Friends & Family

I've been learning a lot about family systems; how the dynamics and relationships within your family affect how you relate to everyone else. Gotta say, it's causing me to feel some real anger toward my family! That's okay, though. I love my family, and I'll work through it. But, man - I thought they were all normal and I was the screw-up! I don't think that anymore.

Meanwhile, I'm growing ever more grateful for my friends, who are some of the coolest people in the world.

I used to say "friends are the family you choose for yourself." But then, I've always had a gift for making really bad choices. I ended up creating a "family" for myself that was ten times more screwed-up than the one I was born into! Go figure...

The friends I have now, I would never have chosen.

Five years ago, I decided that I would never have another roommate. Now I have six - and if someone had lined up a hundred women and told me to pick six I would want to share a house with, these are not the ones I would've picked! But they are the ones I look forward to coming home to at the end of the day; the ones I talk to when things aren't going right and I need help to make sense of the world; the ones I run screaming to when something wonderful and exciting happens.

The rest of my friends are much the same. They don't fit the criteria I once used to choose who I wanted to associate myself with. They don't all look or dress the way I like; they don't all think or speak the way I do; they don't all listen to the "right" music or have the "right" taste in food and films and other essential life things. And yet, I have the coolest friends!

One thing hasn't changed: I used to always hang around with people that I wanted to be like. And I still do.