“I Think I’m Done With My Family”
“I think I’m done with my family. They don’t call, they don’t check in, they never visit. But they always expect me to show up for them. They want money, favors, support—but they were never really there for me. Not when it counted. I’ve tried for years to keep the connection going, to be the “good one,” but I’m exhausted. I don’t even think they’d notice if I disappeared.”
Dear Marcus,
That sentence—I think I’m done with my family—is a quiet earthquake. It doesn’t scream, but everything shifts when you say it. Because it’s not just about giving up. It’s about finally acknowledging something that’s been weighing on you for a long time.
What I hear in your voice isn’t bitterness. It’s depletion. A kind of emotional erosion that happens slowly, year after year, when you’re the one doing all the reaching, all the giving, all the showing up—and barely anything comes back. It’s the ache of being someone’s afterthought but expected to behave like their anchor.
When you say they never really supported you, I believe you. And I imagine that absence wasn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s the silence that hurt the most—the way your achievements went unnoticed, your pain dismissed, your efforts taken for granted. You may have spent years telling yourself to keep trying. That maybe if you were good enough, helpful enough, generous enough, they’d eventually meet you halfway.
But they didn’t. And now you’re left holding not just disappointment, but the guilt that often follows the thought of walking away—even when the connection has been hurting you for years.
Family guilt is its own kind of trap. We’re told that family is everything. That no matter what, you should be there. That blood is thicker than anything else. But what no one says out loud is this: blood is not a substitute for love.
If the relationship is one-sided, emotionally costly, and fundamentally unreciprocal, it’s not unloving to take a step back. It’s not cruel to stop watering something that never grew toward you. Sometimes, the most honest thing you can do is admit that continuing to show up is hurting you more than staying away would.
And let’s be clear—this isn’t about a single missed call. It’s about a pattern. A consistent emotional absence. A dynamic where you are the reliable one, the giving one, the one they contact when they want something—but not when they want you.
There is grief in naming this. Even when you’ve known it deep down for years, saying it aloud makes it real. It means letting go of the hope that someday they’ll become the family you needed. It means mourning not just who they are, but who they never became.
But there is freedom in it too. Because when you stop waiting for someone to change, you start reclaiming your energy. Your time. Your sense of worth. You start realizing that just because they expect something from you doesn’t mean you owe it.
And no, they may not notice if you step away. That might be the clearest sign of all that you were never held the way you should have been. But you will notice. You’ll notice the weight lift. You’ll notice the clarity that comes when your life is no longer shaped around the emotional labor of holding up an entire system that was never built to hold you.
It’s okay to be done. Not in anger, but in truth. You’re allowed to preserve your peace. You’re allowed to want relationships that nourish you, not drain you. You’re allowed to walk away from duty masquerading as love.
You don’t need to perform for people who only show up when they need something. You deserve to be known, not just used.
–RJ
You are not unloving for protecting your own heart.