"Strangers I'm supposed to love" by PQHAÜS

"Strangers I'm supposed to love" by PQHAÜS

(Acrylic on canvas / 16x20 inches / 2025)

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When you grow up around people who make you doubt yourself, make you feel like you're always too much or not enough, you start questioning if you even know how to love yourself. You start asking if it's wrong to feel angry. If it's wrong to want to stay away. The world keeps saying you have to love your family no matter what. That blood matters more than pain. So you keep trying. You force it. You pretend. You hold the guilt in your mouth like it’s your fault you don’t feel anything for the people who raised you.

Their house looks normal from the outside. But your mind burns every time you remember what it felt like in there. People on TV talk about home like it’s peace or warmth or safety. But for some of us, home is confusion. It’s a place where you entered as a kid and never figured out how to escape. You carry that version of home in your body. Even when you move out. Even when you get older. Even when your name is on the lease.

So you start to change. Not because you want to but because you have to. You blend in. You nod along. You say I’m fine when you're not. You become someone who smiles around people who cracked you open. You stay quiet around those who taught you that silence was safer than honesty. You give pieces of yourself away just to feel wanted, even when deep down you know they only want the version of you that makes them comfortable.

And then one day you’re eighteen. And something shifts. It doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t erase what happened. But there is air again. There is space. There is no one standing outside your door waiting to control how loud you breathe. It feels lonely sometimes, but it also feels real. You wake up and realize the silence is finally yours. You start choosing who gets to be near you. You start learning what safe actually feels like. For the first time, life begins to feel like yours. Not borrowed. Not owed. Yours.

When life hits you now, you barely react. Not because it doesn’t hurt, but because you’ve already survived worse. You learned how to keep breathing when no one cared if you did. You figured out how to live without comfort, without love, without anyone noticing you were in pain. You became your own shelter, your own backup plan, your own reason to stay. But the past never really goes away. It shows up in how you flinch when someone raises their voice, in how you pull back when someone tries to care. You don’t trust calm. You wait for love to turn sharp. You want to believe it’s real, but your body remembers everything it had to unlearn just to feel safe.

And maybe the hardest part is realizing love isn’t something you can force. Not even for your family. You can’t make yourself feel something that never grew. You can want the best for them from a distance. You can hope they heal in their own way. But you don’t have to sit in the same room just to prove something. Sometimes you love people best by letting go. Even if you’re looking at the same sky at the same time, your lives will never be the same. And that’s not cruelty. That’s just the truth.