On Being Broken

Growing up, I liked books that were complicated. I don't mean complicated in plot or characterization, although those things helped. I mean that I liked books which weren't pure fantasy. The first book series I fell in love with, Redwall, was like that. It was about all these mice and hares and badgers fighting hordes of rats and stoats. It was nice that it had some epic heroism and some strong female protagonists. But mostly, I think that I liked that it let good guys die. In so many other books, I knew what was going to happen from page 1. But in Redwall, I never knew who would survive. And that gave the story stakes. Made it feel real. And I liked that.

Growing older, this didn't change. I liked Harry Potter well enough, but I couldn't really connect to it. Harry had it rough, in a way. But his parents were so good. He had such good friends. And, I guess if I'm honest, I was always jealous of him. I wish I'd had people who loved me like that. People who saw me, supported me, cared for me like that. For all Harry's struggling, I just didn't really buy it. I liked book six the most, because it was the darkest. But even at its darkest, there was always this light that I just didn't buy. It didn't seem real.

In high school, there was literature. And I fell in love. So much of what we read was so complex. The Awakening, Catch-22, all those existentialist novels rocked my world. I loved the authors who were so tortured, loved the characters who were so sad. Sylvia Plath and her "Dying/ Is an art, like everything else./ I do it exceptionally well." Uggh. It kills me.

And then I read Game of Thrones. And GRRM killed off so many characters I felt like I'd gone to heaven. It was horrific, sure. But it felt real. So, so real.

In retrospect, I understand why. Most of my life was brutal. Not in ways you could see. Not in bruises, not in body counts. But in the casual way that people can destroy each other. My family had so much betrayal, so many kangaroo courtrooms. My father would say such nasty things, would so callously and viciously tear my mother, my sister, and I apart until we were broken and simpering. And then, once destroyed, he would magnanimously take an ounce of responsibility and we'd all pretend to like each other again.

I don't know how my mother and my sister felt; I have learned that my own feelings are not everyone else's. But I know I always felt these shows were hollow. My father didn't have a family: he had a group of hostages. And every time I said "I love you" was as much an act of self-preservation as it was the truth.

I think I've spent much of my life trying to explain how all this feels. How it felt to watch my father call my mom a whore. How it felt to watch him win. How it felt to live with my own private Idi Amin, day in and day out for years and years and years. I have spent so much time trying to describe it. But all I keep coming to is devastation. To darkened halls and shattered glass. To his smug, self-satisfied smile. Content to know he had broken us yet again.

Sometimes I idly wonder if my father knew what he was doing. I usually tell myself "No, he's just caught in a web of his own" but I don't know how true that is. Surely you know what you're doing when you lock yourself in a room with an eight year old for hours and tell them about how sick you are, how unhappy you are, how no one cares about you (wanting them to throw themselves with care upon you even as you both know you'll reject them anyway when they do), how everyone in the world is selfish and cruel and powerful except for you. I mean, you would think. But I don't know.

I want to say he lacks self-awareness. He only ever talks about the feelings of others ("you hate me," "you're trying to destroy this family," "you've never loved me"). He never says, "I am afraid" never says "I feel neglected" never says "I need someone else to make me feel better because I don't think I can do it myself." He is a perpetual victim, and me you and everyone we know are the perpetual perpetrators. And I want to say he's just constantly reacting to a fear of something not happening, to words not said, to thoughts not thought, to slight twinges of emotional reaction on my face which make him feel so out of control he lashes out in shaming accusation to bring it all in line. Perhaps the actions lack conscious intentionality. But surely the desire to never remember those actions does not.

It's sometimes scary, to see how he's trained me so well. To silence myself, punish myself, shame myself. I can say so many words, but my feelings all leave him unscathed and me with nothing but guilt and recrimination over how terrible a child I am. My chest feels like tar, bubbling and black, swallowing any cries for help. And I don't want to hurt him, don't want to break him, don't want to avenge myself upon him. I just want to be free. I want to be free. But the tar pulls me down, pulls me back inside myself, to fight and choke and die bit by bit as I continue his work of self-annihilation.

Father's Day

I called my dad today for Father's Day for the first time since January. It's so wonderful to be able to not talk to him for long periods of time, and then see how much I've changed each iteration.

Today, I noticed our dance, showing parts of ourselves, hinting at pain, but never fully saying "I am hurting" without quickly running away. I only tell him of what I'm doing. He tells me of his deteriorating health, of his job fears, the terror I have heard a thousand times spoken as if it's new today. "Honestly, I feel like I'm living day by day" he says, as if it is a confession to a crime he's forgotten he's plead guilty to all his life. I can feel myself want to reach out to him and touch that painful core in the inverted shape of my own. Yet I stop myself from reaching and having my hand bitten for the thousandth time, knowing from experience how this game will be played.

Even as I can handle present-day him so much easier than ever before, his memory is still terrifying. I was walking today on the greenway, and a train came barreling on the tracks alongside it. It screamed, hurtling towards me with a raucous immensity that carried a familiar inevitability which made me clutch myself as much to hide as to protect myself.

I'm glad it felt like him. I'm glad I can feel it. I'm glad I can get trigged, can feel fear coursing through me, can be overwhelmed and cover myself in the terror I didn't let my child self feel. I can let the feeling wash over me, through me. I can feel it and be hurt by it. And I can survive it.

Truth, Proof, and Having Faith Anyway

On Proof and 'The Truth'

My father never lost an argument. Like any skilled artisan, significant credit goes to his tools. And, by far, his most powerful one was The Truth.

Not just any 'truth' of course. The way he saw the world was The Way, and all other ways were lies, malice and/or idiocy. His trick, though, was that he didn't outright make things up. Instead, he used something everyone had to agree had actually happened. And then he'd use what had happened to hammer his perspective home.

For instance:

When I was 3 years old, I used to sleep in the same bed as him. I was always afraid to get up to go to the bathroom, because it might wake him up and then he'd get very upset with me. So I told my mother that I was afraid to go to the bathroom. When she talked to him about this, he yelled "What am I, some kind of ogre that won't even let my own child use the bathroom?" And he used me bringing up the concern as evidence that my mother and I did not love him and thought he was a terrible person. Which led to "If I'm such a terrible person and you are all so miserable here, I will call the divorce lawyer and end this right now." So we'd plead for him to stay and try to convince him that we did love him. But he would have none of it. "NO, NO, NO. You said that you were afraid to go to the bathroom. Didn't you? Didn't you?" When you admitted that yes, he was right, you had said that, he would then (armed with that evidence and your agreement) use it to prove that you did not, in fact, love him. And since you'd already begged him to stay and agreed it was your fault, he would win. He was the victim, we were his tormentors. And he had all the evidence he needed to prove it.

What do you do with that? Well, you try to do everything perfectly [i.e. the way he wants], all the time. To show him, to prove that you really do love him. But you're a stupid kid who is cognitively incapable of doing that. So you do or say something he doesn't like, and he's right back to "YOU DID THIS BECAUSE YOU DON'T LOVE ME." And while it's clearly a logical leap, if you can't objectively prove your love, his way wins. Your father, The Adult, tells you, a child, that although you think you love him you actually don't or you wouldn't do these things. Even though you know you love him, it's obviously not a good enough love to prove it to him. You don't have any proof that makes him believe. And he has plenty of evidence that you don't love him. So not only do you inconvenience and torment him all the time, you don't even love him well enough to be able to convince him of it. That pretty much makes you a monster.

My favorite example of The Truth is how, during one fight, he badgered my mother into signing a piece of paper that actually said "I no longer love John." His sophisticated persuasive tactic to accomplish this was probably the twentieth episode of the following routine:
 "If you loved me, you wouldn't do <thing that displeased him #463>. But since you did it, you clearly don't love me. You did it, right?"
"John, I--"
"No, Mary, You. Did. It. Am I right?"
"John, that's--"
"MARY, DID YOU OR DID YOU NOT DO IT?"
<resignedly> "Yes, John. I did."
"Then it's true you don't love me. Admit it."
"John, that's not-"
"No Mary, you already admitted you did this. And since you did it, you can't possibly love me."
"John, that's not true."
"Yes, Mary. Yes it is. You already admitted that you did it."
<just to get him to stop> "Fine. Ok, John, yes. I don't love you. You win. Will you stop now?"
"No, I want it in writing."

So after more of the same for a few minutes, she signed it.

And from that point forward, every single time my father needed to prove that he was the victim in a loveless marriage to a cruel, hateful wife, he would say "No, I know you don't love me. You haven't loved me for years. I have it on paper."

That was always what arguing with my father was like. Yes, my mother did literally do something which my father was displeased with. Yes, he got her to say that she did not love him. Yes, she even signed a piece of paper that said this. The facts that he berated her until she did or that there may have been motivations other than hating him or hurting him for the initial thing that displeased him are completely ignored. If you tried to argue with him, he used what you had said like a cudgel and beat you with it. He always had proof.

When you're in an environment where your abuser is Always Right (and won't allow any other outcome), where he will threaten to leave until you take the blame and beg him to stay, where he will always yell until you acquiesce, where he always has a litany of 'concrete evidence' to justify his claims, it's almost impossible to believe that he's wrong. *Especially* when you're a child. His Truth always trumps yours.

Having Faith Anyway

Why did he do this? Well, fundamentally, what I think my father wanted even if he didn't realize it is undeniable, everlasting proof that he was loved. Like many of us, he was hurt badly in his past (as a child) by the people who were supposed to love and protect him (his parents). Ever since, he has been so scared of being hurt again that he wants Absolute Proof of Love before taking the risk of trusting it.

In many respects, his fear is well founded. Love is trust. Love is risk. When I tell you "I love you," you can't really know how I feel or what that means. You can gather a bunch of evidence one way or another. But you can't really know. You just have to trust me. Yet when you've trusted in love in the past (especially as a child), and that love has not protected you, you are acutely aware of how risky it is to believe someone else saying "I love you." My father said "I love you" all the time. And every time, because I felt like such a terrible person since I did all these things to hurt him and convince him I didn't love him, I felt terribly guilty when he said it. Is it any wonder that I find "I love you" such a hard thing to believe myself?

It's a risk. You can gather evidence to help make it a safer risk. Still, on some level, you just have to trust the other person. You have to hold onto the belief without Absolute Proof. You have to have faith.

My father was too scared to take the risk of believing I loved him. So I thought my love wasn't good enough. That I wasn't good enough. So I have been too scared to believe I can be good enough for others, because I know so acutely well how much it hurt to try so hard and still not be good enough for my father.

And now, in my adulthood, I have internalized his voice, asking for Absolute Proof of my love. Of my worth. Of the validity of my feelings.  I am constantly demanding, constantly dissatisfied. Some evidence of my worth may temporarily quiet the voice, but it always comes back. It always wants Absolute, Eternal Proof that I Will Be Good Enough.

More and more, though, I have come to accept that there is no Absolute, Eternal Proof. I can never prove to my father that I love him. I can never prove to myself that others love me. I can never prove that everyone isn't lying to me when they say I matter to them. I can never prove that even if I've been valuable to people in the past, that I will continue to be valuable to them in the future. I can get evidence that supports these conclusions. But there's always a chance I could be wrong. Always a chance.

For most of my life, I've let this lack of proof rule me. Because there is no Absolute Proof, I've been too afraid to take the risk. I've been too afraid to have faith.

Too afraid to have faith in others, but also too afraid to have faith in myself. What if I believe and I'm wrong? What if I trust someone and they can't help me when I need them? What if I trust myself and I'm not enough? And they're hurt? And they leave? Again?

Possibilities, all. But I don't want to live my life like my father. I don't want to deny myself love, deny myself worth because I am afraid of what will happen if it goes away. I don't want to always, incessantly demand a proof neither I nor anyone else can ever give me. I have to take the risk of trusting others. Of trusting myself. I have to have faith.

Not a foolhardy faith, not a faith built upon what I want to be true. But a faith informed by my experience, by what I think I know, by what I feel. I know there are things about myself from which I can build a sense of worth. I know I have people in my life who, imperfect as they are, truly care about me and will advocate for me and won't easily let me go. I may fail. They may fail me. But I am at the point in my life where I am convinced that the pain of that failure is less than my constant fear and the loss I would feel at spending my entire life never believing in myself and those who love me. Like my father, I will never have Proof that I am and always will be loved. But unlike my father, I don't have to let an absence of Proof deny me the chance of having love at all.

What Change Is

For all my doubts and fears, I do firmly believe in this: change is possible. It can be hard, and there is always a limit to what you can and can't change. But we can change ourselves. We can change our patterns. We can even change patterns that have been entrenched in our families for decades, for generations. Change is possible.

I've believed this so devoutly for so long because I need it to be true. It's why I started blogging, actually, over a decade ago: I wanted to explore myself, understand myself so I could find a way to change and avoid the endlessly repeating patterns of destruction my father seemed trapped in all his life.

And slowly but surely, I've been changing. I have some honest-to-god friendships with people I trust not to leave me. I have some confidence in myself. I can, increasingly, not only identify my feelings but vulnerably express them to others. And, perhaps most difficult but most important, I can separate my responsibility to others from how they are responsible for their own reactions and own choices.

I have changed. So very much. I'm still changing. And today I decided to truly test it.

I've not talked to my father in a few years. I have had very brief, very superficial conversations. But I've not said anything of substance to him in three years. It's been really good for me. To remove such an omnipresent source of fear and guilt, to free myself from constantly feeling responsible for him; it's been really really good. But I also felt really guilty about it. Not because I wasn't talking to him, but because I didn't tell him why, didn't at least give him a chance to respond. So finally, I felt like I'd grown enough to meet with him and talk to him.

So, today, I did.

We walked for a little awhile, easing back in, catching up. And then we sat down and I told him.

I told him that there were many reasons I'd distanced from him. The main one, though, was what happened the last time we'd really talked, three years ago, about me coming out to his parents. He felt that me telling them would kill them, and he made it clear that if I did against his wishes he would really, truly hurt me. Back then, I did what I knew: got really quiet, felt really guilty and scared, and gave up. But today, I was able to tell him that that conversation was not only terrifying but immensely hurtful because it felt like he felt as if I really wanted to hurt him and he had to do whatever it took to stop me.

He agreed with me, and said he still feels that way. He still feels like my mother, my sister, and I do want to hurt him. He said he's felt at least since we were in high school that we didn't care about him, that if he was across the street bleeding to death in a ditch we wouldn't do a thing to help him.

In the past, I would have been wracked with guilt and stayed silent. I would have felt like I couldn't do anything to change his mind, and I would have been paralyzed.

But because I've changed, I didn't do that. I knew I couldn't convince him of anything. But what I could do was tell him how I feel and then let him do with that as he would. So I told him that it hasn't felt like that just since high school. That I could remember telling him that I loved him when I was six years old and that he would still tell me "No, you don't." That I tried for years and years even as an adult, despite his furious drunken rampages, despite being called a traitor and harangued for hours during his divorce, despite being terrified of him all my life, that I had tried and tried to keep caring for him and not give up. But that when he threatened me, it became apparent that nothing I could do would ever be good enough to convince him that I cared about him. So I stopped trying.

And then, astonishingly, he said that I was right. He said that he's felt this way in all his relationships, that he can't trust anyone and that everyone wants to hurt him. It didn't really affect me that much, not at first. He's apologized before, and he's really good at saying what a "bad, terrible person" he is. I've always known he hates himself, and he's so filled with guilt and shame that it's not uncommon.

So I didn't trust it. I still don't. He's tortured and has so many years of dealing with his demons that I'm not going to jump for joy and say "Oh Daddy, I love you so!" and believe everything's going to be ok in the end. But, as we kept talking, I started to let myself listen. I let myself hear him say "It wasn't right for me to transfer my suffering to you as a child." I let myself hear "I made my own choices and it wasn't your fault." It wasn't my fault. It wasn't that I wasn't good enough to prove I loved him, it was that he was not in a place to believe that love. He decided, influenced by so many of his past experiences, to reject me. It was his choice, not a defect of mine. And he said this. Over and over. And even if it was a statement made from guilt, a statement made to convince himself he was A Good Person, a statement he will forget, a statement disconnected from his emotional core, it was also a statement I think part of him really believed.

In a movie, this might have been an epic turning point. Or it might have been vindication or a momentous event for me. But it wasn't. I keep wanting change to be A Huge Moment where things "click" and I am the optimal, self-actualized person I feel I can be. I keep wanting The Answer or The Experience which makes everything different. Yet change, as I've experienced it, has never been about Big Moments. It's a bunch of small, but significant moments. It's slow, inching growth.

Today, I grew. Instead of responding with fear, self-blame, or guilt, I responded with vulnerable honesty from a hard-earned place of compassion and self-worth. Instead of disbelieving or not trusting the affirming things someone else (my father, of all people!) said, I let myself listen to them. Instead of taking responsibility for his self-hatred, for his guilt, for his anger, I was better able to let those be his own choices and reactions and to let authentically expressing myself Be Enough. I was not in a place to do any of these things three years ago. I don't think I could have even imagined them. But today, I did.

Again, it's small. I don't know if my father will change or how our relationship will look in the future. But it feels good to put myself in a situation that used to completely overwhelm and defeat me and come out the other side intact. There is some guilt. There is some doubt. My heart is still hard with mistrust. But not as much guilt, not as much doubt, not as hard. And I think that's what change really is.

Fighting the Battle of Myself

I'm in a good place, right now, in this moment. In the past week (after too many things happened in quick succession to list), I've been able to own "I matter." I play with it, I savor it, I say it to myself and I hold it to my breast like a small, warm animal I must keep safe, experiencing a nascent joy as it pulses through me.

But I have to fight to keep it. I can sit with in for a few moments, and then grim armies at my gates will start their bombardments again. And they start to overwhelm me, and they close in and the sky starts to get so dark, and I have to struggle so fervently to pull this small warm thing back to me.

Did you know that I matter? I don't think I did. Not really. And then I started crying and people started listening. And then I started witnessing other people who believed they mattered. Who were so open and honest about how much pain they experienced from so many people in so many places who, in unremitting savage chants, pound like wardrums in the assault on our souls. And they were so open about that hurt, and still they held onto the belief that they mattered. I was in awe, that one could do that. And I thought "I want to do that. I want to own my hurt and my worth. I want to own myself." And I started trying.

Did you know that I get to decide? "Decide what?" I asked my therapist. "That's it. You get to decide." This, I did not know. I did not know that I get to decide who can make me feel worthless. I did not know that I get to decide what my expectations are and whether I'm reaching them. I did not know that I get to decide these things, and then I get to decide when to listen to others about change. That I don't have to be my father, who always decides everything, but I also don't have to be the scared little child who has to let him. And as I confront change and the child whispers "You can't, you don't know how, they always win they always leave they always win they always leave," I can hold that small warmth and say "I don't know how. But I learn to decide what "winning" is. I can learn to decide whether I'm succeeding. And I can learn to decide who I can trust not to leave." And I've started trying.

It is hard. It is hard to own my hurt, to realize how deep my self-hatred goes, fueled by a million things big and small each day that say with unthinking conviction "You are abomination. A repugnant punchline whose very existence is as much a testament of your deep wrongness as it is a threat to the wellbeing of Good, Normal people everywhere." It is hard to confront the abyss it fuels within myself and how that darkness warps me and my views of those around me. It is hard to break down in front of others and to let them see the immensity of the pain and terror and sadness as my words falter and then fall out clumsy and dull. And it is hard to rematerialize anew and not calcify or dissolve again.

It is hard. But I am trying. Trying to hold onto "I matter." And "I get to decide." And "I matter, and you do too. I get to decide, and you get to too." I am trying to remember that, in order to let you decide and matter, I don't have to erase myself. And it is so, so hard.

In this moment, I think I can do it: I think I can win this battle of myself. But it's going to be a hell of a fight.

Father, Christmas

I just saw my father for the first time in a year or so. I used to see him once every week or two, on Friday nights before I went to visit my mother (they live ten minutes from each other). But it was always compelled by guilt and laced with the fear of what would happen if I ever disrupted our relationship. When I felt him pulling away from my after I transitioned, I took the opportunity to pull away also. Now, I talk to him perhaps three or four times a year, for a couple of minutes. And that’s that.

That kind of distance does something. I felt cut-off, certainly; better because I wouldn't feel guilty by being around him, worse for the lingering knowledge in the back of my mind that he was still out there and knew I’d pulled away too. But it also gave me new clarity when I saw him again.

I suppose this is what happens to many when they go off to college and return. Instead of having someone be a usual presence, you gain more perspective and distance. And with distance, like taking a step back to survey an entire scene instead of focusing upon what’s right in front of your nose, you see more anew.

He was the same person I remembered, but I could see the sameness with a twinge of difference. Fat, awkward, a scared boy in a large man’s body who doesn’t know how he ended up in the dolorous life he’s found himself in. Now, his hair and beard are almost entirely white, and I thought of how he looked a bit like a rather tired and sad Santa Claus. The comparison prompted me to imagine, as I often do, a hypothetical future scenario where my partner and I ask him to dress as Santa Claus and bring gifts to our kids for Christmas. And I imagined how happy he’d look, how joyous he’d be to have these innocent little creatures laughing and smiling around him, happy because he was giving them things, and he’d see their joy as love. He’d want to awkwardly pull away, of course. He wouldn’t know what to do with this love that scared him. Or, in the worst case, one of my children would say or do something that would prompt him to respond to them as another selfish, poorly socialized child might, not really understanding that he’s a giant adult playing with tiny children, not a poorly socialized peer. But assuming that didn’t happen (and, if it did, I don’t think it’d be particularly severe), it would make him shine. He would be so so happy. And I would be happy. A bit wary, of course, but with my own family and the safety I felt with my partner and the love I felt for my children, I would be happy.

It’s a fantasy, of course. Not *that* much of one; a feasible one, as far as fantasies go. But it was still starkly different from our present reality. The reality where we stand somewhat distant in the cold,  the gray sky and the dead trees the backdrop to two sad, lonely people. He can barely look at me, his eyes shifting down and away, his body withdrawn. And as I stand there and look at this childish old man before me, I wonder to myself “How could I have ever been afraid of someone so sad and scared? How could this man have ever invoked such absolute terror inside of me?”

Then he looks at me, for a moment, and I meet his sad, sunken eyes with the blueish purple sacs below them just like mine. And I realize how very similar we are. How, even though I devoted years to trying to find ways to Not Be Him, he’s one of the few people I know who feels so very… familiar.

This gaping wound, this morose and fearful child in a decaying body he barely recognizes as his own. I want to reach out to him, to cry out “I feel so sad and scared. I feel so very alone. And you know that feeling. You live that feeling. You are that feeling. I live in a world of people who seem to hide or never feel the loss or hurt or fear or desire that I so so strongly feel all the time and here you are, your very existence aching. I know that ache. God, I know that sad, bitter ache that wishes for so much more than it has. And I hate being so lonely and unhappy, and I hate not knowing how I ended up this way or how to change or break free. And I just want to be with someone who knows, who lives that feeling too.”

But we both know that can’t happen. At heart, he's a little boy who wants to be loved and wants to be protected. I can’t ever be the parent he so desperately needs. I can never be enough for him. I can only ever be a child to this sad, sweet, awkward boy who only ever wanted to be loved and when he finally was he hated himself too much to accept it.

And that’s the dark coda to this sad story. I ask him about his work, and he predictably complains about it (now he has too much work, whereas a year ago he was constantly obsessing about being fired for too little; it’s always something). And then he says “But it keeps me going; I’d probably have no reason to get out of bed in the morning if I didn’t have it.” The sort of glimpse of desolation that he tosses out where part of him so wants someone to ask more, to care more, to reach out and feel that desperate pain even though I know that if I tried he’d lash out and pull away.

Yet it feels like a Ghost of Christmas Future, pointing me towards my own grave. The walking dead, a sad, lonely, self-loathing person who hurts so very much but pushes away those who try to reach past, barely living only for work, the one place one can truly feel useful, valued, and productive.

I don’t want to feel like that. I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to end like that. But it’s in my blood. I’ve been running from it for so many years, and yet I’m still staring it right in the face. And one day, an ever-smaller number of years from now, I can so vividly see myself traded places with him, glumly bewildered at how it happened just as I always feared it would.