It feels strange to call this a newsletter because right now it feels more like a public journal. If you’ve ever carried the weight of a messy history, then this is written with you in mind.

“What's in a name?” I keep asking myself. Not in a cute, rhetorical way, but as a real, loud, scrappy question banging around my skull.

What is family, really? What is a bloodline? What value do we give heirlooms, signatures, and the stories passed down like orders? I grew up with an absence that felt like a presence. Grandparents gone before I was born. Parents who should have been anchors but turned out to be storms. My primary abusers were the same people I sat beside on holidays, shoulder to shoulder at every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. And hovering outside that circle was my father. His letters, when they came, were small acts of destruction, ripping at me in ways a stranger shouldn’t know how to. It’s a peculiar kind of cruelty to be torn apart by someone whose face you barely know. And on this trip, while sorting through paperwork at the house, I came across a letter he sent to Charlie in 2017 — pure lunacy on paper, an extra bit of fun I wasn’t prepared for.

It would have been easy, even familiar, to walk away from this. I’ve done it before. But this time I’m here, holding the boxes, the bills, and the bad memories, face-to-face with the leftovers of other people’s choices. Staying doesn’t look heroic. It looks like sorting, sweeping, and standing still when every instinct says run. And it’s harder than I thought.

Charlie’s stripes, the familiar behaviors, haven’t changed. While I’m trying to build her a life that isn’t tethered to institutions, she still tells people I’m not loving enough, not present enough, not doing enough. It’s a soundtrack older than both of us, echoing the same cruelty I’d already learned from the people who were supposed to teach me tenderness. And it leaves me unsteady. The questions rise: am I only the result of those who came before me? Am I nothing more than the byproduct of two people who were never designed to make a healthy child?

There’s another possibility: maybe I’m some kind of cosmic proof, a person forged by messy origins who can do the slow, patient work of becoming whole, day after day. That thought, kinder and more spacious, keeps me from folding back into the old path that always led to erasure.

The shadows of shame are thick around here. Shame like an old coat I keep slipping into. I don’t feel proud of my bloodline, nor do I hate it ferociously. Mostly I feel numb and worn thin, a recognition that generations of pain went unhealed. Not proud, not demonic, just people with bad tools and worse teachers. And if all of that is true, what does that say about me? Does that make me less? Or more? Or none of the above?

We’re told pride is dangerous. Hubris kills. Maybe. But I keep asking: should we be proud of our origins, or proud of who we choose to become? Or maybe pride is irrelevant. Maybe it’s about accountability and creation, the stubborn, quiet work of making something different out of the raw material you were given.

The house is full of objects. Heavy boxes that smell like someone else’s life. Heirlooms I never wanted, family portraits I never asked for. There’s a ledger of what it’s worth to strangers and the gnawing questions from her about why I don’t feel called to fight for more. I don’t want any of it. Not the objects, not the conflict, not the brutal auction of memory. And yet I know leaving questions unresolved doesn’t erase them. They calcify.

So I’m sitting with contradiction. Estranged from the people who made me, yet the one who shows up when there’s a mess. I want distance and I want closure. I want a future that isn’t haunted, but I know the only way out is through.

Sometimes I wonder if my life is an experiment in alchemy, a test of whether pain can be turned into fuel. If that’s true, I’ve been given a bulk supply of raw material — more than enough to keep the fire burning for ages and maybe even rearrange a few stars with what’s left over.

If you’ve ever been the one left to clean up the past, I see you.

So what’s the message here, besides that I’m tired and caffeinated and trying to figure it out? Maybe this: names and bloodlines are not destiny. They are context. Coordinates on a map, not the whole terrain. Who you are is what you do with them. Some days that looks like forgiveness. Some days, dropping a bag at the donation center. Some days, making sure your mother has care even if she’ll never love you the way you want. Some days, walking away.

Healing isn’t a heroic reveal. It’s the quiet discipline of choosing, again and again, to live.

I’m seeing that I am healed in more ways than I knew before showing up. If I weren’t, I couldn’t be here doing this without undoing myself. Still, healing is not finished work. It’s messy, visible, and strange. Healing this in public is a trip — but if it helps someone else feel less alone in their own family wreckage, then it’s worth the rawness. Because family is never neat. It’s both a claim on you and something you get to rewrite.

If you’re sitting with your own family wreckage, or a shoebox of letters you can’t face, I’m with you. There’s room here for all of us.

— Sunny

If any of this stirs something in you, here are a few questions to sit with. They’re not about finding the “right” answer, but about giving yourself space to notice what’s true right now: