Not Some Flaw Within

By Anonymous / Winter 2023

To my dearest,

There is so much to learn about yourself and even for me still, for myself. We are the same at our core, and yet so incredibly different.

Please try to understand your situation at present with a bit more forgiveness for self. Please take some solace in that I know for certain that you will find your way through your confusion and resultant anger—most of it, anyway, and no doubt the rest will go with more time, and more understanding. I apologize for sounding so cryptic. There’s a lot to cover, and more than just for a single letter.

Let’s talk about our father. I know you didn’t realize what was happening to you for a very long time. How could you? You were a little kid, and then just someone grappling with growing up, and the kind of experience and knowledge needed to grasp why someone who was supposed to love you unconditionally could be so conditional about it isn’t something a child should be responsible for. And I get it. When things were good, they were great. He was the ultimate “Disneyland Dad” and what child would say no to being able to go to Disneyland or Six Flags monthly with their friends, to the arcade and ice skating, or to getting movie rentals and candy from Blockbuster every Friday night? That’s how dads always seemed to show their love in the movies and TV shows you watched. But the TV dads never had that other side to them. The anger, the name calling, the screaming, the abuse. The other kids you knew were never put in a place where they had to decide whether or not to press charges against their own father. And you refrained because you were worried that mom wouldn’t be able to support you and your little brother and sister. You did what you thought was right at the time with the limited amount of information you had, and you should know that I still think you made the right call. I wish for us though that we had had the strength or foresight to end the relationship there, and to try to decipher what the real pull was- the fun things that dad offered, or the desperation to just be loved by him. Turns out it was both, but the methods he used of fun, new, shiny things to distract you with and to buy your love would unfortunately affect your perspective on love and relationships of all kinds for a very long time.

Let’s talk about those friendships and relationships. In the semi-altered words of the Grail Knight at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “You chose poorly.” But again, who could blame you? Your initial education about relationships in the world was tainted from the start. Dad effectively taught us that love was to be bought. If we wanted our friends to love us, we had to amuse them and to entertain. We did have great times, but that desire to be fun and have fun led us so far off course. I know dad never had any interest in our education. It’s not like he ever checked if our homework was done or talked to us about the future beyond some supposed duty to get married, but without realizing, we let him damage our future. Our focus on fun with our friends and especially on all the cute boys we got attention from pulled us away from school and away from actual fulfillment. I know it didn’t seem as much at the time because yes, we had an absolute blast, and I know you don’t know this at present, but that focus on fleeting fun as a form of happiness sets us back significantly. In whose eyes? Well, society’s for sure, but you have always defined success for yourself as getting a degree, actually using your brain, and having a great job that also does something genuinely good for the world. Those dreams weren’t for anybody but you. And you end up giving up so much more than you could realize, as you’ve had baby fever since you were 19, and your ability to have children is put on an indefinite hold because that desire to have fun leaves you uneducated, overworked, and significantly underpaid - mostly by dad, actually - for the foreseeable future. You don’t have kids, because you can’t afford to give them a good life.

And love. You are weird about love. You know, and have always known deep down that actual love cannot be bought with things. If it could, you never would’ve stopped loving our father. But still- and even still—you’ve never actually stopped trying for his love either. Unfortunately, this shapes your relationship with yourself and basically every romantic relationship you’ll ever have. You will turn down a lot of truly great guys because receiving love from them was too easy, and for a handful of guys you do fall for, you will spend too many years on each of them in what amounts to a holding pattern. They are emotionally unavailable and generally treat you as disposable, but give you just enough “love” to keep hope alive that some day it’ll be the real deal. I wish this wasn’t the case, but you do this because you feel unworthy of love. You feel unlovable.

I know you don’t realize that is what’s at the root of all of this for you, that feeling of being unlovable and unworthy. The anger that builds inside you is misconceived as strength, because it keeps you from breaking down, but all it actually does is keep you from understanding and being able to move forward.

Please don’t finish this letter by internalizing any negative feelings of responsibility or despair for our situation. You’ve blamed yourself since the start, and it never helped offer the drive for change. You will reach a point though where the feeling of your reality becomes so wrong, you just can’t ignore it anymore. Things will become more explosive than ever with dad as you reach your limit, finally. And then he’ll be out of your life for five whole years. In that time, you will choose to do some good for yourself, starting with going back to school. You’ll be successful, and this will help give you back some self-worth, which will continue to unlock a series of very positive events. Don’t get me wrong, it’s going to be hard. You will be giving up time with your friends, any chance at any extra money in the bank after paying bills and buying the absolute basics, and you can kiss any time for a relationship goodbye. You will get a lot of time to really look at who you are and what you need though. Still, it won’t be until a solid year or two of introspection while being relentlessly immersed in your real feelings (and then one very particular evening of self-realization) that you finally come to understand that being unlovable is actually how you’ve felt all along, because your pursuits and methods have been hollow, founded by a hollow man. It’s been the poison seed that gave life to the wrong in your world. And thankfully, when this realization hits, you’ll have lived enough and have enough perspective to be able to finally tell yourself that it’s not true. It still won’t be perfect from there. Our dad will, somehow, still find ways to make you feel small and unlovable again, but at long last you will have enough love for yourself to understand that that’s not about some flaw within you but rather, within him.