Like most writers, I like to think that I know everything there is to know about the relationships between people and the way they interact when, like most writers, I just make it up and really know nothing about the way it actually works.
We always want to show the characters that we create as completely independent entities but we can never create someone who isn’t inherently us, or a version of someone that we know. I cannot write a heartfelt male that doesn’t struggle with his own morality or fear or self-doubt because that is what I know; it’s who I am, and it’s who my characters always emulate. My own worst enemy and my greatest companion.
I watched my mother chase after my father for 24 or so years. All she wanted was his love. His attention. She just wanted to be his friend. And I watched my father grow more distant with every “Please,” more interested in his hobbies or his career. In himself. But she never stopped, and I don’t think she ever would have if he hadn’t found in someone else what my mom was looking for him to find in her.
These are the people who taught me my first lessons about love. They showed me that love is not give-and-take, not a two-way street and never equal. Love is an unbalanced scale, a one-way lane, where one person gives everything while someone else takes even more.
And, try as we might, we all become our parents. My relationships are one twisted form of this or the other. Trying too hard to win the affection of someone who takes or selfishly ignoring the adoration of someone who gives.
I don’t know how to tell the truth. I have grown up hearing that honesty is the best policy and that lies are the Devil’s gate inside, but people have never truly shown me what it is to tell the truth. My father never once, in all those years, said “I am not happy.” Instead, he showed me how to repress. To push the truth down and cover it over with gravel and cement. A foundation built on un-truth is a foundation built on lies. My mother never told me that she was unhappy with herself, insecure and depressed. Instead, it was all clichés and self-diluted hope through unexplained tears. Rose-colored glasses over watering eyes.
So now, I am able to see the beauty of the world in the mundane or the tragic, but I am also very untouched by it. I don’t know how to feel happy. I don’t know how to be angry. I don’t know how to grieve. I don’t know how to ask for help when I need it because I almost never know when I need it. I spend my time telling myself that everything is alright and it is just my perspective that is flawed.
I am bound by my fears. My mother left my father to try and start a new life for herself. My father left my mother and did start a new life for himself. But my mother hasn’t found anyone else and my father is miserable. One made no decision and the other decided and went for it and neither one have found any more happiness than they had when they were miserable. I don’t see how I can avoid that fate. So I continue to make choices (or make none) that leave me continually unhappy.
I have a daughter that I cannot have. She lives on the other side of the country with her mommy and a man who is not her father but is her daddy. While here, on my side of the country, I am daddy to a little girl who is not my daughter. I love her but I resent her for something that she knows nothing about. And as much as I dream of being her daddy, I cannot commit to her for fear that I will leave her without me.
I am constantly plagued by my morality. I want to do things (or not do things), but the morals that were instilled tell me that those things are wrong (or that I need to do them whether I want to or not). So, I try to live piously, holding firm to the ideals that my heart was founded on, and fail. Because I am a human, and humans were beasts before they were civilized. I live a life that is torn, tortured by wants and desires and captive to what is right. It has made me cynical, and I doubt very much that it is possible to exist happily as an optimistic cynic.
I know it sounds like I am trying to blame my parents for the way that I have turned out, and by rites, I guess I am. At the same time, I haven’t mentioned any of the things that make me, in spite of all of this, a pretty great person. But those aren’t the things that I have qualms with right now…
I am uneasy with what I know. And even more-so with what I do not. Knowing may be half the battle, but not knowing how to win is the harder half…