What has helped you make peace with your decision to stay distant or to reconnect with a family member, even if things still feel complicated?

Sometimes it feels like everyone else has a "normal" family and you're the only one carrying around this quiet, complicated thing. But so many of us here know what it's like to live with distance from a parent, a sibling, or a child, and to still be figuring out how we feel about it years later. Whether you're the one who stepped back or the one who got left behind, there's rarely a clean, simple story behind it, and finding an estranged from family community where you can just say that out loud can make a real difference. I've been thinking about how different everyone's path looks. Some people are coping with being estranged from parents and finally feel like they can breathe. Others are coping with being estranged from their adult children and still hoping for a way back. And some of us go back and forth between relief, grief, guilt, and everything in between, sometimes all in the same week. Talking about estrangement without shame, even just here, can feel like a small act of healing after estrangement in itself. There's no one "right" way to feel about any of it. What has helped you make peace with your decision to stay distant or to reconnect with a family member, even if things still feel complicated?