thanks to discussions with my friend lizzie, I have had some new realizations.
i had known of my dad’s anger and displeasure toward me and my siblings actions. i wanted to avoid those at any cost. i came to know that as flying under the radar. if i could fly under the radar, i could avoid the wrath of dad. this was a continuous and exhausting struggle. those times i would do something wrong, no matter how small, I’d pop up on the radar and be in fear of what ever retribution would come my way. It was never a lesson except through retribution.
how is this fear any different than the fear the wild rabbit feels, afraid of the next time they are to be chased by a wolf or coyote, with in inches of their life? in both instances, there is this living in fear of something that may or may not happen. with this constant fear, the adrenal gland constantly works over time. that’s hard on the body.
all of this came into focus from a simple and obvious statement; living in fear = not safe. it is so obvious, i had never realized it before.
the above and more comes cascading out of that statement. i had this vision of a somewhat idyllic childhood. Sure, i had my struggles, among them my dysfunctional family and the gifts that came from that, but leaving childhood i felt somewhat well adjusted. Also, so does the rabbit but still, when they hear a branch break at 50 feet, their hair trigger response tells them to run.
on this statement alone, living in fear = not safe, causes the crystalline structure of my supposed idyllic childhood to come crashing down. i now sit in the broken shards, in full recognition of my early childhood along with some of the outcomes because of it. i, like the rabbit developed to hair trigger response to run. why run? because i like the bunny, don’t feel save.
sitting in the shards, an answer to a long standing question comes into focus, “how with this supposed idyllic childhood, do i face such emotional and depressive struggles?” the answer comes clear; there was no idyllic childhood. i now have a better understanding of the reasons for the lack of foundation that i hoped would serve as a basis of handling life’s struggles.
will i ever feel safe again? likely not. the early childhood’s experience are pretty difficult to overcome. even if i could, there still exists this safety robbing fear is part of just about any higher life form. even with that, thanks to you and my friends around me, i can learn ways to handle it and hopefully make for a better life. is failure inevitable? sometimes. i will close with a self authored meme, “failure doesn’t make me less of a human…it only makes me human.”
when dad was around, i would spend a couple hours a weekend doing senior tech support over the phone. since i couldn’t point to stuff on the screen, dad would do stuff i didn’t realize he was doing. i asked him what was on the screen now and he’d described what he’d see and i wonder how the hell he got there. most of the time when we were through, my dad would be no closer to a solution.
i approached my niece about it. She didn’t really want to discuss it. As she walked away, she said she didn’t really want the laptop. i told my siblings what happened and figured i had the votes to get the laptop.
i thought about immediately leaving town. i didn’t. i was supposed to help with a breakfast the next morning. i called and told my sister i wasn’t going to help and i wasn’t even sure that i would go to the breakfast. i did go to the breakfast. i remember one sibling approaching me. i don’t remember what was discussed as I lived in my emotional stew. i do remember it wasn’t much. after finishing my breakfast, Mary and i promptly left.
as a child, i have very few memories of belonging. it is just an indication of my fucked up, dysfunctional family. I still seek to belong and find belonging and acceptance in the groups i attend. it is sad that i seldom got that sense of belonging as a child and it was only made worse by the betrayal and the estrangement that followed.
on one side, it is a sign of something held back. maybe it was something considered so minor, it didn’t have to be brought up. perhaps it was fear, that if you really knew how i felt, you’d think less of me or even reject me.
that act of sharing is a courageous act, being vulnerable, exposing a little more who that person really is. sure, the person asking the question likely has every right to be asking that question. the problem is, in asking the question, they have not only overlooked the gift they have just received, they have also totally disrespected the vulnerable person fighting through their desire not to share.
when the person receiving the bit of information can see it as a gift, they can be joyous of their new discovery. the person sharing gets treated with the utmost respect. they feel safe. that makes it all the easier for them to share the next time.
there is no doubt that often times an unsolicited solution is well meaning. sometimes an unsolicited solution has unexpected consequences. i want to explore why it can be effective sometimes and yet other times detrimental.
that clarifies for me why not to give solutions to the person who is likely to see the solution as an opportunity missed. they will likely end up feeling shame.
a pretty common difficulty in today’s society is the inability to process shame. that really is no surprise since people have difficulties processing pretty much all emotions. i would think that inability to process shame would be more prevalent with depressed people. the inability to process the shame can contribute to a gloomy feeling, which can widen their pathway downward, which makes the journey to depression even easier.
the cases of bad parenting are close and nearly no space in between. that makes healthy cases worthy of a recognition. i often share a fathering incidence of yours and it’s about time i personally honor you.
i hope you recognize how you have helped to set up your daughters for success. i am certain you haven’t performed every fatherly act perfectly, but far closer to the idea than most fathers i have seen. as a matter of fact, for every father like you, i have seen far too many fathers fall far short of the example i saw you set that sunny day. hell, many fathers i see wouldn’t be able to accomplish one of the four above mentioned acts that you did in a matter of five minutes.
as the day went on on i realized the love i see in my friends. if god is love and love is god, i felt closer to my god than i had in a long time.
if goes with out saying my second life is full of people in which i share my life and in return, they share theirs. These friends give me a sense that i belong. while they can completely take away the pain of being alone and lonely in my first life, they remind me, today, in the here and now that those feeling don’t have to rule the roost, today
or maybe like me, it’s a combination of safety and fear. Is the safety really safe? Is the fear truly justified? What is lost by living in a seemingly safe and fear free place?
those of you who read 
just because Mary’s mass looks like a liposarcoma doesn’t mean it is. if may be green, but not the true green. it still is very possible that even though it looks like a liposarcoma doesn’t make it liposarcoma. mri are still too imprecise.
i was passing on some math riddles to a friend with a degree in mathematics. I passed the on for fun and entertainment. my friend felt lest than because they couldn’t figure out the riddles. I didn’t like that what I did troubled my friend. i quicker felt less that myself, feeling responsible for my friends struggle. all too quicker, i called myself a “loser”. it seemed like a huge leap but pointed to inherent instability.
I spent a lot of time conversing with friends, and getting real with myself. i gave name too the scary feelings. i talked about them. i talk about my precipitous fall. i talked about where I didn’t want to be. that day sucked but far less that the previous day’s suck.
facing off with the big d 