the pain of family and the essence of this bitch thing

Family are those from who there is no escape. The people who follow you where ever you go. Having left such an impact on your innermost being, they stay a part of your life forever.

I see them in my face when I look in a mirror; the people who gave me my genes. The people who share my blood. Those who, like it or not, made me who I am.

And I feel them in my heart each day. The people who came into my life from nowhere at all, with no blood relation whatsoever, and got stuck there. The people who just happened to slip into my life, and the people who where invited. Those who, like it or not, made me who I am.

Sometimes I'd like to be free to just go about without family. Without those people who find every sore part of me and rub at it. I would like to have escapable friends.

Not that it would make me happy, but because it would be easier.

"Network. Before a word for those who took care of me. Nowadays a word for the contacts in my phone book." Åsa Sanders, in todays City Stockholm newspaper

Family. Those who actually do take care of me. And call me when I am busy flicking through the phone book on my cell for the fourteenth time trying to decide which name is the coolest or most beautiful or possibly the most compatible with mine.

In this world there are many ways of surviving. For me there are two. Either I adapt to the ways of the world around me, or else I don't. If I do, I will be soft and loving and friendly when around Christians who speak with soft and loving and friendly voices. Then I will be tough and rash and crude and sarcastic when I am confronted with the hard world outside the Church doors.

Or else I don't adapt. And then I refuse to be soft and loving and speak with a friendly voice just because that is expected of me, or just because others do so around me. And then I refuse to gossip and slander and provoke and hurt just because the world around me does.

But the truth still remains, that no man is an island. The people I carry in my heart will forever affect me. My voice, my body, my choice of food. My choice of music. (Playing at home right now: Bob Dylan, Rammstein and welle:erdball) And somehow I have to find that way of living that means opening my heart to those I love. Those who cannot be escaped. Who cannot be locked out. And yet live so fully in God's love that I refuse to be a puppet.

But since when was this an easy task?

Beg your pardon, God, but surely even you yourelf must sometimes wonder what you thought you were up to, creating earth and all?