writing and communication assignment

Statement Misunderstood

A statement that I have made, but which is often misunderstood, is that "family usually will hurt you the most – blood does not matter." My impression is that the first part of this statement is actually fairly well understood. People realize that you rely on family, and trust in them, and this leaves you far more vulnerable. If a stranger rejects you, or does something hurtful, it really does not matter compared with when family does the same thing. But the second clause of the statement often throws people, and is misunderstood.

There are two parts to something being misunderstood. The first is the message intended by the speaker or writer. In my case, the message is that just because somebody is your family, does not mean that they care about you. There is no guarantee that your blood will matter at all, and no guarantee that those people care. This is something that has been my experience. In my upbringing , I found this to be the case.

The second part of being misunderstood is the message that people receive. I am genuinely unsure of what message people receive. In a way, I wonder if they are receiving the same message. Perhaps they are, but they do not understand the message. This is entirely possible, and for me, I think that second clause is perfectly understandable, if taken at face value, and especially when people who know the context, as many people who know me would attest.

So where does this misunderstanding come from? I feel that my statement creates misunderstanding because it really challenges the assumptions that people have. The phrase "blood is thicker than water" is something that people just sort of take for granted. A lot of folks will look at their own lives, and assume that it's like that for everybody. I suppose if your entire worldview is misaligned with what I'm saying, then there is bound to be some misunderstanding. It's just how it is.

The sense that I get, when people struggle to understand what I'm conveying, is that they genuinely do not understand my experience. I know that people who've been in my life a long time completely understand, but if I've just recently met someone, they often do not. So statement, I suppose, really does rely heavily on context for proper understanding. I am certainly not suggesting that this is true for all people; I cannot speak for all people but only for myself. So in that sense, the sort of universal nature of the statement might throw people, as they seek to apply it to their own experience, and find that it's incongruent.

I have thought about how to convey my profound disappointment in my family. In a sense, I feel that I have to directly contrast the "blood thicker than water' narrative, and that the shock value, disbelief and misunderstanding that I create from that is in a way necessary. I want to create that misunderstanding so that people take a step back a bit, and realize that maxims and things that they hold to be universal truths might not actually be universal truths. There are people out there with such radically different experiences that those experiences actually stand in direct contrast to conventional understanding. Only be directly challenging that conventional understanding is there really a hope that genuine understanding of my reality can occur, at least for those who take the time to understand the context behind my words.