The Root

TEN whole fucking posts for January. Wow! Well somebody pat me on the back. That’s probably never going to happen again.

We’re into February. I am struggling with my demons and winning for the most part. Still have a backslide here and there with food or weed mostly. But other then that, it’s all been positive.

This is the part I have to continue to maintain. It is very easy for me to be overwhelmed by too much happening at once, and then slip into my world of fear. My biggest demon of all. The thing I have the toughest time admitting to let along dealing with. My level of depression and agoraphobia. I have been working on myself, this blog being a big part of that, in hopes of getting to the root of why I am like this and find ways to stay strong and fight it.

It kills me how much of my life is lived in secret. I WANT to be the type of person that says This is who I am, I stand by it. If you don’t like it too fucking bad! But I am not. I act like I am that person a whole lot. But I am a little fraidy cat when push comes to shove. I don’t talk about my depression openly at all anymore, or my weed use. Partially because of the fear of losing work from it. My Dad doesn’t know really know about either. He and his wife can be incredibly judgmental and I just can’t handle the majority of their expectations. My father is the reason for a lot of the anxiety I carry. And a lot of my life fears. So I just steer clear of the things I feel they don’t need to know. For my new readers, my father is a tough subject for me. Our relationship is at it’s best now in it’s current state. But most of my life our history has been not so good. A quick refresher course for old readers, and fill in for new readers. Here we go.

My parents were teenagers (Mom 17, Dad 16) when they had me and were divorced within 9 months of my being born. I did not “meet” my father until I was about 15 going on 16. The details of why he wasn’t in my life are still largely debated. The latest incarnation of the tale – he had a fight with my Grandmother that prompted her to move us away from him. We tried to build a relationship for years. I spent as much time as I could with him, but a lot of weird stuff went on. Like the time he was “attacked” at Home Depot and never showed to pick me up. I did not find out until years later that my Dad was still fighting a heroin addiction. He wasn’t clean until I was about 20 or so. When he became clean, we stopped talking for about 8 years. I had gotten sick and after a lot of doctor visits he thought I was telling him I had an STD. He told everyone on that side of the family. I was horrified and embarrassed. Really it was PCOS or poly cystic ovarian syndrome. This would later be a a big cause for my battle with cancer. When I got sick, my father and step mom took me in during my treatment. My Dad lost his job and they began to resent me and treat me like shit, looking at me as an expense (even though I paid for everything myself, and then the state took over.) This built up and combusted into a huge fight the day after my last chemo treatment where he said a string of awful things to me. I was thrown out that night onto the street with a bag and no where to go. My Mom had to come find me in the middle of the night. As fate would have it I found an apartment and job two days later. I had put the application in for both the day before our fight. This is something I never entirely forgave him for. But for the sake of my sisters, I moved on.

I don’t know even where to begin with my Daddy Issues. I love him. He is my favorite person. I hate him. He is a selfish bastard. I am too much like him. I am nothing like him. The older I get the more I seem to follow in his footsteps. Then I realize and recoil. Forgiveness is a powerful thing. I have forgiven so much. But the hurt, it’s still there. Reminding me not to trust him. Reminding me not to trust men.

When I was a kid and I would ask my Mom who my Dad was, she would say You don’t have a father. Then follow it up with, Men only want one thing from you. Don’t give it to them and don’t trust them. Now how do I reverse those years of mistrust, anger and learned hatred in me? I think these are the roots to my issues to commitment in anything.