Being the Political Black Sheep of Your Family

I saw this photo the other day of Princess Diana in her famous Black Sheep Sweater, (which you can actually buy again now for the first time since 1994, here) and I felt this deep connection to her. It’s a feeling that I’m sure all of us feel in at different times for different reasons.

Misunderstood.

It’s a constant state of feeling like you’re being rebellious, but that was never your intention. You didn’t have an intention. You’re on the same journey everyone else is on, trying to show up in the world in a way that feels honest to you.

Then one day something clicks.

You begin to profoundly believe in the things you have silently wondered about, and you’re smart enough now to know how things functionally work in the world and you begin to surprise yourself that you have answers to every curve ball thrown your way: the economy, small business vs big business, immigration, the “swamp” and draining it. You get the picture.

You used to be able to handle the family group thread, then one day, that promptly changes. Email-chain-style-text copy and paste messages entitled things like, “20 Things All Women Do That Annoy Their Husbands” sent by your brothers best friend who somehow made it on to this family text thread (?!) that we use regularly. Anyone that “likes” or responds in an affirming way to that text you start to feel a weird, new distance from them. Your feeling moves from, ‘yeah we just disagree on stuff’ to ‘I genuinely feel sorry and sad that you are still living in a world that progresses so slowly in the name of tradition and fear of socialism.’

You frequently think back to your childhood and think about what went wrong or right with either you or them. You start to deconstruct things. Maybe that saying that was constantly drilled into your head since you were 17, “You know, it’s crazy to be young and conservative and it’s crazy to be old and liberal ” might not be… right?! In fact, you realize that believing that is subscribing to a double pat on the head as if to say “there — there, one day you’ll get it,” when in fact you’ve realized that it is your fundamental beliefs on how the world should work and how we as humans live in it, and you don’t know how one changes their mind on something that intense.

Then, after many months or years of the back and the forth, you go home. On day 7 or so, you see your mom sitting in the backyard, she doesn’t know you can see her. A tear rolls down her face. You know she’s going through a hard time too. You soften. She’s not a monster. Politics is essentially a construct, why have you let this shake all the most important relationships in your life? Then, a jabbing reminder to not lose yourself in this, that you are making progress creating boundaries and forming your opinions comes roaring in. You recognize that the softening is as imperative as the standing your ground. That life is short, we can die at any moment and these things we disagree on, represent our values so maybe you should just try to focus on living those values instead of proving someone else’s to be wrong. I need to know more about her experience just as much as she needs to know more about mine.

You realize this is work. You can’t just unfollow or disassociate with your family. You at one point or another, make an effort to really understand. At times, you even do understand their point of view, but the conversation never feels productive because let’s be honest, at least one of you entered into the conversation with a goal to educate the other.

You got through the 2020 election. There’s nothing more challenging than that, you can begin to care an appropriate amount again, instead of living in fight or flight.

You’re now navigating a new world that wants to “go back” but in two different ways. One side wants to “go back” to life before leaders like this orange man who might not have read the Constitution before assuming our highest office. The other wants to “go back” to an America that was about the classic family and happy soda fountains and drive in’s, where we had good old fashioned fun, and didn’t worry about offending each other, but we are also ignoring the fact that that version of “fun” was founded on a system that validated laws confirming that women and Black people were property.

You don’t know what’s next, but you carry a new level of chill that makes you confident that not every year with have this much growth packed into it, and there will be eventually be moments of true rest.