a lightness and a joy in letting go
Being a follower is not as easy as it sounds. At least, not a good follower.
Letting go and following has brought me back to my Dad. Good old daddy issues, hello.
Most, if not all, of it has been recognizing and accepting that my Dad was not a Dad. He does not define fatherhood, and in fact is almost a perfect inversion of it. And it took me until I was this many years old to realize what this means.
What does this mean?
It means that my anger at him for not taking care of me as a father should is based on my fundamental assumption that, he is a father. That my humiliation at his hands was not just senseless torture, but a dedicated training in the inversion of how fathers make their daughter feel. That my basic worthlessness to him means I am worth everything to a real man.
The more I feel into this, the more I learn. “I pity the fool” as he often said while looking at me, was a curse in his backwards mind, but here, now, it is a tender blessing.
“You’re not capable of love” was a promise that I was and am full of love.
“You’ll never be happy.”
“You waste your time doing silly shit”
And on and on. I have been straining to remember if either of my parents ever had anything positive to say to me. What they did say was manipulative; “you’re so a good at making coffee you should do it every morning!” and, “you’re so much smarter than I am” when my mom wanted me to review her work, “I’m so proud” of course when I did something that gained any clout. my mom even used to say “you love me!” after a talk. Gross.
It’s all so… Cringe. I wish there was a better word in my brain than but there’s not.
I guess that the old mental judo analogy works. What did my Dad give me? He gave me a picture perfection negative of fatherhood. It’s all there. Every single detail. Right down to the nitty gritty details.
It is me who continues to wish that the picture was not a negative, but a positive full color print. It is a wish for nonexistence. Since if I were to have had that kind of father, which is to say, a father at all, then I as a personality would not exist.
And I wonder about that.
Or is it that, I would exist, but I would be even more complete and fully myself? Without these wounds, pieces and parts missing, without these catastrophic injuries that formed into my living body as I grew? Would I simply be without all this wounding, pain, this somehow persistent feeling of meaninglessness? Who is this I that I could have or might have or had potential to be?
I wonder.
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