Excavation of the heart

I think my favorite part of blogging is that I have to proclaim to myself each and every time that this is a safe space for me. I have to remind myself that my thoughts and feelings are valid and have the right to take up the space that they do, a space that I created for them.

The hardest part about convincing myself to write openly, especially when my experiences are in relation to others, is that I feel it a betrayal of sorts, to air my side, without their consent. But if an experience is shared, am I then permissed to share my portion of the experience? Rather than think of it as something negative, perhaps sharing openly, vulnerably, and honestly in a space that I have made known is open and free for those who wish to come dive into my thoughts is my super power.

Direct communication is hard for me. It was never modeled growing up, at least with my foundational relationships. Directly telling my parents anything, usually ensued in an argument which would inevitably get shut down, never to be reopened with calm minds and hearts, only allowed to fester. It wasn’t like we didnt try to seek help, I remember visiting a family therapist once, after we had the police called during a particularly loud ´disagreement´, we were visited by someone who’d ask us questions separately, I remember being taken out of class one day too - to be interviewed alone about my family life. Despite it not being the safest space, it was the only one I knew, and I didnt want to venture out into the vast unknown alone. After this we went maybe three times..I remember being honest with the therapist, earnestly trying my best to help facilitate change within the turbulent space we called home. I remember using the therapist as an accountability point, telling the rest of my family ‘but the therapist…’ and after the few sessions, we stopped going because my dad was a patriarchal father with unsealed wounds and an (what i would diplomatically refer to as a ´dysfunctional´family) to communicate the more complicated things. He was a ´because I said so’ kind of father, a ´that’s none of your business´kind of dad. He was an ´I can find ways to tear you down to your core, say the most hurtful thing, feel bad about it after and apologize disingenuously because it will most definitely happen again and again and again.´

Naming these things, citing these experiences, learning what it meant to be continuously, repeatedly disappointed by someone who was supposed to be my role model, by someone who was supposed to teach me how to excel, succeed, and grow into my fullest self - is hard. It is embarrassing, to feel like I am proving him right in a way. He talked about how shitty a father he was, though it was in the homophobic context of

I was such a bad up male role model that I screwed you up and now you’re gay.

Or

I bet when you grow up you’re gonna write a book about what a shitty father I was and all the ways I screwed you up.

I would deny these accusations, these self fulfilling prophecies that he foretold, because all he had to do was find it in him to change himself. To realize that he was projecting his insecurities, and if he thought these things, he could have just done better. I grew up deeply disappointed and betrayed by the most prominent model of masculinity I had available, feeling that he wasted his male privilege by refusing to hold himself accountable. I knew if I were given the chance, that I could be a better man than he was, but that was taboo, something I would interpret as a burden or liability to the fragile routine that felt like a comforting chaos. We lived in a loop of miscommunication, projection, pain, and an inability to get to the root of any of it (my parents inability to hold any of the responsibility to consider us as fully fledged people who had different but equality valid views and thoughts of the world). I justified it because of the generational gap, and chalked it up to their being ´traditional´. Whenever I tried to challenge their ideas, they’d accuse me of always having an answer to everything, tell me that I had to have the last word, and every other method in between of invalidating what I tried to say.

I recently got The Will To Change, by bell hooks. A book Ive been wanting to read for months, since seeing it on Devin Michael Lowes story.

I am only halfway into the first chapter, but it has already helped me deeply consider and analyze my nuanced relationship with my father, as well as begin pinpointing the things within myself that I internalized.

Here are some excerpts that resonated:

-This is the most painful truth of male domination, that men wield patriarchal power in daily life in ways that are awesomely life threatening, that women and children cower in fear and various states of powerlessness, believing that the only way out of their suffering, their only hope is for men to die, for the patriarchal father to not come home.

-My longing for my fathers death began in childhood.

Pg XV

-Barbara Deming on her fathers death:

I realized that this was the first time in my life that I has felt able to really touch my fathers body. I was holding hard to it - with my love - and with my grief.

And my grief was partly that my father, whom I loved, was dying. But it was also that I knew already that his death would allow me to feel freer.

I was mourning that it had to be so. It’s a grief that is hard for me to speak of. That the only time I would feel free to touch him without feeling threatened by his power over me was when he lay dead - its unbearable to me.

-In turning away from my dad, I turned away from a part of myself. It is a fiction of false feminism that we women can find our power in a world without men, in a world where we deny our connection to men.

Obviously a lot of these resonated especially strongly because of the passing of my dad a little over two years ago.

There’s a part of me that really wishes that I’d found this book before, in the same way that I found it now. I read a lot of bell hooks in my gender studies classes, but admittedly I didnt apply myself to school the same way that I am trying to apply myself to my passions, so just like everything else, I am exactly where I am meant to be right now.

It’s 3am so I’m gonna catch a quick nap before heading to the gym. More doing, less thinking about doing.

See ya around.