J
I'll just start by saying feeling like this sucks! Pardon the lack of propriety, but its certainly honest and much cleaner than what I could have said.
I process by writing. Some of you have read some of my posts, and you should know that simply writing is a form of therapy to me. Often times, its just the purging that makes things clearer.
Today, as I was preparing dinner for my boyfriend and I, I began feeling very down. As I pondered what it was , I remembered our New Year's Eve service. At that service the pastor spoke about building an alter to remember what The Lord had done. At the end of the service, he invited us to take a stone and ask The Lord for a word for the year. I was really hoping for something pretty and uplifting... peace, joy, or other gushy things. I'm never that lucky. Mine was "mourn". Lucky me.
I felt mournful and wondered what I was mourning. Right away came the image of my father. For lack of space or mental and emotional capacity, I'll just give you the understatement of the year: he was not a good dad. I've felt this way before, but I always struggle with giving myself the freedom to mourn. He was not the kind of man a sane person would want to associate with when he was alive, so why in the world would I feel the need to remember him a year after he died?
So I began writing a letter to him. I've written two letters before and for disowned in response to both of them. Consequently, writing this one was a bit awkward. Most of my letters began with a declaration of hate or disgust. What can I say? In all honesty, I wasn't allowed to be angry as a child. This one was different. It began with the confusion of feeling negatively affected by his death. It continued with the admittance that I would have rather been an orphan than have him as a father.
But the pinnacle, the devastating revelation, came in paragraph 4. Sometimes my emotions fly through the tip of a pen before I can recognize them, and words I'd never imagined being brought into the open, were scribbled down. "Yet I still feel strangely guilty for not being smarter than I was, for not protecting YOU from hurting me out of ignorance (feigned, of course). So I guess your stupidity was my fault. I still feel like I hurt you for allowing you to hurt me."
I've been pondering roots of shame recently and these words came as a slap in the face to me. Notice feel... feel...feel. I am not saying these things are true, simply that they feel true to me even if I know they're not.
I process by writing. Some of you have read some of my posts, and you should know that simply writing is a form of therapy to me. Often times, its just the purging that makes things clearer.
Today, as I was preparing dinner for my boyfriend and I, I began feeling very down. As I pondered what it was , I remembered our New Year's Eve service. At that service the pastor spoke about building an alter to remember what The Lord had done. At the end of the service, he invited us to take a stone and ask The Lord for a word for the year. I was really hoping for something pretty and uplifting... peace, joy, or other gushy things. I'm never that lucky. Mine was "mourn". Lucky me.
I felt mournful and wondered what I was mourning. Right away came the image of my father. For lack of space or mental and emotional capacity, I'll just give you the understatement of the year: he was not a good dad. I've felt this way before, but I always struggle with giving myself the freedom to mourn. He was not the kind of man a sane person would want to associate with when he was alive, so why in the world would I feel the need to remember him a year after he died?
So I began writing a letter to him. I've written two letters before and for disowned in response to both of them. Consequently, writing this one was a bit awkward. Most of my letters began with a declaration of hate or disgust. What can I say? In all honesty, I wasn't allowed to be angry as a child. This one was different. It began with the confusion of feeling negatively affected by his death. It continued with the admittance that I would have rather been an orphan than have him as a father.
But the pinnacle, the devastating revelation, came in paragraph 4. Sometimes my emotions fly through the tip of a pen before I can recognize them, and words I'd never imagined being brought into the open, were scribbled down. "Yet I still feel strangely guilty for not being smarter than I was, for not protecting YOU from hurting me out of ignorance (feigned, of course). So I guess your stupidity was my fault. I still feel like I hurt you for allowing you to hurt me."
I've been pondering roots of shame recently and these words came as a slap in the face to me. Notice feel... feel...feel. I am not saying these things are true, simply that they feel true to me even if I know they're not.
