe this week, that's you.
