You Are Part of the Freak Show Too

I love my family. I would go to war for my family. I’d do just about anything for them. But like all families – you can only hang with them for so long before you wonder if you’re adopted.

And there isn’t anything like a traditional and public event to put everything into focus. The situation is ripe for observation and personal quirks. But when you add into the mix your very own nuclear and extended family – you have the makings of a great book by David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs. It’s something that seems quite surreal, but totally real and relatable at the time. Want to up the degree of difficulty? Do what I do and throw in a cultural background and the situation can and will make others laugh.

When you go home for these sorts of things, you feel like you’re in a Freak Show where everyone’s personal foibles and quirks become magnified. You become increasingly embarrassed by what you perceive as the “dumbest thing you’ve ever seen” and you “can’t believe I’m related to these people!

Now, we can laugh and point fingers at those we love as being imperfect or irrational, but there is a very important lesson to remember when doing that: YOU ARE EXACTLY LIKE THEM.

Yes, Freak…I’m talking to YOU and ME.

I went home this weekend to San Diego for a family-centric event. And I can give you hours of stories about personal aggravation and how “wrong” I think some people in my family are. However, when I came home and had a few days to decompress and distance myself from the situation, I realized that my family’s behaviors are not familiar because they act out every time I’m around. Oh no, friends…the behavior has a familiar ring to it because you share the same traits.

Think of it as nature’s little practical joke. By submersing humans in the family culture, natural instinct has allowed us to pick up specific traits and behaviors over the years. Basically, we are who we are because of our surroundings. And it makes sense – you spend your formative years with these people! It’s only expected you’d pick up a trick or ten from the gene pool.

Whether we like it or not, we are mirrors of our upbringing. Sure, sometimes it seems like a fun house mirror, but it’s a reflection nonetheless. I’d like to think I’ve only mined the good stuff from my parents, but I would be fooling myself! As frustrated as I get about certain family members need for control and flair for the melodramatic…I do the same thing. And as much as I want to be the cool, calm, and collected thinker in the group – I lose the temper just as fast and sometimes never think things through.

Yeah…yours truly is only a legend in my own mind.

As depressing as it initially seems – it’s really okay to have picked up the weird stuff. I promise! You can always spin these things into positives. The one thing I’ve determined that can’t happen is that I can’t dwell on the downers and let them dictate my life. I had a friend a few years back who told me that he didn’t want to have any kids. He was 18 at the time and I wondered why he’d made that decision so early. He conveyed to me that his father wasn’t exactly the best in the world. In fact, he abandoned his family permanently a few years before. My friend had actually started to see his father’s tendencies in him and because of it; he stated that he didn’t want kids because he “didn’t want to screw up their lives.”

That’s just sad, you know? They say the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree – but you know that fruit rolls away when it falls! Remember what I said about being a reflection of our families? A reflection is merely a production of an image. It’s not the real thing. So you can’t wear the negative traits of your family around your neck and wait for it to strangle you.

And that’s what’s great about being the humans that we are. We have the ability to take what we know and adapt. I refuse to believe that I can’t turn the behaviors I’ve inherited into something worthwhile. I think I’ve done a good job harnessing most of my hard-nosed, stubborn, and loud personality into something that most people around me find amusing. And I will continue to evolve these behaviors. If I can’t do that, then I’ve truly failed my parents. Realize that the behaviors they bestow upon you are their way of passing their knowledge on. For better or worse, they’re part of your personality inheritance.

So next time you’re with your crazy family…go a little easy on them. There are far worse things in this world than having to put up with them.