Family

The past few months have been a true test and one question has always come to mind: what does it mean to be family and what makes someone your family?
I guess there is a conventional definition of family where family is someone who has some sort of blood relation to you or a legal relation to you through a piece of paper.  The bond, especially the blood related bond has been taken into a level where no matter who you are, if you are related by blood to a person whose views or actions you don't agree with then it does not matter that you don't agree with them or that you don't want that around, the convention states that because they are related to you by blood that you are supposed to put up with all that bullshit!!!!
Unfortunately this is not something I agree with and this is where society and I collide.  In the past few years I have learned that those who are blood related to me are people I don't necessarily want to be around, they are people I can't change and that have different views or ideas about life than I do.  This disagreement has caused a constant battle between these people, one battle that I realized I will never be able to win, and while it is sad because some of these people I love with all my heart I also realize that if you are going to be in constant battle with someone then it's better to stay away.
There is a saying: "You can't divorce your family", I was told you can't say "I am your ex-family", the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard and read.  For one, you can divorce a family, there are many different ways that a family is created and one of those is by marriage of two people from two different families and if that marriage does not work then the two people file for divorce and well you divorce the family you created.  Now, if we are talking about family that is related by blood to include: sisters, mothers, fathers, brothers, grandparents, etc... Well, no you can't literally divorce them, but you can stop being around them.  You can just say: I have no family.
And yes they will throw a tantrum because they are being ignored and for some reason whenever they need anything from you they use the: "I am family" card to try and guilt you into helping them.
That "I am family" card is one of the most overused and illogical emotional blackmail moves I have ever fucking heard in my entire life.  This is something that comes up when the sister that decided to be a fucking loser felon gets out of jail and suddenly mom and dad want the other sibling to spend time with the family and accept the sister back making believe that everything is fine and dandy and she did not do anything to get herself into trouble, so let me go ahead and say: well, she is family, she is your sister... and? So what if she is my sister? Has she actually proven that she has learned her fucking lesson or is she going to continue to be a fucking felon? I can forgive someone but that does not mean I have to let them into my life and sorry but the "they are family" card is not logical enough to make me change my mind.
Or the son that is a drug addict, has stolen numerous times from his parents and suddenly comes back asking for help, the parents are told well... he is your son and he is family, you have to help him... mmmm how about: he is your son and you have tried helping him by giving him money in the past and that has failed numerous times so the help he now needs to is to actually fall flat on his face and maybe he will actually find his way into becoming a good member of society.
I've had my family blast my fucking phone because they needed something from me and when I did not answer right away I was seen as the bad guy and as the person who always wants to create problems.  These people don't realize that they are not priorities in someone else's lives and when they figure out that they are not a priority they get pissy and they use the "well I am family and I should come first" mmm NO!!! NO!!! NO!!! AND FUCKING HELL NO!!!! Here is how I see family and people may or may not agree with me and that is fine and dandy...
For me family are just people, they are persons you came to know not by a personal decision you made when you were finally able to make a decision about who, what, when and where people would be allowed in your life; therefore you got stuck with them until you are finally able to say look these are the kinds of people I want around me, and if they are not one of them then tough fucking luck for them.
The people you surround yourself with should be people that add something good to your life not drain the good you have going from it.  They shouldn't be people who drag you down and try to emotionally blackmail you because "they are family".  You should be surrounded by people who love you, the good kind of love the one that does not ask for anything in return, not by people who are constantly throwing it in your face how much they've done for you; yes this is to include your parents!!! As a parent it is my responsibility to provide for my child, make sure she is fed and clothed and well taken care of.  Having a child is a choice you make and you don't get to grow older and say to said child: ohh I did this for you or that for you! That was your fucking responsibility so if the child grows up and decides to not show any gratitude for it, then suck it! It would be your fault for not raising a child with manners although, they don't have the obligation to say thank you to you for anything!!!
So, if your family, those blood related people are causing you more pain than anything else, then stop talking to them, go out and find people that are like you, build a new family, there is no need to keep people that drag you down around, seriously, in life there will be enough of those that you might end up being forced to deal with because of a job you want to do, or a school you decide to go to.  Family is not people you were able to choose at the beginning of your life but they are most certainly people you can choose not to have around when you get older, if they don't bring anything good out of you, why the hell have them? I mean I could see keeping them around if they neither added or took away from your way of life and from how you want to handle your life but if they are taking away more and giving you more pain than joy then don't feel guilty about not talking to them. It is not an obligation to be around people you don't really want to be around, it is not an obligation to try and make their lives better, make your life better by getting rid of those who, as much as it hurts to say it, have done nothing more than hinder yourself from moving forward.  Let the guilt go and go form new relationships with people that are actually worth your effort, the people that don't ask for anything and that don't use emotional blackmail to get their way.
I promise that after the hurt of realizing how useless it is to say one has a family, it will get better, you will attract people like you, people that have same values and eventually you will have the opportunity to make your own family and instill those good values in it, however when your kids grow up and they decide that they do not want to be like you or go with the values you have taught them, then... let your kids be, they are only given to you to care for until they are old enough and capable enough to care for themselves, you will always love them but that love is not something you should ever ask in return.

On Death and Dying

Today I found myself saying: "It will be fine, in the end I will end up alive and well or dead and finally resting... Either outcome is not a bad one."  And then as the day kept going and I kept running around town getting things done, I started to think how there might be some people that would think of me crazy for saying such a thing, others that would think of me as someone that is extremely negative or just insanely depressed.
The thing is that those words came through to me with a smile on my face and with a weird calmness to it.  I really did not say that (or typed that) in a negative manner, I said it with a sense of feeling that at this moment in time I have no regrets.
I kept thinking how a lot of my friends will say to me that I am young and I should be praying to live another day and to have a long life and blah blah blah... But for me, I only keep asking the universe, God, life, whatever you want to call it, that if I am being continuously granted another day of life, to not allow me to regret anything that happens to me each and every day.  The good, the bad, the ugly... All of it has taught me something, I have learned and grown from each experience and because I have done so I can say at this moment in time with absolute certainty that I have no regrets.
In the past I have done my best with every situation I have been put through, I have given my best to those who I loved and I have said to each of them how much I love them and how grateful I am for them.
There are those with whom I was not able to spend as much time as I wanted to but I learned and accepted that those were things that needed to happen in that way in order for me to grow and learn.  I thought about my grandmother and how she is getting older and sicker, there was a time when I regretted that I am unable to go visit her because there are certain people who are selfish and irrational that have hindered my going to see her.  I used to get really angry at them, but now, there isn't anger, there is acceptance.  The same acceptance I have come to have about the one thing I will never be able to prevent, and that is my death.  We are all going to die, one day, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe we will be granted more days than we ever could possibly imagine to have, but we will all die.
We are mortals, our physical bodies are finite, and while I go through life adding more things to take care of and more weight over my shoulders that one person could possibly ever bear; I enjoy every single moment of bearing that weight.  I've enjoyed the pain and sorrow, I have enjoyed the anger, the happiness, the moments with the closest of friends, the moments I have cried and was unable to stop. It might sound crazy to say that I've enjoyed the pain, but the truth is that I have, not because of the actual pain but because of what I learned from it.
I've enjoyed each moment of silence, each person that has come and hurt me, and each person that has come and made me smile, each person that has come and left, those who don't seem to be physically around because either they passed away or are far away but that with just one thought I can bring them closer to me even when they don't think I am thinking of them.
I think I have given my best to this life, I have given each person, each situation the savoring that was needed.  And I have faith, I have true faith that things go exactly the way they are supposed to so that the big picture, the end result is true happiness and contentment, with that faith I realize every day that if I was to have to leave this plane of existence today it would be for the best of everyone.
I am ok with thinking this, with knowing this and accepting this, I have found myself ok with living on the right now for 90% of my time, which is a lot given that most humans like to live in the tomorrow rather than in the right now. I am ok with all of this because this has allowed me to not miss out on anything that life has to offer. I have enjoyed the lessons and the happy moments, so how could I possibly ever sit here and ask for more days to live so that I can accomplish more? Instead I ask that if tomorrow I get to get up, I don't forget to live in the now, and I don't forget to enjoy the now at least 90% of the now, to enjoy the pains and the lessons, because the day that I decide to constantly live in the tomorrow and stop living in the today I will become dead while still alive, my soul will then die and that would be worse than physical death.

Being Grateful

And so it happened that after being away from one of my social media websites I went in just to check on a message I had been sent and a wonderful friend had tagged me on a status, the idea was that he was nominating 3 people to write 3 things they are grateful for each day for 5 days.
And yes it did not mean I had to do it, but you know what I figured hey! It's a great idea and a great exercise especially since as humans we have the tendency to complain about things and look at them in such a negative perspective that we forget that some things we complain about we can change and the ones that we can't change are probably there as a lesson we must learn whether we want to or not, therefore it should not really be a big deal right?
As I started thinking about three things I was grateful for yesterday, I realized that I just kept adding to my list, there were not just three things I had in mind but several of them, and possibly this happens to me because I am just an avid thinker and if someone gets my mind started on something I just keep on going, so I figured I would make a slightly larger list and would actually make this list about things most people are rarely thankful for because they see those things as negative things and they tend to have a concept of a Utopian society that if existed would probably be extremely boring and in a way possibly depressing.
So here I go:

1. I am thankful for each person that has come into my life and intentionally hurt me somehow.
   Each of those persons, while they did some damage they also taught me a few lessons, lessons that had they not hurt me the way they did I would not have learned. Thanks to them I have learned how to spot good people, it was not easy but I learned there are certain things people who are out for themselves always do and say that those who are not don't do. Learning the difference has really helped me improved my life and taught me that it is not about how many people you have around but about the quality of the people you have around and when you get rid of the bad people, the ones that are left (even though they are not too many) make life even better! They have also taught me to be thankful for the few good people I have around, they made those people even more important and more valuable to me and that alone has increased the level of gratefulness towards those few good people, so much so that it seems I keep attracting them somehow and keep getting rid of the bad ones. 
2. I am thankful for sickness.
   Yes, why would anyone be thankful for that right? Well, let me tell you one thing about sickness... Anytime I've gotten sick it has been because I am working myself too much and I've learned that it is my body's way of saying "hello!!! you need to step back and relaxed a little" it is when I don't listen that things get worse. Today my little one woke up without a voice and coughing, I had a sore throat, the first thing I wanted to do (which is usually what the first thing most people do when they don't feel good) is complain, why ohh why am I getting sick and my daughter is getting sick after just one week of school and when I have so much stuff to do, meanwhile all I really want to do is go lay down in bed and sleep it off... Then it hit me, I needed to slow down a bit, she needed to slow down a bit, we both have been in this different way of living and just going along our lives on our own time throughout the summer and now we have to adjust to the schedule that is set not by us but by other people and the adjustment will take a little bit of time, and it's ok, it's ok to just take a small break, better to take a break than to get even sicker. Not only this but sickness reminds me of the times I am healthy and reminds me to enjoy those times even more, same when I hear about other people's sickness, it reminds me that it could be worse, it reminds me that I am not invincible, that I am a mere mortal and whether or not I feel like crap my job is to enjoy life as much as I can even when I am really not enjoy it much. 
3. I am thankful for the struggles that life has given me.
   Yep, I am definitely thankful for that, the struggles I've been through have taught me to see life in a different way. They have taught me how uncertain life is and therefore have allowed me to live a life where even if I plan certain things when things don't go as planned (and 99.9% of the time they really don't go as planned) I don't dwell on them too much while most people do, we want certainty in a world that is completely uncertain. We all want that, we want to be certain of things even though we know that there are no guarantees... ok there is one guarantee, you are guarantee to die, but you don't know when, where or how, everything else is not guaranteed, everything else depends not just on your decisions but on the decisions of billions of other people that live in this planet and are (I believe) connected to one another. So yes, I am thankful for life's struggles, they've taught me to live with less anger and less stress and to prioritize things in a way that most people don't.
4. I am thankful for death.
   Death is often seen as something so negative, especially when it happens to someone young and that has not "lived" to what most people would call a full life. The thing is that as I stated above, death is guaranteed for everyone, whether we believe it as a reality or not, the concept of someone dying and passing on is the same for everyone and it will happen to everyone. My acceptance of death and that it can come at any time reminds me to live life too, whether things are going great or they are not going so great, knowing and accepting that I can die at any time has made me see life in general and the life of others in a completely different way, a way that I've come to painfully realize that the majority of people (especially people my age) don't really accept because they are stuck on the believe and hope that they will be alive tomorrow and the next day and the day after for many many years to come. Some even create anxieties about dying and go about their lives worrying about the things they do that might kill them so instead of living they are pretty much dead before they actually die. The older generation though, most of them, and psychologically you get to the age when you accept that death will come and so that's when they actually start living each day, yes they have their complaints but they come to an understanding that life is limited and so they worry less about certain things like debts and actual things, but most tend to always go back and express with regret how much they wished they would not have put so much emphasis on those things back when they were my age because then their lives would  have been fuller. Even when you read about what is something that most people regret while they are dying it all comes down to the things that we as young adults believe we have to put so much emphasis on right now that we forget all the actual important things that we should be doing. 
5. I am thankful for debt.
   Yes, yes, WHAT? Most people want to get out of debt, they really just don't want to be in debt at all. But see we live in a society where we have been taught that we have to borrow money in order to buy certain things that we "must have" we get into extremes amount of debt, as students we use loans to pay our way through school, then we get out of school and we are worried about how the heck we will pay those loans. We complain about the loans, we complain about the car payment, we complain about the mortgage payment, the credit card bills... the list goes on. But what we don't realize is that for every single dollar we have ever borrowed we have actually acquired something we wanted at the particular point in time that we had acquire the debt, whether it was our education, or the new car or the house, but we wanted those things. Even if we say ohh hey I got debt for hospital bills, well you went to the hospital because you wanted to get healthy. Or I got into a lot of debt because things broke down in my house or my car, or some sort of natural disaster happened, still you wanted to fix those things that you originally wanted and with those things that you acquire comes a greater sense of responsibility because now you have more things to take care of. Anyway... to my point, debt has taught me to live a simpler life. There was a point in my life where I could walk into any store and I would get a huge credit line because I made enough money and I had excellent credit, but then shit happened and everything was lost in a manner of days, it all went to hell so I was forced to live a simpler life. The simpler life is not a life that most of the people around me are ok with and therefore is a constant battle to get them to stop telling me that I need this or I need that but... It has been worth it to me, and had it not been for debt and the complains of others about their debt, I would not be able to live simply and work towards memories rather than work for things. It really is freeing when you think about it. 
6. I am grateful for injustice.
   Yes, yes, I might be completely insane on that one, how can one be grateful for that right? Well... Let me tell you something, without injustice I would not know or enjoy those times when something just happens. And even though in my view of things each person has a slightly different concept of what justice is and the "reality" is that deep down we all have a collective concept of what justice is, and that concept changes as we evolve as a society which is why most times we can't even define what justice is, we tend to give examples of what it is, but we would not have those examples if we did not have examples of injustice.

So there... I am sure there are more things I could think about that most people would want to completely get rid of and do without because hey, they are not so good things for them and therefore would never think about being grateful for them but there is always something that those things teach us and the lessons we learn are part of the life we are living right now and one should never be ungrateful of the lessons we learn. In the end that is what we are here for, to learn, and the more that we fight the learning experiences the more we will be put in situations where we will be forced to learn those lessons, the harder we will make our lives and the more grateful you are for the things that happen to you the more positive you will begin to see your life...