Reflective brunch with pops in Reflection and Release

Man what has it been 10 days since my last entry?? Now I know I usually beat myself up mentally when I fall short but I’ve learned that it doesn’t change anything about the situation. All that does is make you feel like you suck at life and actually antagonizes your own mind. So safe to say I’m back on the wagon here. That’s all there is to it!

Yesterday I met up with my dad, who always seems to have an endless amount of clothes he’s giving away to shelters or friends. Somehow I can always count on him to have an entire clearance rack in his closet ready to be worn, so I look forward to the monthly pick ups. We don’t talk as much as we probably would like and that falls on both of us. Since a kid I’ve always felt like the communication level we shared was closer to the minimum than average. As I’ve gotten older and he’s felt comfortable to share the intimate parts of his childhood, I see that he has broken every cycle that was set as precedent by my grandfather. My grandfather was in the army back in times where as a puerto rican man, no one was willing to hire him with a Puerto Rican education in America. Part lack of academia and part social norms being against people of color didn’t leave him with many options. Enlisting was probably a hard decision to make but it beats being so hungry on the streets that you have to turn into a criminal to survive. Many veterans today are still dealing with that but that isn’t the objective of this post. Long story short my grandfather and father can’t have conversations that I share with my dad because my grandfather never did that with his father. Looking at the whole picture, you see my dad and say he’s more of a father than my grandfather was in every way. But as someone new coming into this world without any of this context, all I knew was that I wished he was around more. So looking back, I can see how his faith in my amazing mother, paired with the fact that he’s already doing 10 times more than my grandfather did, would lead him to believe that his level of effort was more than enough. Believe me this is not a journal post about excuses, I don’t believe he gave his 100%. With more information, we can understand why and remember that our parents are also flawed human beings just like us.

I shared with him the fact that my choice to skip my finals week in my second year of high school back in the day was to try to force him to have a more hand on approach. I also shared with him I thought the family forgot about me. There was a time where I ended up moving 3 hours away from the city and that increased that gap between my paternal family and me substancially. Living so far for around 4 years established a lower level of communication that I believed would all be solved simply with me moving back. But as we all know habits die hard and nobody picked up the phone to see how I was doing even when I came back and only lived a borough away. These details among other things were thoughts and feelings I needed to get off my chest because staying within only caused me pain and the inability to move forward. As person halfway to 30, I feel the need to remove all of my possible fears and mental chains that would hold me back from believing that I deserve better than what I can do right now. Fear has stopped me from seizing so many opportunities in my life and its easy for me to live in the past and beat myself up about it. But as time moves on, this doesn’t help me become the person I need to be to take care of my family. So as I continue to release my feelings and regrets of the past, I can see a much clearer future. Most importantly, I’m starting to believe that, regardless of what I’ve chosen in the past, I can turn it around and I deserve to turn it around.

Whatever you’re going through, believe that you can turn it around. Believe that you deserve it.

Last updated December 06, 2018