Today is Day 53 of being no contact with my entire bloodline.
When I think about where I am now, I realize that not much about my day-to-day life has actually changed. In many ways, I already had distance. The emotional distance had been there for a long time. What I needed was to make that distance physical. I needed to establish a final boundary. I needed to stand my ground and prove to myself that I was not afraid to do it.
And now I have.
These 53 days have taken me through an array of emotions. There has been anger, sadness, grief and all of the complicated feelings that come with finally accepting something that has been unfolding for a very long time. There have been moments when I have looked back on the past and realized that, in some ways, this feels as though it was always going to be a part of my pathway. Not because no contact is something everyone needs to do, and not because I believe it has to be forever for everyone, but because for me, it became necessary.
Right now, it is going to stand. There is no going back. And I have realized something else during these 53 days. I don’t regret it.
That doesn’t mean I don’t feel sadness. I do. There are still moments when I think about things, and there is still a heaviness that I can’t always explain. But regret isn’t what I feel. There is a difference between grieving what was and wishing I had made a different decision. I don’t wish I had made a different decision.
If anything, this has given me the opportunity to see more clearly what still needs to be healed in me. Going no contact didn’t magically fix everything. It didn’t erase the past. It didn’t suddenly make me whole. What it did was create enough space for me to begin looking at things without being in the middle of them.
There are things I have remembered that I had forgotten. There are things I have looked at differently with the distance I now have. There are patterns I am beginning to recognize, not only in my family but within myself. There are things about me that I still need to work on, things I want to change and qualities I don’t want to continue carrying forward.
That is part of what this next chapter is going to have to be about.
I can recognize that my parents did the best they could with what they knew at the time. Could they have done better? Of course. But I’m not interested in making this about assigning blame anymore. I’m much more interested in understanding the patterns that continued through my family and were never really dealt with. Someone has to deal with them. Maybe I’m the one who gets to.
Those Before Me
When I look back at my family, I can see that I’m not the first person who tried to create some distance. I had a much older first cousin who established herself as the independent one and was viewed for years as the black sheep of the family. She pushed against the expectations placed on her, but she still maintained contact with her parents. There was still a connection. There was still some control.
I also had a maternal aunt who moved many states away in an attempt to create distance from her family. She physically got away, but the control followed her. Even when she was dying of cancer, her mother (my grandmother) still had a presence in those final moments of her life. The chains lasted until death. I have thought about that more than once. That isn’t the kind of life I want.
If breaking away from a system that has existed for generations on both sides of my family means that I have to be the one who does something differently, then so be it. I don’t know what that ultimately means for the generations that came before me or for anyone who comes after me. I only know what it means for me. It means I chose to stop participating.
At Day 53
The last week has been quiet. No third party has attempted to reach out to me. Maybe they have grown tired of trying. Maybe they haven’t. I don’t know, and at this point, I don’t feel the need to know. I am on the other side of a closed door that I intentionally closed. For now, I’m going to leave it closed.
There is something else I’ve been experiencing during this time that is harder to put into words. Beneath everything else, there is still a vast inner sadness. I don’t know that I would call it depression in the clinical sense. It feels different from that. It is more like a deep sadness that has been sitting somewhere inside me for a very long time. Sometimes it feels like a void.
And I know what people might say about a void like that. They might say that it is a place only God can fill. If that is true, then I am ready for that next step. I’m ready to stop feeling like a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit anywhere in the grand scheme of life. I’m ready to believe that there is more for me than simply waiting for something to happen, whether that something turns out to be good or bad. I don’t want the rest of my life to be defined by anticipation. I don’t want to always feel as though I’m waiting for the next thing.
I want to live.
I don’t mean that in some grand or dramatic way. I mean that I want to discover what life feels like when I’m not constantly measuring myself against what has already happened. I want to find out who I am when I’m not trying to make sense of a family system that never made sense to me. I want to understand what is still possible for me.
And maybe that’s where I am right now.
Not at the end of healing. Not at the beginning of it either. Just somewhere in the middle, finally able to look around without the immediate pressure of having to protect myself from the people I spent so much of my life trying to understand.
There is still mental and emotional work to do. There are things I need to process. There are things I need to change in myself. There are things I need to forgive, perhaps including things within myself. There are things I still don’t understand.
And then there is my body.
I’ve been dealing with a lot of somatic pain that has become physical, particularly in my throat. It has affected my voice and my ability to talk for long periods of time, especially when I’m talking about the past and the trauma that has been part of this journey.
So I’m listening to my body.
I’m tired. It fatigue beyond exhaustion that I cannot put into words.
I’ve carried a lot for a very long time. I’ve held onto pain. I’ve endured. I’ve masked emotions. I’ve continued moving forward even when there were things inside of me that needed attention.
Maybe this is a season for me to stop pushing so hard. Maybe I don’t need to have the next answer yet. Maybe I don’t need to know exactly what comes after this.
For now, I know that the boundary stands. I know that I don’t regret establishing it. I know that there is still healing to do, and I know that there is still more of me to discover. And I know that there is a sadness inside me that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life carrying.
So I’m going to sit with it. I’m going to rest. I’m going to allow God into the places in me that I have spent a lifetime trying to understand on my own. And I’m going to see what happens next.
Because maybe this is not about waiting for something to happen anymore. Maybe this is about finally becoming available for the life that is waiting for me.
My Voice Unchained 