wasn’t going to work for me to meet his father. Then at the last minute he pulled out of the wedding because, “something came up.” This is all just numb and serial to me as I say this. I try to deal with non-emotions. I am so detuned to it. Generally I think I deal well with my emotions but it is strange that I feel so numb about this. It is like I feel nothing - just a blank non-feeling. I grew up wondering if one of my brothers would ever use this against me. It only happened once. I am crying as a tell this. My brother said during a fight, “He is not your real dad you know”. I had prepared myself for this for years. I grew up expecting it but I still reacted and stumbled. I didn’t know what to say. But my dad was right behind the door and immediately stopped it. I never forgot that. He called my brother out. He said you will never do that again; such a strong defense of me. It still makes me cry. My dad is large and I just loved it when he defended me like that. My way of coping was to just be invisible. Just be alone and don’t be seen. I have not felt safe for much of my life. Some of my friends would say they are afraid of their own shadow but I am afraid that if I turn around I won’t have a shadow. I still don’t have a sense of what this all means to me as a boy or as a man. I don’t really think about what it means to be a man, I think of myself as a person. As a person I have struggled with acceptance, rejection, identity, and confidence (among other things). I have always felt this weird need for acceptance and insecurity and don’t really know why. Conversely, in my life there has been no other higher form of friendship to me than loyalty and feeling defended. I am experimenting with tracing these back
to the absence of my biological father.
