As a queer person, ‘family’ often feels like a foreign concept. If you’re part of a big Indian family, yes, it’s your parents and your siblings, but it’s also your aunts, uncles, cousins, cousins’ cousins, friends of family, and every nosy aunty in a 5-mile radius of all of those people. Five-ish years after moving out of my hometown, I don’t feel close to most of these people. I’ve barely just started to be comfortable with my own parents again.
It’s all because I am ‘not straight,’ a woman who has any form of attraction to other women. Being entangled in a messy web of familial interactions means I’m a daughter, a cousin, an aunt, a niece, etc. I’m not only myself. I bear the weight of my last name, an association with countless other people that will die when I do. So, if I’m bisexual and most of my ‘family’ doesn’t think that’s normal, I’ll become the black sheep. Most of my extended family doesn't know yet.
A few years ago, one of my cousin sister-in-laws was too worried about buying a rainbow pinwheel to adorn her balcony, saying she didn't want to be confused with those people. I imagine my cousins, aunts, and uncles will look at me as if queerness is some sick perversion, maybe a disease. Keep it away from our kids. Even though I love all my nieces and nephews? Even if I want to be part of their lives? Even if I’m still the same kid you all joked around with on all my trips to India?
When you grow up with only conditional love, you always try to figure out what criteria you’ll have to meet to get you that love. I learned very recently that that’s not healthy. These days, it’s my chosen family that actually makes me feel whole. I’ve built up a community in the past few years, a close circle consisting of my partner, sibling, and non-judgemental friends. With these individuals, I never have to measure up to some invisible bar to feel loved. They accept me, no questions asked. Chosen family is AMAZING, life-changing stuff.
What they don’t tell you about discovering your chosen family is the heartbreak you feel for the family who raised you. It’s a big disconnect to feel an abundance of unconditional warmth from people who are not related to you and so little from people who are. Even though I am tremendously loved by my chosen family, here I am, still worrying if I am too much for extended family. Worried if I will even be allowed to participate in the lives of my nieces and nephews once they find out.
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