I've grown quite estranged from my family. Not completely, but quite. I can't go into it too much because it's quite an issue at the moment, so it would lead me too far, but just saying.
Let's go into it too much. Contact has been very intermittent since I left home and moved to a different city, but maybe contact was already very intermittent when I was still living at home. Maybe a good way to say it is that family often felt more like something that just happens to me rather than something I'm really part of. I guess I felt like somewhat of an afterthought or so. They had other stuff to deal with maybe, and I was doing just fine (read: my grades in school were doing just fine and I was living in a state of constant panic.)
-bit of a tangent warning-
Maybe part of it was just an attempt at some kind of free upbringing. I mean, I was about 6 when I first started using my dad's drill and circular saw to make stuff (unsupervised), 7 when i had to take evening busses into the city to go to music classes on my own (which I started skipping regularly the second year and instead hung around the library or park, usually carrying a plastic bag of comics or heavy books about animals). First trainrides alone started around 10, taking care of my own dinners around 12 (no, earlier, but it became more regular at that time). So I didn't exactly grow up in a tight knit family where there was dinner every evening at 18h, like at many of the families I've known over the years, so it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that there's some distance between us.
The autism kinda worked both ways because as I was left on my own a lot, I had more time to do just that, be on my own and read books or mess with stuff and not be bothered with people, but because I didn't mind it that much (and seemed to be somewhat responsible, maybe no one (including myself) noticed I wasn't exactly developing as the other kids. (the constantly playing Monopoly against imaginary players could've been a hint. Quite a lot of counting needed for that too. And maybe my dad just thought it was nice there was at least one other person in the house who was interested in his way of keeping the books and comics sorted.)
-end of tangent-
Anyway, I went to my dad's wedding last year, but before that it must have been another 5 years or so since I went to anything official, apart from maybe three visits to my sister. Ever since that wedding I've been sort of struggling to keep myself together, mostly because there's been even more contact since then, and there's another family wedding coming up. Lord give me strength.
I have to move in the foreseeable future and I've been thinking about finding some place in a different country, and I can't say the idea of not seeing my family for a long long time bothers me one bit. I wish them all the best, but I just need the space to have my own life, and that space just so happens to be not where they found space for their lives. (I'm trying to keep it positive, obviously).
and you are starting do do that for your self now.
