Hi! This one's a break from the usual important life updates. Just some thoughts I've had swimming around in our head for a while that I want to share. Was showing a game to a friend when we saw a scene involving characters' feelings about their heritage. It of course had me wondering about where we came from. So here's some backstory and feelings about our family tree.

(CW: discussions of family and forced bonds, emotional abuse, the usual)

Extended family

Sunny and I have had a complicated relationship with our extended family for as long as we can remember, and it's been pointed out several times to me by friends how unusual it is. There's several moving parts to why we felt and feel the way we do, that I want to put down in writing.

Ever since Sunny was little, there's been this kind of... bubble. Sunny was heavily incentivized to close themself off and only associate with their immediate birth family. Their friendships were looked down on by their birth parents, and they were disallowed from visiting friends even for schoolwork. It was clearly part of the abuse, but that's not why I bring it up. It also applied to extended family. We've been getting written birthday and christmas letters from them for years, but could never attach a face to any of their names. Sunny was pressured to write back thank-you letters ritualistically for a time, which gave it a bad association. As well, Sunny's birth family did christmas photos that were sent as christmas cards every year, which began to feel just as hollow. No one in the extended family ever reached out to us - to ask how we were doing, or show interest in anything about us - which made us believe their letters were dishonest and made out of obligation.

When I was about 17 - so within a year of our split - some extended family members came over for a night to catch up with our birth parents. Having such a bad association with them, which I believe was incentivized by our birth parents, I hid away in our room and hoped I wouldn't see them. I remember fearing the moment any of them would see me and force me into conversation. Our birth mother did, however, guide our paternal grandmother "nana" to our room despite my wishes, and I was very cross. She made certain to point out this person wanted to see me so badly, how much she cares, and how disappointed she was when I turned her away, even though to me, this person already was told I wanted to be alone that night, crossed my boundaries for her own gain, Sunny only met her once, and I felt I was being forced into a relationship I didn't want only to satisfy our birth mother.

Speaking genuinely, it's hard to tell how much of the rift between us and our extended family was due to us, as opposed to interference from our birth mother. Sunny was taken on two trips, to see their grandparents on both sides of the family, when they were little. They had a bad experience both times. My theory is that Sunny caught on early to the neurotypical "performance" culture, the shallow displays, the rituals, the meaningless banter, the adults making cheap shots at their expense, and no one ever seeming to genuinely want to connect with Sunny or their interests. That all makes sense to me.

But it's also true that our birth mother gave us a very poor association with extended family. She guilt-tripped Sunny over not sending "thank-you letters" back to people they didn't know, and for wanting to stop christmas photos because they felt uniquely exposed and taken advantage of. She used to bring up names of extended family, and if Sunny asked who they were, they were scolded because they "should" remember them after meeting them once when they were like 2. We have a very faint memory of Sunny being brought to meet extended family at a gourmet mexican restaurant, a place with extreme smell and ARFID complications - all we know is that it didn't go well, no accomodations were made, and it was all blamed on Sunny for ruining the outing (extended family didn't seem as invested in shaming us as she did, but still made no attempt to stop her). Also, in the last several years, she's been subtly transphobic by refusing to tell anyone my new name and pronouns (especially her brother) and making excuses to avoid doing it (ie. "he's a different generation").

There's something else pretty significant I haven't brought up yet, and that's location. According to our birth mother, the extended family, including her brother and parents, and our birth father's brothers and parents, all live very far here. That's why visits to and from these groups were so rare. Even so, I believe there's more to it than that...

Other than that, here's what I can say for certain about our extended family:

Our birth mother had a brother who remained in the home she grew up in, on a farm raising cows. He's been overweight and diabetic for many years, unable to even leave his home or use the restroom on his own, and recently was moved to physical rehab and a retirement home. For every day for decades now, he's stayed by himself, watching tv and making a living by breeding the cows. He would call her for a few hours a day every Monday for several years (so I heard her deadname me constantly, hence what I said above).

Our birth father had two brothers. One used to be a firefighter, I forget what the other did. They apparently grew up with relatively health sibling and parent dynamics, nothing like our birth mother's side. They had been taking care of their mother in her retirement home for the last several years, she just passed away about a week ago. I visited her and the two brothers once, with our bio mother and brother, a few years ago. Most of that visit was them reminiscing about the past, nobody talked to me except to let us pick out lunch.

...And that's it. I'm going to elaborate more on our birth parents and their parents shortly, but other than that, this is all I can say for sure.

Biological family

I've already talked at length about our abusive birth mother on this weblog, but here I want to touch on everything else about her. She's a piano teacher, and has been teaching piano lessons at her house since before Sunny was born, organizing music festivals and events, playing songs at churches, and such. She told me that she worked at a music store for a short time in her early twenties, then had the teacher job "handed to her on a silver platter" (her words) and thus has no experience job hunting and never financially struggled. She grew up with her brother, mentioned above, in the country in Aransas texas, on a farm with cows.

The stories she's shared of her parents paint them as even more abusive than she is, but she still holds them in high regard and praise:

• Her father was described as having "some kind of ocd or autism or something" as he was very neurotic and impulsive: tiny things set him off, he screamed and threw tantrums, and made his kids follow strict rules they couldn't understand. Apparently, his parents - our maternal great-grandparents - were described as "beating the shit out of him" to make him conform. At one point, he was a racecar driver (?), before retiring due to pressure from his wife. He later bought a shrimping boat and made a living shrimping. Sunny only met him one time and it didn't go well - he threw a fit over nothing and screamed that he doesn't want any of his inheritance to go to Sunny, who was 9 at the time.
• We know less about his wife, our biological maternal grandmother. During the visit I just mentioned, Sunny was also taken to see her, but we remember nothing of the actual meeting. She suffered from alzheimers and was living in a nursing home. Our birth mother has mentioned offhand a few times that alzheimers' shows up in every second generation of women in her bloodline, which means we could be next. I hope not!

Now, about our biological father. He was an aerospace engineer, working for Boeing. According to some of his coworkers, he made major contributions that got the ISS (international space station) running as it is now. He got some awards for it I got to see around his funeral, including the "silver snoopy award", but as he "preferred to keep to himself", it's hard to find almost any record of his contributions online. He made a lot of money doing this. When not working, he was something like the stereotypical couch potato dad, except instead of beer, he drank lots of coca-cola, and while he did watch american sports rarely, he was much more interested in gaming. He had a launch day Wii, and an xbox 360 (the kinect star wars edition) that Sunny and their brother grew up around, and much later on, a ps4. He was hardly around, and was leveraged by our birth mother as an enabler who delivered punishments. He confessed at one point that he blames me for crushing his dreams of taking his family to disneyworld because of our health conditions and special needs. He only "became nice" after learning of his small cell lung cancer. From old stories from our birth mother, he used to be a much more whimsical and happy man. It's pretty clear to me that once the abuse dynamic formed, she changed him.

As for his side of the family:

• He had two brothers, as mentioned above. I got to see them once or twice as he was dying, but don't remember much about them, other than one has a moustache, as funny as that is. He grew up in a somewhat rural area, but definitely not on a farm. His mother, "nana" as mentioned earlier, was soft-spoken and really into 70's and 80's cartoons, which to be honest I find that endearing? The only memory we have of her husband is this one time he showed Sunny the cards bouncing when you win solitaire on windows xp. He waved his arms and cheered, and IIRC he used to play again and again just to see the animation. I've been very negative so far, but, I'm going to be honest, this side of the family seems much nicer, even sweeter, than our birth mother's. While our birth father didn't do anything to sour our impression of his relatives, he also never brought them up.

Lastly, our biological brother. He's 3 years younger than us. He and Sunny used to have a pretty healthy sibling rivalry, with the exception that their birth mother interfered. Sunny has multiple memories from when they were little of them and their brother having to "team up" to debate their mother over her behavior. She'd employ the same tactics she still uses now, with the addition of mocking both kids' voices in a stupid voice and strawmanning their arguments, and making them sit in stunned silence. So, Sunny and their brother were on the same page at first. But later on, the abuse got more intense towards both kids. After I came along, I was in the right position to be totally brought into the "fog", and lost myself. Our brother was subject to some pretty horrific behavior and violations of privacy by his parents, and was left fighting his own battles too. But we couldn't "team up" with him again. By the time I finally managed to come to my senses and start resisting, it's already too late for our brother. He's completely on her side now, parroting and enabling everything she says and does, and they gossip about us and expose my secrets and any vulnerable confessions I've made. They're now enmeshed, and are functionally one unit, thinking and doing the same things toward the same goals at any time. In return, he's the "golden child", the example everything about us is compared to, and there's many double standards where he gets especially good treatment because he agrees with everything she says.

What we're left with

Needless to say, we have poor association with both extended family and biological family as a concept. I believed for years we'd never be able to leave, due to our disabilities and resulting dependence (thankfully, we will be escaping soon). We were raised in the US, around toxic masculinity, harmful boomer ideologies, some christian puritanism, american nationalism, southerner and texas culture, and so on... so basically, nothing we actually identified with. Everything I do claim, like my queerness, my skills, my interests, even my name, all come from me, not the world around me. Even though I live in a bubble of sorts, it's a bubble I fought hard to create from nothing, and the same goes for Sunny. I've heard NY will be a much more accepting and queer-friendly place, and I can't wait.

I've found much comfort in the notion of found family. Since I showed up, I've gone through many friendships and relationships online. These came to be the bonds I really care about, as I found that not everyone is as cruel as our birth family, and the more stories I shared with them, the clearer it became just how much I was being deceived. I ended up coming to them for support for the longest time, and, while it's by no means perfect, I built up as much self-confidence as I have by now thanks to my dear online friends. Sunny eventually met some of them too, and made their own friends! These people are our real family, and care about us more and in more real ways than any biological or extended family member has. It's why I jumped at the chance to move in with one of my most trusted online friends, and it's why we affectionately call each other "uncle" and "neice" as if he adopted us.

It should also go without saying that after we move, I plan to cut off our biological family, and go completely no-contact. Even though I've been comparatively lucky, and our birth mother isn't as bad as she could have been, we still have the right. She's done unspeakable damage, after all.

But here's where things get a little muddied. Despite how much disdain I have for her, our birth mother is helping with the move. She supports it, has made no effort to stop us, and even put in the time and effort to transfer the title of our car to us, along with Sunny's college savings funds their birth father set up before they were born. We have a lot of money to our name, and it's clear that Sunny and our birth family never struggled financially. But even so, I'm pretty stunted socially and still have a lot to learn. Sunny grew up somewhat sheltered. We are very lucky to be moving in with someone who knows and cares for our special needs and disabilities.

Things like this have always made it confusing. In the past, it's been hard for me to even believe my own experiences because I got gaslit repeatedly into believing our circumstances really weren't that bad. We never had to worry about starving, being robbed, running low on money, or being subject to hate crime. And our birth mother took care of me as a disabled adult, with no expectation that I'd get a job. So surely it couldn't have been that bad, right? Our birth mother argued this herself once, and said I got off easy, her parents were way worse. There was multiple periods of time in my life (post-personality switch that is) when I repressed all my complaints and hurts, and tried to convince myself that I really do have an easy, comfortable life. That didn't stick either. I genuinely have a hard time insisting on this sometimes, but I do mean it: I'm glad and grateful I don't have to fear those things, and I don't need a job, but I do struggle hard in my own ways too, and so has Sunny. So even though we come from a kind of privilege, our lives haven't been easy, and we still have to face many challenges.

About the move... for a while now, I've been seeing it as a way to throw it all away, so to speak. Reject everything in this place Sunny grew up in and I lived in. I honestly expected that we'd be spending January and February of 2026 revisiting old locations and old friends, to say goodbye or hang out one last time. But I already said my farewells to August and Mocha at the end of last year, so the only person left I care about is our IRL friend, the one who's helping us drive to NY. I was surprised to find that Sunny feels the same way. If anything, Sunny was mostly attached to our bedroom - not because of their childhood memories (it's not even the same room), but because it's where we met and they were given a second chance at life.

So, yeah, aside from those few things, I believe we're about ready emotionally to "throw it all away" and reject life in texas for the happier life that awaits us in NY. We value found family so much more than blood family, a feeling shared among many queer people who also had to throw it all away. I hope once we arrive and get our life in order situationally, we'll be able to finally relax, open up, and heal. I'm ready to try therapy again, for one, and Sunny deserves way more time to come out. It'll finally be safe to.

In closing, I guess I could say that... whenever people talk about their connection to their heritage or culture, I feel nothing about that. It's not exactly like I'm empty, but more like I'm missing this connection that they have, because we have nothing to connect to there. In the past, I used to say I don't "identify" as texan, or even american. I hope you can see why.

If anything, rather than care about our culture, or heritage, or traditions, or holidays... I care about our past, specifically the split and our shared past. Learning all about Sunny's stories from when they were little, I feel like I'm being entrusted with a special vulnerability, and I care about Sunny. Sunny's experiences, my experiences, the places they overlap, the feelings we've always held inside, and the circumstances that led to us developing DID... that's our story. That's the most uniquely us thing I could ask for from our past. No one will ever be able to identify more with it than us. That is "where we come from".