You Can't Choose Them

There is nothing truer than the phrase 'You can't chose your family'.

This was prompted by a discussion we were having at lunch today, my family seems to be split completely down the centre in regards to morality and mentality. My close family such as my mum and my two grandparents are my kind of people, we are very similar in many ways, very open minded and I suppose you could say liberal. We like a wide range of music and films, we enjoy things that many people may not, we are more interested in things like architecture, photography and fashion instead of football, cars and alcohol. Now i completely accept that everyone has different interests and tastes after all that's what makes us all unique, however there are differences within our extended family that I am extremely unhappy about.

I know that I'm an unusual person, and I love it. I'm left handed, dyslexic, gay, depressive, over emotional, atheistic, perverted, articulate and creative to the point of brain overflow. I am consequently very open minded and I tend to gravitate towards people that differ from the 'norm', people that I can relate to. What deeply upsets me is that outside of my close family seems to have formed a shell of people that in any other circumstance would offend me by their mere existence; bigoted, racist, homophobic, chauvinistic, narrow minded people. The kind of people that make me shout at the television with pure rage and hatred as they ignorantly spill out views and opinions that are inadvertently focused towards my closest friends and indeed myself.

It makes me sad that the modern open minded attitude that my close family shares is not carried across to the rest. There are at least four people that fit the above description in my family (that I know of) that have a very offensive attitude towards anyone that is outside of their moral bubble. A few of them are siblings of my grandparents, what upsets me is that my grandparents have to be subjected to an endless barrage of these views when these relatives visit, even when they know that they do not share the same opinions. This is upsetting to me as without knowing these people are basically talking about their hatred for me and many of the people that I hold dear, for simply being born this way.

Although these relatives are unaware of my sexual preference or my opinions on such subjects, their prejudiced ideas are not mentioned when I am around, of which I am grateful because I would not be able to hold my tongue in such a situation. I am not sure why they don't know, it is not remotely important for them to know, however I do wonder how much their attitude towards me would change on the discovery of this. I dont know if an opportunity has presented itself at all over the years to inform them of this, if it has I do not blame my grandparents for keeping it to themselves as we have had many rifts in our family over the years and the last thing anyone wants is to reopen the scars. I have no doubt that my grandparents will have read this at some point, and if so I am glad.

It does upset me greatly that these things can be a problem, and at times I wish I didn't always have to take the moral highground and be able to tell these people how they offend me, it is true enough that I vent my anger frequently in order to avoid this. As good as it is to avoid such conflict, I'm afraid that their eventual discovery of a dreaded gay in the family or should I say another dreaded gay (yes there's at least two of us! shock horror!) is completetely inevetable in the end.

_Saturn