Here I sit at the end of an annual family vacation, dreading the end of what I look on every year with mixed feelings. My feelings are mixed for several reasons, I’m taken away from work and home and friends, and taken out of my comfort zone for several weeks. We stay in a small house, 5 bedrooms with eight beds and a couch. Of course, that wouldn’t seem small unless you take into account that at it’s most empty, the house holds eleven people. Yes, someone always has to take the couch or a blow-up bed. Being put in a cramped space with different people from different families, in a situation where everyone is around and constantly shuffling or shifting their sleeping arrangements is never particularly easy.

Despite how cramped and different everyone is, by this time in the trip (the end) I don’t want to leave. This is the one time per year that my entire extended family are gathered together, and at any given time cousins from at least three different families are all living together at once.

Everyone is so different, from different places and backgrounds that it makes for a wild and interesting vacation. The only quiet moments are in the morning before everyone wakes up and before everyone falls asleep. But it’s a good kind of loud (usually). Everyone is strange and weird in their own way. Living with that many different people, you learn to deal with a thousand different quirks and particularities and how to navigate so many different personalities.

Getting ready to go anywhere takes about three times as long as it normally would because we have to take everyone’s plans and preferences into account. But it’s not a bad thing. You learn how so much about different personalities, you learn how to manage and plan for a big group; you learn to be able to operate inside of a big group where everyone’s feelings need to be taken into account over you own. You become influenced by people from different places and with different backgrounds and learn more about people and how you can work with them. Two days ago, my uncle started playing old seventies folk songs from a speaker in the small cramped kitchen while my mom, two aunts, and the babysitter were throwing dinner together. One song got my mom and aunts to start dancing and drew my brother and two cousins into the kitchen. Before long, there was a circle formed in the kitchen, and all thirteen people staying in the house were drawn into the smallest room in the house, with the heat from the oven making them sweat, all to get their chance to dance in the middle of the circle. A microphone was found and turned on and even the most unwilling of teenage cousins were thrown into the middle of the circle and made to awkwardly dance.

It was a perfect example of why I love staying in a house with a plethora of family members and why this vacation is worth it every year. You could see everyone’s personalities in their awkward thrashing dance moves, you could see how different everyone was, but it all worked together. Everyone was moving together, being together and celebrating that fact. We are all different and weird and sometimes it’s hard to be together, but at the end of the day we can celebrate those differences and weird quirks and celebrate them all as one, learning from each other and moving together.