I’m back in California and we’re going to be unpacking this experience for a while.
There’s a lot to say.
About strange family dynamics. About healing the biggest things in your life like your life depends on it, because sometimes it really does. About capacity for change. About surrendering to the truth of something while still striving for personal mastery and spiritual evolution.
I suspect this will come out in pieces over time.
But the first thing I want to talk about is capacity.
For a long time I didn’t have the capacity to engage with Charlie at all.
I was wounded. Reactive. Combative. Suspicious. Unable to extend grace.
And I don’t regret the fifteen years I spent without her in my life. Not for a second.
The boundary of no contact without therapy was not something I came to lightly. I think sometimes people who have grown up inside consistent, supportive families miss how serious a decision that is. Nobody wakes up one morning and casually decides to stop speaking to their family.
At least I didn’t.
I didn’t go no contact out of spite or the desire to control anything. I went no contact because time and time again when I invited Charlie back into my life in any meaningful way she betrayed my trust and it caused real problems for me. Serious ones. Legal ones. IRS ones.
The pattern was consistent enough that eventually I chose to draw the line. It wasn’t going to change on its own. And I could no longer reconcile constantly doing damage control every time the pattern repeated itself.
People love to talk about “the final straw,” but the truth is the final straw is never the first one. It’s the last one in a long series of moments where you hoped things might finally be different.
Walking away from your family, even when it’s the right thing to do, is painful in its own way. But that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong choice.
Sometimes it’s the most loving choice available.
It was definitely the most loving choice I could make for myself at the time.
For a long time after that I carried around a story about what her refusal to go to therapy meant.
The story was simple.
I wasn’t worth it.
I wasn’t worth the effort it would take to repair the relationship.
She was willing to take the L and keep it moving.
And when you carry a brutal belief like that around long enough, it doesn’t stay tucked away in the background. It starts shaping the way you move through the world. It gets into EVERYTHING.
If I wasn’t worth the effort to her, how could I possibly be worthy of effort and consideration and gentle treatment from anyone else?
With this logic firmly in the driver’s seat, I ended up in one unhealthy situation after another.
Relationships where exploitation and abuse were the norm. Environments where chaos reigned supreme and calm felt unfamiliar. Situations where I tolerated things I shouldn’t have tolerated because somewhere deep down I believed that was about the level of care available to me.
There were years where the nights blurred together.
Too much drinking. Too many substances. Too many mornings waking up feeling like I had narrowly survived my own life again.
I wasn’t trying to destroy myself. But I also wasn’t protecting myself very well either.
When you grow up without a clear picture of what love and safety are supposed to feel like, you spend a lot of time wandering around trying to figure it out.
Some of that wandering was reckless. Some of it was a blast. Some was all of the above.
In the years we were estranged I grew into and out of several different versions of myself. I explored life without worrying about anyone else’s expectations for me. Some of that exploration was dangerous. Some of it was indescribably beautiful.
And somewhere along the way I started meeting new people.
I started opening up about my experiences in ways I hadn’t before. Telling the truth about what my life had actually been like. I found community and realized I wasn’t nearly as alone in my pain or uniquely fucked up as I had thought I was.
I started meeting people who had been through their own versions of hell and were still standing. People who had been abused. Betrayed. Abandoned. People who had spent years untangling the damage that comes from growing up in environments where love and safety get confused with chaos and cruelty.
And they were healing. Not perfectly. But incrementally. Measureably and with intention.
They were building lives that felt safe and beautiful and peaceful in ways I had never really seen modeled before. Watching them changed a lot of things for me.
In a real monkey-see-monkey-do moment, I realized something that altered the trajectory of my life.
Just because things had always been painful didn’t mean they had to stay that way.
And even more importantly, nobody else had to change in order for me to heal.
I could bring peace and acceptance to the situation without anyone else’s agreement. Without anyone else’s participation. Without anyone else putting in effort alongside me.
I could do that for myself. That part was all mine. If I was willing to work for it.
And once that realization landed, something else became clear.
Charlie never going to therapy had nothing to do with my worth.
Nothing.
It had everything to do with her capacity.
Her capacity for reflection. For honesty. For vulnerability. For looking back at painful parts of life and sitting with what was there.
For a long time I thought those things were being withheld from me.
But they weren’t being withheld.
They weren’t available.
That realization came into sharp focus during one of our last conversations before we moved her.
I was on my knees beside her bed, holding her hands and trying to reach her.
She had a caregiver living with her, there to support her. Nurses checking on her. People who genuinely wanted to make her life easier and keep her safe at home, with her pet and part of society.
All she had to do was accept the help.
That was it.
But she was fighting them.
Yelling. Throwing things. Making it almost impossible for them to do the very thing they had come there to do.
So I was there beside her bed, pleading with my whole soul.
Please just let them help you. Please stop fighting the people who are trying to care for you. Please let this work for you. Open your heart to this. See and accept the love that is being poured out for you here daily. Please.
I was crying from my core, trying to get the words out between breaths, grasping for the next thing I could say that might land.
At one point I leaned in close enough that we were eye to eye, trying to close the distance in every way I could. And when I looked into her eyes I saw something that stopped me.
Through the tears and the terror, I could see the desire to do what I was asking.
She wanted to. Desperately. She really did.
But there was no understanding of what the thing actually was.
It was like she wanted to do it but had no idea how.
No idea what I was even talking about. I was speaking words she couldn’t comprehend and I was out of new ways to try and say it.
And that’s when it became clear.
Change wasn’t being withheld.
It wasn’t available.
And when that realization finally landed, it was like exhaling for the first time in months. No more pushing for, waiting for, angling for, praying for, or trying to change anything.
This was the way it was and the most loving thing I could do was stop asking her to do something that she couldn’t. The most loving thing I could do was accept her and the conditions exactly as they were with a peaceful heart.
No more fighting for what could or should be, but a peaceful embrace of what is.
Peace. The peace that comes with acceptance and surrender.
Not because the situation wasn’t sad.
It is deeply sad.
But because I finally understood something I hadn’t fully accepted before.
I didn’t have the capacity to reach her.
And she didn’t have the capacity to change now any more than she did fifteen years ago.
Once that became clear, the most loving thing I could do was stop demanding it from her.
Stop expecting something she simply didn’t have to give.
I did my best.
I showed up.
I said the things that needed to be said.
What I came there to do was make sure she was safe and cared for to the best of my ability.
And that’s exactly what I did.
And strangely enough, that was enough.
Not enough to change her.
But enough for me to leave that room with a clear heart.
Because the truth is, I had spent a long time believing that if I just found the right words I could finally reach her.
But some things are simply outside our reach.
Not because we didn’t try hard enough.
Not because we didn’t care enough
But because the other person simply doesn’t have the capacity for what we’re asking of them.
And once I accepted that, something inside me softened. And I’m liking the change.
For most of my life I carried the belief that when it came down to it, I was alone in the world.
But somewhere along the way that stopped being true.
Not because Charlie changed
Because I did.
I started telling the truth about my life. I started building relationships with people who were doing the same kind of work—people who were committed to growing their own capacity for honesty, accountability, and care.
And when people like that find each other, something different becomes possible.
You realize you’re not doing the work alone anymore. We’re all out here together.
And when you start seeing life through that lens, something else becomes clearer too:
NOT ALL CAPACITY IS CREATED EQUALLY
How unevenly it’s distributed.
How differently it develops depending on where we place our attention.
One of the easiest things in the world to do is judge someone for not being able to do something that feels obvious to you. Especially when it’s something you’ve spent years learning how to do. But every one of us has spent our lives developing different abilities depending on where we’ve placed our time and attention.
Some people spend years learning how to understand emotions and relationships. Some people spend their lives studying physics. Some people build houses. Some people run businesses. Some people make art. Some people raise children.
Wherever we put our attention, capacity grows.
But it’s arrogant to assume that because something feels obvious to us someone who struggles with it must be lacking. They may simply have spent their life learning something entirely different. And if we’re honest every one of us has areas where we are completely out of our depth.
No one is capable in every direction. We’re all strong somewhere. And we’re all beginners somewhere else. Remembering that makes it easier to meet people where they are. It makes it easier to stop asking someone for something they simply don’t have the ability to give.
But it also brings something else into focus. Our responsibility.
While we can’t build someone else’s capacity for them, we do have a responsibility to keep building our own. The capacity to forgive. The capacity to sit with discomfort. The capacity to tell the truth about our short comings and growth edges. The capacity to love.
And that work is something we should start while we still have the chance. Because the truth is there may come a day when the window for that work closes. A day when the opportunity to grow is no longer available.
So if there is work to be done in your life, don’t wait. Build the capacity now, while you still can.
You can’t build someone else’s capacity for them.
But you can build your own.
And that’s work enough for a lifetime.
-Sunny
