Dear Dad
Dear Dad,
I think this is the first Father’s Day gift I’ve given you in a long time. We could go the superficial route — I buy you brunch and give you a wall-mounted, Djokovic-shaped bottle opener — but money is not as scarce a resource as time, and I spent many nights writing this letter. While it will never be enough if the goal is to be perfectly comprehensive, it is written out of real love, the kind money can’t buy and fatherhood can’t promise.
I feel lucky to have grown up under your roof. You have a daughter who is resilient, thoughtful, creative, hard-working, kind, bright, and powerful. You also have a daughter who can be harsh, cynical, stubborn, intense, bitter, insecure, pessimistic, and cold. We all have our light and dark. What I can sometimes be is not what I am. Maybe it is a reflection of how I have behaved around you — and that default response has grown stronger with time — but it is not who I am. I think I could say the same for you.
I think we’ve been in a bad pattern.
I have so much trust in you. I’ve always been able to count on you to fix anything, figure out anything, do anything for me. I know you provided me incomprehensibly more than your parents provided you. And not a day goes by that I’m not grateful in some small way. The thing is, I don’t tell you. The concept of doing so feels vulnerable and awkward and uncomfortable. And I think it’s because I don’t trust you.
I have trust in you. But I don’t share the more vulnerable parts of myself with you because I’m scared to. Somewhere down the road, vulnerability became the last thing I wanted to see in myself, yet the first thing I wanted to see in you. Vulnerability is the currency of trust. And given that we didn’t feel we had the space for a free and respectful exchange, we couldn’t invest in building trust.
I want us to exchange perspectives and feel secure enough in ourselves to be real and honest. Even if we disagree, I want us to engage in an exchange with our walls down and hear each other out. I often wanted you to hear me out and say nothing at all in return, to just wrap me in love because that softens everything and makes it all feel okay.
Sometimes, our two cents are best kept to ourselves. Love and protection are different things. I wanted you to let me hurt. I wanted you to let me feel it and help me understand it. I didn’t ask you to save me from it or tell me how to get rid of it. I had already tried that. I wanted you to let me know I was not alone and didn’t need fixing, that I was okay feeling it then and would be okay feeling it again. I didn’t want someone to tell me to think positive. I wanted someone to tell me that this is life, and it is messy and hard and wonderful all at once, and it is our work to feel and allow for every part of it. I wanted someone to sit with me, hold space, dig deeper, and support me as I found the answers on my own. That said, I know you didn’t have the knowledge or awareness of how to do this, and while I may have blamed you in the past (both implicitly and explicitly), I don’t anymore.
Something you said last week stuck with me: Everyone is afraid to be wrong. What sets us apart is how far we’ll go to avoid it. The more vehemently we resist and avoid, the more shame we carry. The more we fight against our vulnerabilities, the more we refuse to meet ourselves where we are and grow from there. I know you’ve gotten hurt in your life. I know you’ve felt neglected, ignored, belittled, criticized, screwed over, and underappreciated in your life. I refrain from saying you’ve been any of those things because I don’t believe anyone is what they go through. Yes, it shapes your neural pathways and changes your brain chemistry with repeated exposure. But transformation of original wiring is always possible, and I believe it comes with learning and understanding yourself in all your complexity, not resisting or avoiding it. Shame shuts down the centers of your brain having to do with learning and growth. Stifling what you’re ashamed of only keeps those centers muted for longer.
I know we’ve had a surface-level relationship for quite some time. I know we’ve tried to keep things sunny and avoid confrontation. I know we’ve butted heads and disagreed vehemently when we do have an actual conversation. But underneath it all, I think we share the same fears. The same shame. The same parts of ourselves that are deeply wounded and buried and begging for us to listen and wrap our arms around them and just let them be seen. It’s time we put those parts of ourselves on the table. We could keep pretending they don’t exist, but has fighting and burying them really gotten us to where we want to be?
We don’t have to prove that we are something better than who we were in the past. We are the same as we were, as we always have been and will be. It is our beliefs that change. It is our beliefs that shroud who we are underneath it all. It is our beliefs that foster shame. I say this like it’s a novel concept because to me, it is. I never knew it was an option to believe my thoughts about myself, or that my beliefs were distinct from my identity. I thought I embodied objective, true beliefs, and that other people were just trying to make me feel better by labeling those beliefs as opinions and not facts.
I want us to understand each other’s webs of thoughts and beliefs, the ones we haven’t been able to let go of but fight every day to be free of. I want us to come to our own realizations that certain beliefs we hold tightly (and maybe don’t even realize we hold) are optional. This is a mutual agreement that the best question to ask is why. I want us to understand each other and, in turn, better understand ourselves. Sometimes we’ll converse with curiosity and civility. Sometimes we won’t know our answer and will need to think on it, or we’ll realize what we said was a skewed version of reality. Sometimes we’ll talk over each other and cut each other off and scream louder to drown the other out. And that’s fine. We’re learning. We might lose focus and go back to our safe spaces where we shut out all contradiction and protect our precious beliefs, but we can be mindful. We can notice when we feel shame shutting down our brains and putting us in survival mode. We can loosen our grip on fear and let our walls come down. We can come back to presence. We can, time and again, seek to listen and understand.
As we practice coming back to that intention again and again, what we practice will grow stronger.
I love you. With practice, that will feel easier to say, too.
L.S.
