The Multiverse of Family Feelings

The holidays always bring me home, both literally and figuratively. A couple of times a year, I visit my family—on special occasions, for obligatory photos with big smiles, over platters of food, and under a haze of beer and liquor. It’s comforting and familiar, but just beneath the surface lies a quiet storm of anxiety, guilt, and obligation.

Growing up, my family operated on survival mode. My mother taught me what she knew best—how to make it through. That’s what she did her whole life: survive. How can I fault her for teaching me only what she knew?

But survival comes with trade-offs. It instills grit but leaves little room for growth. You don’t challenge yourself if you’ve never had the luxury of doing so. My mother survived through everything life threw at her, but how do you teach someone to build the muscle of being comfortable with discomfort when they’ve never had the space to try? How do you instill values like hard work or resilience in the next generation when you’re just fighting to get through each day?

For me, survival wasn’t enough. I left home, not because I didn’t love my family, but because I didn’t know how to love myself there. My childhood felt like a prison—not just of rules, like not going out or staying late, but of emotions. Even joy was fleeting and tinged with guilt, like I didn’t deserve to feel happy.

If I had stayed near my family, I might’ve followed a more “acceptable” path. Pharmacy school didn’t work out, so maybe I would’ve ended up as a dental hygienist—safe, practical, and unfulfilling. But leaving gave me a chance to strip away the expectations, the guilt, and the noise, to discover what life felt like on my terms.

It wasn’t an easy transition. For years, I carried resentment. My parents put me in this world, but it felt like I was burdened with expectations too high to meet, without the tools to succeed. Their survival mode became my survival mode—a constant state of fight or flight, always anticipating the next thing to go wrong.

Then I read The Body Keeps the Score and learned how trauma and survival are inherited. I began to see the ways generational survival manifests: the inability to stay still, the guilt of rest, the fear of failure. Survival wasn’t just my story; it was our story, handed down like an heirloom.

Last year, I tried to be honest with my mom about some of these feelings. I told her about the day I graduated from college, the day that should’ve been celebratory but ended with me in the hospital, overwhelmed by anxiety. When I shared that, she felt guilt, and I felt the need to back off—old survival habits creeping back in. But even in that conversation, I started to see something I hadn’t before: feelings aren’t black and white.

I’ve always thought of emotions as linear: good or bad, happy or sad, love or resentment. But I’m starting to realize they’re more like a multiverse—an endless web of contradictions that coexist. I can love my mother deeply and still feel hurt by her. I can resent my upbringing and still value the lessons it taught me. I can feel successful and disappointed, joyful and sad, all at once.

It reminds me of Everything Everywhere All at Once, a movie where chaos and contradiction create something unexpectedly beautiful. That’s family for me—a complicated mix of love, guilt, survival, and growth. It’s a reminder that discomfort is where growth happens and that maybe, just maybe, I can break the cycle.

This holiday season, I’ll go home again. I’ll smile for the pictures, share food and drinks, and sit with the chaos of feelings that come with it. And this time, I won’t just survive. I’ll let myself feel everything, everywhere, all at once.