Blood & Water

Family is everything, or supposed to be. They’re the ones that are supposed to stick by you, do right by you, love you endlessly and unconditionally. But we all know that’s not always the case.

​Honor your father and your mother, they say. But what if they don’t honor you right back? Why must we perpetuate cycles of abuse and generational sins for the very sake of upholding an institution that doesn’t always serve us, accept us, and love us.

When you grow up sitting in pews, you learn quickly who is worthy of love and who deserves eternal torment. You can sit there knowing that the type of love you crave would get you shunned by everyone in your orbit and you have to decide for yourself what your future will look like: Love in all the right places or tolerance in all the wrong.

When families are known to leave you because of the people you love and when families are known to break you to fit into molds that weren’t made for you, doesn’t it follow that they shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all of existence? Doesn’t it follow that you can find a bond equally strong or more so instead?

The family you choose is the family worth fighting for. You can choose the family you were born into or you can choose the family you find along the way. But make note, know that this is true, the bonds you make, build, and cultivate are harder to break.

Blood means nothing. It’s happenstance and fate, but the choices you make with intention and conviction are what brings purpose and meaning to this life. The love you choose is the love worth fighting for.

If your parents abuse you, they have chosen not to love you. It’s because of there choice that you can choose to find parental figures somewhere else. If your siblings do you wrong, you may leave them and never return. They did not choose to love you and you don’t have to love them despite how they failed you.

But you may also choose love. When you think the fight is worth it, to teach them how to love, then love. If you can forgive, if you can see progress looming in the horizon, then by all means put in the work to teach people how to love. That work is holy. That work makes the world a better place to live for future generations of people who will need to be held and chosen. But you may also choose to love yourself and leave. It is justified.

Blood means nothing if you do not choose your blood. You did not choose to come into the universe. The powers that be decided that you should be born, but what you are born into does not have to be what you continue.

There can be no blood without water. There is no life without the things you choose. But there is always room for both.