Hello psychedelic sheep!
I binge-watched Late Bloomer this week. I thought it would be easy background noise, after a busy working/life week! Instead, it sideswiped me into a full-scale identity audit of cultural expectations, family, belonging, the whole messy architecture of who I am & how I got here.
There’s something about watching someone else navigate the impossible gap between who their family needs them to be & who they actually are that hits differently when you’ve lived it. When you grew up as the “psychedelic sheep” in a family where conformity was everything & so were appearances, a show like this doesn’t just entertain, it … well it excavates! BIG-TIME. Let’s just say I had to write about it to process it.
It pressed on memories I’d carefully archived. The years of constant relocation as a DIPLOMAT BRAT, the Greek respectability politics that policed everything from my friends to my furniture, the way “fitting in” was treated as the highest virtue & I was… spectacularly not built for that.
So I wrote about it. About the late bloomer paradox & how we’re not actually late, just running a different race. About diplomat-kid displacement & about never feeling rooted anywhere. About the double-bed scandal & what it taught me about family control. About coming out as queer & my dad asking if it was “an experiment.” About my yiayia not seeing me for seventeen years & her first words being about my tattoos.
About the steep price of not fitting any template your family recognises.
If you want the full reflection, the essay I didn’t know I needed to write, it’s here:
→ Read
Medium read, with BIG feelings & even BIGGER realisations.