Selena's Story

I have five siblings that I am related to through blood and then I also have three step siblings. What is it about that group of people that you love so much?

They have always been there for me throughout my entire life. We've been through a lot as a family. We're all very close right now and talk daily, but that is not how things have always been, especially when I was a lot younger. And some of my siblings when I was younger, they went through some very bad years. But all of them have, I've watched them pull it together, and really like turn around their lives throughout the years, which I've never told them this, but I admire them so much for the amount that they've gone through. And they're all so successful now and are getting married and starting families. And I don't know, I just, I admire them a lot.

This is a group of people with all kinds of wonderful qualities. They’ve been through difficult times. Many families have. They've come out stronger and more caring. And they seem to care for each other as well. From, from what, what you're saying, so the same wonderful family that you love dearly, many of them, not all of them, are unvaccinated, right? My mom and my stepdad, they are not vaccinated. And then, I'm the youngest of the six of us, and I am the only one who has my vaccine. They only get their news from like one or two sources. So I think a lot of it is very biased. But there are so many fake studies and stuff out there that a lot of people fall for. And I think they are included in that. I think they like to say, oh, well, there's this many people that have died from getting the vaccine. There's this many people who have had heart failure. And I don't see any of that online. I don't really go out of my way anymore to look at stuff like that. But I think a lot of it is just like the fake science, fake studies that they see in the news or on social media.

You have this wonderful group of people whom you love dearly and love to spend time with, but you have this pretty serious disagreement which at some point could have been, might still be, risky. How do you manage that? Do you get angry with them or how do you cope with that? A lot of my close friends from home, they were in similar situations as well, which was very comforting because in the beginning I was like, I'm gonna go crazy. Like, I can't stand this. I don't know what I could possibly say to like make them realize that this is an actual threat. And I had my friends that understood what I was dealing with, with my family at home, so that was relieving.

So, this is a group of people that you, you love dearly, but you disagree with them on something pretty important. Has your love for them changed at all in the last couple of years? I definitely don’t love or care for them any less than I did before, but it's opened my eyes; it's shown me their perspective in ways that I guess I hadn't really seen before. So this attitude towards vaccination is an outlier in a sort of way.