Wolves, Chameleons & Eldest Daughters Have No “Found Family”

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I am apparently drastically incompatible.

This is hilarious considering that I am paid for my ability as a comfort blanket in any conversation. When I worked as a therapist, parents would report “feeling understood,” and even my kranky professor in university had to admit that I am not bad at client interactions.

I am an eldest daughter to the T, who balances the room, finds a way to say hard things, but doesn’t always come out of the conversation with the easiest load to carry.

I tell myself that it is fine, because I take pride in this skill. Especially as an Austrian girl living abroad in Taiwan, I am proud of my highly developed ability to be a cross-cultural communicator.

It took an abhorrent amount of uncomfortable silence, cultural learning, and interaction training to allow me to say that I can now speak to anyone, from any culture, and I will always find a way to give them a feeling of kinship.

To end my ruthless and shameless brag, my career counselor called me a “key-person”. Those are the people, he explained, who open up others. Those who invest time and energy in digging deep and understanding. You see, being a therapist is really a great fit for me.

But being “the key” in a room, the balancing scale, the constant barometer of emotions, comes with a toll, and recently I have learned what the exact price is for me: I am too aware of my social circle to feel entirely safe, making it almost impossible for me to have a “found family”.

The eldest daughter’s issue

I could tell you the typical things they say about eldest daughters, that always land too close to home in my heart.

Eldest daughters are high achievers who work to fulfill everyone’s emotional needs. We are the ones with ethics higher than Mount Everest, ready to throw ourselves at the mercy of emotional outbursts to protect others. We are not the fire extinguisher, but the foam.

I will not censor myself here, because I was, for years in my childhood, “the first lamb to the slaughter”, like Taylor Swift calls it. I threw my hat in the ring, from the sidelines, when there was conflict, pointed at inequalities that had I left them unattended, would’ve been none of my pain to bear, but rather somebody else’s.

It got to the point where I felt I was counseling part of my family, while being part of the problem. I remember feeling like a hero sometimes, when I had taken a hit, in some sort of a weird, sadistic martyr complex. And as I thought I was clearly helping, it turned out that I was actually digging trenches.

At some point, it turned out I needed a divorce. Not as much from my family as that trained version of myself, that couldn’t stop feeling clever for self-harm.

I was always playing the strong girl, the daughter of a woman who had worked her way up in life, and the daughter of a man who never showed pain or gave way to impossibilities. It was like my mother knew everything, and my father could do everything, but my brother was everything. Not that he was prioritized, because my parents were very fair. But he would often require more attention, and I understood why. Sometimes good, sometimes bad.

Amongst all of these “everythings”, where I was supposed to inherit both my mom’s “know everything” and my dad’s “does everything”, I ended up with a peculiar nothing. I couldn’t even be the funny one because my brother always was, and he also seemed to always come home with the biggest problems and rewards.

It was only much later that I realized why this was the case: As the eldest daughter, I was the measuring bar. Everything that my brother did that was worse than what I had done was very bad; every domain in which he was better than I was very good. I had no “very”, because my job was to set the standard, which definitely didn’t leave the relationship with my brother unscarred.

Sensitivity doesn’t suit a wolf

The thing my expectation-setting did to myself was not just the massive regular load of self-doubt, but as the emotional reader of the situation, I also became very sensitive.

In a room full of strength and bravery, sensitivity is a crutch.

I am well aware now of the ways in which my sensitivity is my asset, the driving force of words that feel imminent and personal on a page, and the reason I can make conversations feel comfortable.

But two things can be true at the same time: Sensitivity is a reward and a pain.

In a family of everything, it was painful, but I would soon come to learn that I can actually turn my sensitivity on and off in most areas. When I first “divorced” my old family version and stepped on an airplane, I felt that switch of sensitivity click unmistakably, for the very first time.

This was only possible because I stepped away from a scenario where my insensitivity was a learned behavior of self-harm into another script, namely, study abroad, where a bit of insensitivity towards myself doesn’t only cause me harm, but mostly good. And that good came in the shape of independence.

The funny thing about moving abroad is that when you apply for programs, visas, and are stuck in heaps of preparations, you think you are on the way to a dream. You step on the airplane, and maybe you still think you are entering a new world.

And then you realize, as you have made it to your destination in one piece, that you just opened a Pandora’s box: You are self-sufficient enough to make it anywhere. With or without pain. No place filled with humankind is essentially completely different from the other, because humans are more similar than different, and it is just the rules that govern it that create tension.

Where is the box for canines with iron intolerance?

It took me some getting used to to figure out Taiwanese culture, Korean culture, and essentially most of Southeast Asian cultures, because most of my mates at my university were from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, among others. They all were relatively culturally closer to one another than I was to them, so they had a command of each other’s cultural “subtext” that I had yet to learn.

But I adapted, I became a better cross-cultural communicator, learned the role of the foreigner in Taiwan, what was expected, and what was taboo. And along the way, I made friends.

These friends were, what I suppose would be other people’s “chosen family”. If only I hadn’t just learned to love independence so much after a life as a self-assigned sacrificial lamb.

You don’t just happen to “stumble upon” your potential “found family”, if you are actually, long-term committed to such a thing. If anything, you can find a “temporary family,” which is a concept that becomes increasingly painful as one lives abroad.

Because what do you mean, another person enters the group and breaks your fragile family apart?
What do you mean, your hard-earned language or culture-learning is rendered useless when something just doesn’t fit?

The fact is that people living abroad move on faster and more drastically than those who live within the comfort of their home countries. You can rely on their fear, laziness, or whatever other property to keep them stuck at home.

All of the above points don’t seem to bother the people around me, though.

Weirdly, I am the only one to see potential dangers, the mist of uncertainty between drinks, and the words left unuttered. In this “found family situation” I am again an eldest daughter who reads the room and holds the balance, only that now, I already know that it is a stupid idea.

Careful: New laquer is fresh & sticky

First, as a person moving abroad, your order of call is to find local friends. Right upon entering my first classroom, I made a local friend, we had a language exchange, and I immediately, naively thought we clicked. That was before I learned that ANY Taiwanese will ask a foreigner for language exchange, and only time will tell (particularly the 3-month mark), if that is a sustainable friendship.

With the “local friends” box prematurely ticked, I went into international friends, which is the easier category and likely the less sustainable one.

I made two deep connections within my cultural circle that flamed and dwindled repeatedly. At the very least, I got into real fights with these people, the good old European way, which I can understand and haggle with. The Asian “slow retraction” mechanism is actually far more painful to learn.

And I had my fair share of that too. There were several people I thought I shared a heart with, eventually even shared a house with, who gradually, more or less dramatically, disappeared from my life.

And now you might say: These are friends. “Of course, they come and go”, be aware, I am a woman living alone abroad who has a kind distance to her family. Each time I found someone worth trusting, I would have loved to create my own “found family” with them.

Unfortunately, I am suspicious and sensitive enough to smell approaching insecurity with the mechanical numbness of a tin can if need be, because I can live independently if you treat me badly. I have that thing now, that people call “boundaries”. They are new, so mind the paint, it’s still sticky.

Eventually, my international friends and I often divorce and remarry the way that Psyche falls off her cliff: Plunging for a sure-death I am well prepared for, but floating away merrily on a sudden wind that others call Zephyrus. This name is about as unpronounceable as the idea of me finding lasting happiness in solitude.

Try explaining to a fairy-like Asian girl the clarity of your Austrian-trained relations. I feel like playing with a glass egg every time I delicately bend over backwards, cracking each vertebra in half, just to play according to the cultural rulebook of another friend. I have played this game far too often to keep debating over what exactly the names are in rock-paper-scissors and how many times I should shake before revealing my hand.

I am sick of always having to be the wolf with scars, offering a fuzzy coat for those who need heat, and letting another person braid my tail. I have been the mammal-social version of a chameleon, without any of the cool side effects of color changing or an incredibly long tongue. And especially, most crucially: I cannot melt into the background either.

I get clearer every time with what I want from the connection, and I hope that someday it won’t scare people away with my blunt, uncovered personality. But after 3 years, there are no secure successes so far.

But maybe I should give myself grace, because as an eldest daughter with many layers, I haven’t run around this world the way I am for as long as some of my peers have. Their statistical chance of finding a “found family” fit is higher, merely because they tried for longer.

The bottom line under my journey from blood relation to “found family” is that there is no such thing as a “found family” for me so far. One only ever finds themselves at every turning point, every corner.

I constantly discover my own boundaries, how I like to handle things, and I find that I am easily enraged, but hardly saddened. I have built a shell, not in a locking-out way, but rather like seashells that turn a lump of microplastic into a pearl. When I protect myself from danger, I always keep a sample of it, throw it at a blank page, and write.

Because I have divorced my family, been cut by myself and others a few too many times, and finally discovered that all I am really doing is looking myself in the mirror. The only constant is me, and a blank page, that slowly, in a solemn trickle, fills with my own words that always were the key for others, but now, for the first time, can unlock something for me.

This Pandora’s box of internalized self-loathing contains only one seed: Hope.