While I love my family -- and I do -- I'm just not a "family person."

Growing up, I never spent a huge amount of time with my family. While my parents worked, I'd often be left at daycare, with a babysitter, or something similar. Usually, I'd come home from school, dump my backpack on the ground, and head straight to my bedroom or to the television. I don't mean to say that I never spent any time with my parents. When I was really young, I spent pretty much all of my time with my mom, and when my dad would come home later from work, I'd sit in his big reclining chair with him, watching movies. It's just that as I got older and my parents divorced, everyone became really busy. My mom worked all the time; my dad did his own thing, too. Of course, nothing is wrong with all that, it just happened to lead to me not being a family person.

A lot of the time in high school, my friends would mention that their moms were their best friends, that they could tell their mom's anything and that they'd hang out with their mom's just because they liked to. My mom isn't my best friend. I don't tell my mom everything in my life -- in fact, I barely tell her anything. My mom's opinion also doesn't really mean anything to me. I don't go to her for help, nor do I ask her to help me make decisions (no offense, mom, but you've never been good at helping me make decisions anyway). This goes for the rest of my family as well. I'm not close with my mom and it doesn't mean I'm a bad person just because I'm not family-oriented. Further, I love my dad, and I consider myself a "Daddy's girl," but I can't stand to talk to him for more than 10 minutes without getting frustrated. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just how I grew up.

When I began to really think about where I wanted to go for college, I never once put family into the equation. Staying close to home was never in the cards for me; I wanted to get as far away from home as I could. This wasn't because I hated my family, but rather just because I've never been terribly close to them and wasn't afraid to experience a different environment than the one I'd grown up in.

I'm not a family person. My family is not the most important thing to me, and although I love them, I'm not dependent on them. When I list off the things I couldn't live without, "family" isn't very far up on the list. My mom isn't my best friend, my dad pisses me off, and I sought out a school a thousand miles from my immediate family. And that's all okay. I'm still a good person, I've just been raised differently.