Dear Dad,
today, I feel like breaking the silence and telling you how much I hate you.
I hate you for leaving me at my most vulnerable time in my life. I hate you for not being there for me when you and my mother divorced and what I knew as my life turned upside down in an instant.
I hate you for leaving me alone with all this confusion and fear while our family fell apart in front of my eyes. I hate you for misreading my anger and emotional distance as a personal attack onto you, instead of understanding how much of a hurt child I was.
I hate you for not fighting for me enough when I pushed you away in childish pain and disappointment. I hate you for giving in to my mother and not standing up for your right to see your children – to see me. I hate you for giving up on me.
Ironically, I hated myself equally bad after you stepped out of my life. I repeated the circle of pain and projected it mostly onto myself but also onto others.
I hate you for the damage you did to my soul and the young child I once was, I’ll never be able to cure it, it seems. I hate you for causing so much suffering in this young boy’s heart. A boy who keeps breaking hearts of the few close people he loves, because that’s what he was taught in an early stage on how the world (obviously) works.
I hate you for leaving me alone in this messy world without any male guidance and fatherly advices. How many times have I wished you would just be there for me right now? What would you advise me to do in this situation? I would have loved to hear and learn from you.
I hate you for not being there and do your part in preparing me for this chaotic world. I hate you for robbing me of the chance of seeing my future through you – leaving me with this void I am unable to fill.
But unlike me, you managed to fill it. You got yourself a new family and I hate you for replacing me with an “easier” child from a new wife. I hate you for occupying yourself with a new family so you don’t have to think about the fact that you already have left your first one behind.
I hate the fact that you were selfish enough to never seek contact with me ever again and that you justified this behavior based on the anger and denial of a 10-year old boy who pushed you away. Even though you should have known that all this young boy wanted was to be embraced and loved in the midst of this chaos which turned out to be his new life.
I hate you for not standing your ground against this confused and hurt child. You were the adult, you should have known better. I hate you for not embracing this child’s fear – your child’s fear – with fatherly love and understanding of what this poor boy must go through now in the years ahead of him.
There were not many times in my life where I truly missed you, but the few times I did outweigh everything else. I would have needed you in all these moments in which I pretended I was strong enough to do it all by myself.
I hate you for putting so much pressure onto my young and weak shoulders. I hate you for the fact that you left me alone with all this mess and refused to hold my hand while going through this painful period in my life. I hate you for forcing me to grow up super fast, in order to learn how to deal with this huge amount of distress and painful emotions, which I was clearly way too young to communicate and/or deal with.
I hate you for forcing me into becoming a young adult when I was still an even younger child.
I hate you for making me swallow all this pain when I was too young to understand where it was all coming from and then put all the blame onto myself causing me to never feel good enough in the many years to come.
I hate you because all this shit still makes me cry like the lost and confused boy I once was 20 years ago when I last saw you.
Dear Dad, I hate you.
Because I love you and you left me.
Personal Notes: This is a blog post from a couple of months ago. I didn't post earlier because - honestly - I didn't know if I should and/or if it's even a good idea. But in 2018 I decided to be more honest and real with others and also with myself, no longer neglecting my core emotions for the sake of a "greater good." And even though everyone told me to not write about stuff like that because "you can't do that", I wondered: Isn't that something that we should be talking about? Aren't there many more people out there who feel neglected and/or lost because of what happened to them in an early time in their life? What if deep emotional wounds in their earliest life experiences shaped them in drastic ways and now (subconsciously) dictates their behavior of today? What if these shut-away memories left them crippled and broken and these people now struggle to put the pieces back together? Because additionally everyone else is fronting too, making them feel even more excluded and lost. Also, what if finally addressing these "hidden secrets" is the only way to resolve them? Because when you learn that you are not alone, and you no longer need to falsely redirect your anger and fury towards the hurt child within you, and begin to see that there are other people out there who go through the same bullshit struggles, you slowly begin to re-discover the fact that it's all good and it's "normal" to feel the way you do. Suddenly you no longer need to "shut away" parts of yourself and instead begin to accept every aspect of yourself - the nice and socially accepted ones, as well as the ones others might look down on you for. And with this new realization also the annoying voice inside your head which keeps telling you that you are not good enough suddenly shuts the fuck up. And this is something worth aiming for.
