What I come from

Day 1 of Blogtember! I've been so excited to see bloggers getting pumped over this challenge. If you're participating, I hope you enjoy the topics and make lots of new friends this month! Or if you're just reading along, as always, WELCOME and THANK YOU. Hope you enjoy the topics as much as I have a feeling I'll enjoy writing on them. You can expect some other routine SOML posts as well, so get ready for a busy month around here! :)

Today's prompt asks that you describe where or what you come from. The people, the places, and/or the factors that make up who you are.

Several months ago now I sat down to dinner with my sweet late grandma, who was perfectly healthy at the time but gone just a few short weeks later after a blood vessel burst in her brain. She's the beauty in the photo above, taken on her wedding day. Those of you reading a while now may remember that time and how my family’s heart broke with grief that she was gone. I still miss her every single day. But I remember that dinner like it was yesterday, and how I laughed because she was being her usual sweet and spunky self and said something silly and sarcastic, and I remember feeling so proud of the type of women I come from. Women that stand up for themselves and speak their mind and have an opinion of their own but are also kind and expressive and demonstrative and intelligent and strong and full of empathy and good humor. I felt overwhelmed with this pride in my grandma and also a desire to be more and more like her.  So much of who I am today seems to have been passed to me straight down the line from my grandma and mom - everything from migraines to mood swings to gaining weight in the ass region. But I couldn’t be more proud to come from them. 

I guess this discussion wouldn’t be complete, though, without saying that there’s a little bit of darkness there too, in where I come from. I come from hardworking and passionate people, yes, but I’ve learned a lot about my family on both sides and I also know that we are prone to addiction, mental illness, and disfunctionality of many kinds. I feel that in myself, sometimes. People who are close to me see it there, twinges of it. Many of the people I come from are profoundly empathatic and feel things very deeply, but we tend to have poor follow-through in relationships, scary tempers, and unhealthy levels of ego. So basically, it’s an intersting concoction, my blood. A funny mix of light and dark I always feel competing in me.  But in the words of Sirius Black, “we’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.” 

There's so many ways to interpret this prompt, and I could go on and on. But I'll leave it at that for now.  Can't wait to see what everyone else has to say... leave your links below! :)

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