Who am I?

I am a woman.
I am a daughter.
I am a sister.
I am an aunt.
I am a friend.
I am a nurse.

These are all true. I am figuring out what each one of them means individually as well as what all of them mean as a whole that makes up me. I grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin and lived there until I was 26 years old. From there I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After a couple years I took the leap of faith and moved to San Diego, California. This is where I started to discover who I was or at least who I thought I was.

See, I thought that I could move to San Diego and all my problems would stay in Wisconsin. WRONG! They were put on hold for a while by all the newness and excitement of moving across the country to a place as majestic as California eventually wore off. I was finally forced to figure out what it is I wanted and what it is I liked. It’d take me a few more years as well as 3 moves before I really truly started to figured that out.

My 30th birthday I was sitting in my apartment with my parents and one of my sisters. They had come to visit a few days earlier and this was the last full day we had together. It had not been the visit I’d imagined. It just wasn’t about me at all, which wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. Unfortunately at the age of 30 I had still not found my voice or learned constructive communication. I was raised in a household where the silent treatment was how you knew you did something wrong, only to have it swept under the rug and never talked about. So learning from mistakes or even how to have an open dialogue was foreign to me. So as I’m sitting in my living room with my family and we are in a heated discussion about how my mom thinks I’m depressed because I haven’t spoken much of anything all day, I realize… I am so done with this bullshit. It’s my 30th birthday and instead of us celebrating, I am counting down the minutes until they leave. This is not normal. That is another realization. Every family has their stuff, but my family is not normal, nor is our stuff. We are a surface family, where we keep things kosher and easy on the surface. Never do we dare dive deep into how we truly feel… about ANYTHING! It’s exhausting being fake all the time and on my 30th birthday I had had ENOUGH!!!

I was brutally honest with my parents and my sister at how disappointed I was in my birthday weekend. I called my dad a drunk, called my sister out on being judgmental and critical of everyone, but too afraid to look in the mirror, and told my mom that all I wanted was an honest and true relationship with her which I’ve been longing for for as long as I can remember. This day, my 30th birthday, nearly broke me. My parents were devastated so they left with my sister to get some food and look for another place to stay that night. This act of abandonment, yet again, hurt me more than anything. Their flight was set to leave 12 hours from when they left. I was 30 years old, living alone, with few friends, and a family that didn’t understand me. I had no idea what to do, think, feel, etc. The next day I called a therapist and started therapy.

In therapy I learned about expectations. I learned about cycles of relationships. What I learned in the 5 or 6 sessions I went to, I worked on and through over the next year or two. I was processing things that whole time. Learning how to accept things, or try to improve things I was having trouble accepting. These are things I still work on almost every day.

My parents weren’t able to find another place to stay so they spent their last awkward night at my place. Thankfully their flight out in the morning was very early. I wasn’t mad at them, I was just disappointed that they couldn’t be who I needed them to be. It took me years to accept this and I am still trying to understand and accept some aspects of it today. Our relationship is still not great. My sister and I talked within a few days and were able to patch things up. We are closer now than we’ve ever been and I could not live without her as my rock!
I never realized things I said to her on that day made as much of an impact as they did. Years later she brought up that conversation and really took the time to look within herself and understand what I meant when I said those things. It’s amazing to me how peoples words can stay with us for years, sometimes the rest of our lives. It makes me very mindful of what I say, especially to people I love.

So who am I? I am Amanda, a 34 year old trying every day to figure that out!