Being Ridiculous

There are few things worse for me than to be ridiculous, and not being able to do anything about it. I am being ridiculous right now. My Mom's side of the family is enormous, and historically not very close. In the past few years there has been great effort to remedy this, and thus this summer we will have the first family reunion in roughly 8 or so years. And I can't decide how I feel about it. Part of me is excited to meet cousins I haven't met, see cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents that I haven't seen in years. Part of me has a completely unholy "Screw them, why bother?" attitude. But mostly, I have the ridiculous feeling of inadequacy and inferiority. I am roughly in the middle of the cousin spectrum of 25(? I have to think about that) and I feel like everything that I've done with my life has been done before, and better. All my older cousins are at elite schools (damn my pride), or doing awesome things with their lives, and the younger ones are all proving their giftedness and being cute and adorable and incorrigible.

I think the part that hurts is that I am not certain of their love. My dad's side of the family loves me, accepts me, and I don't feel a need to perform or to justify myself. My ridiculousness is a symptom of the brokenness in the family, as much as I would like to deny it. It doesn't make it right on my part-- I am just as broken as my family, and it is too easy to blame my stuff on my family. And that is not fair to them or to me. I can't assume that my family is judging me-- I'm the one judging them without any justification for it. I think I just have to get over it, go, and allow myself to be surprised by how cool my family really is.