Anecdotes of Alienation

Since I hit the ages of double-digits, I had always felt like I was a completely different person compared to those who make up my immediate family. As members of my family, my older brother, mother, and father will always be loved by me unconditionally. They, however, have many qualities that make up their personality that make me feel ashamed to know that the people I am related to don’t share the same modern open-minded ideologies that make human beings more understanding and more accepting of one another. The truth is that I often feel alienated from my family because I cannot see eye-to-eye with them, or rather, they cannot see eye-to-eye with me.
I first picked up on the serious degree of my parents’ egotistical, narcissistic, and materialistic, or typical American, ideologies when I was about sixteen years old. We were sitting in a restaurant, just my parents, my brother, and I. We had all been dining when the empty table next to us had become occupied by two younger men who were well-dressed, clean cut, and who appeared to be a perfectly fine class of people. After a few moments of eavesdropping on their conversation, my mother had whispered the word “gay” in a discreet form of conversing that they had used through my younger years to speak in front of me and my brother as children and to maintain discretion. Unfortunately for them, I had caught onto their antics quicker than they had hoped and was well aware of what they would talk about for years on end. As soon as I was cognizant of what my mother had said, I quietly lashed out at her, demanding to know why her snobbish acknowledgement was necessary. She insisted that she meant nothing by it, yet she is a repeat offender when it comes to making such statements, wether it be about race, sexual orientation, or anything that makes the subject of her statement taboo from herself.
Materialism has always been a concept that is mutual to everyone in my family, again, with the exception of myself. When it comes to the expensive materialistic goods such as cars and motorcycles, —which each member of family has one of their own— my parents, and my brother especially, never know when to settle. My brother, who has been driving for only five years, has gone through six cars between new leases and used purchases. In his two and a half years of riding motorcycles, he has bought and sold four. I had leased another car last December, my second one after the lease on my first car had ended and my parents and I had decided it was not a car worth purchasing after the lease term. My brother is perhaps the most indecisive that one could ever meet. From automobiles, to clothing, to watches, (which holds traditional value in my family, for every time one of us passes a milestone such as high school or college graduation, or marriage, our parents reward us with a very fine timepiece) it is never enough. He is a child who often buys and sells his assets to move on the the “bigger and better” additions to his materialistic collection
Perhaps my alien ideologies root from the second child complex that I feel I have been subjected to throughout the entirety of my life so far. There is a completely different mindset that the second and final child of a family adopts given such circumstances, including a number of ideologies that only that child and others who are the subject to similar circumstances could understand. I find that I often perceive matters differently than I would if I had been a first or middle child. Instead I have adopted specifically the mind of a second and final child. Perhaps it is this second child complex that causes the most alienation; given that my brother is as interconnected with my parents’ perception of people as I’ve claimed, I am able to see well within the depths of someone’s character while both my brother and parent’s judgmental eyes are only capable of seeing the surface.
Perhaps just the way my parents do not understand my thought process, I will never understand theirs. In physical senses, we are related, but within the confines of our minds, we might as well be complete strangers. I am perfectly contempt living free from their burdening judgment, maliciously materialistic ways, and their egotistical attitudes. I try to live open-minded, to understand that which is different, to never judge another human being by what he or she appears to be, and most of all I try to express my unconditional love for my immediate relatives that I often feel I can not mentally relate to. I live like an alien, a practitioner of that which is unlike anything my family could comprehend or appreciate.