Feeling Things

Hard week.  I keep trying to smile through it, but…  According to the therapist… and the Sir… and probably Dr. Phil (I don’t actually pay attention to things he says… but he probably says this…) simply refusing to feel bad feelings doesn’t actually make the bad feelings go away.

Never one to simply trust other people’s judgment, I’ve spent forty years testing this theory.  You know, just to make ABSOLUTELY sure…  But I might have to concede their expertise at this point.

This week is the first anniversary of my dad’s death.

I still don’t know what my feelings are about my dad, or about losing him.  But they hurt.  Whatever this hot mess that my brain and heart are about this topic… it’s painful.  And a year after he died, it’s still painful as fuck.

Sometimes I talk about it… talk about my feelings… or more precisely, my THOUGHTS about my feelings.  I don’t actually talk about my feelings because that would mean I might actually have to, you know, feel them.  And that would suck.  So I talk about my thoughts about my feelings, my thoughts about my life with my dad, my thoughts about who he was to me, and who I am because of him.  I talk a lot about my thinking.

This week DJ has been pushing me hard against the wall in terms of NOT talking about my thinking.  About shutting up and actually feeling things.  And I hate him for it.  Bastard.  Every time I start to escape into that safety of intellectualizing he pushes me back, makes me stop, forces me down into the pain again.  And he’s so nice and sweet about it… Bastard.

A student lost his mom this week.  That is tragic enough as it is and I cried for him when I heard, my heart broke for the pain he has to face at such a young age.  But it has also broken the seal I had plastered over my own grief for my father’s passing… and even for his life… I can’t even have a clean “he’s gone and I’m sad” grief.  I have grief for losing him AND grief for living with him, for growing up with him, for the things I wish he’d been, for the things he was, the good and the hurtful… the confusion of feelings, and the fact that… despite it all, he’s the only one I had.  I only ever had one father…  for better and for worse… he’s what I got in this life… to teach me the love of a man.

I don’t want this pain.  But I don’t want to do what I have to do to let it go…  I’m a coward.  I’d rather cut myself… burn myself… whip myself… grab an electric fence so I can’t let go as my muscles twitch against it… All my old strategies to, ironically, not feel.  But I can’t do those things anymore.  My innocence is lost.  Now I know that the feelings won’t go away no matter what I do to my body, no matter how I run to my mind, the feelings will still be there, waiting, patient, ready for me the second my distraction ends.  And I can’t live my entire life running away anymore.

But hell…

And I just realized that I listened to the same Train song four times before I realized it was on loop.

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