Father Forgive Me For I Fantasize About Ghosting My Family

Sometimes I fantasize about never speaking to my family again. Ghosting them if you will...

Not in a dramatic, door-slamming way. Not with speeches or ultimatums or long text messages that try to sound calm while bleeding through the screen. I imagine it the way Americans seem to do it so cleanly—I’m done, and then they’re done. No lifelong echo. No ancestral chorus humming in their chest. No constant moral hangover.

For them, it appears to be an option.

For me, it feels unspeakable.

As a first-generation citizen, family is not just people. It’s duty. It’s survival mythology. It’s the unspoken agreement that you will endure what you would never tolerate elsewhere because these are your own. You don’t choose them. You don’t evaluate them. You don’t leave them. You adapt your nervous system around them and call it love.

But what no one tells you is how heavy that becomes when the people you are required to accept are people you would never, under any sane circumstance, choose to keep close.

I wouldn’t be friends with them.

I wouldn’t trust them.

I wouldn’t invite them into my inner life.

Their lack of self-awareness exhausts me. Their absence of empathy injures me in small, cumulative ways. Their resistance to personal growth feels like being asked to sit politely in a room with the windows sealed shut, forever.

And yet—love them.

Honor them.

Stay.

There is a particular kind of pain that comes from loving people who do not love you enough to protect you. Not just from harm outside, but from harm inside the family. From malicious people who are enabled because confrontation would be “too much.” From silence that masquerades as peace. From the quiet expectation that you will swallow your discomfort so the system can remain intact.

That pain is lonelier than abandonment. Because you’re still surrounded.

The fantasy isn’t about freedom in the reckless sense. It’s about relief. About waking up and not bracing. About not having to contort your values, your boundaries, your intuition just to maintain proximity. About not having to call tolerance a virtue when it’s really just self-betrayal dressed up as maturity.

I imagine what it would be like to choose distance without remorse.

Without the guilt that gnaws.

Without the fear that I’m severing something sacred.

To walk away and still sleep at night.

But even in the fantasy, regret lurks. Because I was raised to believe that leaving is a moral failure. That endurance is proof of goodness. That pain is the price of belonging. And so the dream is never clean—it’s always haunted by the image of who I’d be leaving behind, and who I’d be accused of becoming.

This is part of why marriage feels impossible to imagine some days.

It’s not that I don’t believe in love. It’s that I am already managing a lifetime’s worth of disappointment. I am already carrying sadness that did not originate with me. The idea of inheriting someone else’s family dynamics—their silences, their denials, their unhealed wounds—feels like agreeing to double the weight when I’m still learning how to stand upright under my own.

How do you vow for better or worse when worse already feels so familiar?

Maybe this is what no one names about being first-generation: the grief of knowing that the life you crave—clean boundaries, chosen intimacy, peace without apology—exists all around you, but accessing it would cost you everything you were taught to revere.

So for now, it remains a fantasy.

A quiet one.

A guilty one.

But fantasies are honest. They reveal what the soul wants even when the mouth cannot say it aloud. And maybe naming it here, in this small, private way, is the beginning of something gentler than disappearance.

Not abandonment.

But discernment.

Not exile.

But the slow, radical permission to want a life that doesn’t hurt.