Unwanted

EMDR sucks. EMDR is amazing.

My friends all warned me that it would be rough, but I was still unprepared for the reality of what it is like. Part of my brain refuses to accept that it could work. Track a little ball on the screen with your finger, while remembering … and somehow get better.

Describing it like that completely belies just how intense it feels. I’ve cried, groaned, howled and cursed while tracking that godsforsaken little ball.

My ex-partner and I used to have this little joke about “three owls in a trench coat”, how often all your fears came back to the same thing, just wearing a different disguise every time. I’ve written before, how my brain weasel Lucy had a whole wardrobe of disguises.

As I write this, I realise that Lucy has been on an extended vacation. She’s been blessedly silent. I have the occasional tingle of anxiety, but I haven’t been wrestling my own fears the way I used to.

I digress though, that’s not what I wanted to share.

What I wanted to share was an insight, which by all means should have hit me like a ton of bricks, but instead felt like a huge weight had been lifted from me. The moment I uncovered it, I felt lighter.

My dad didn’t want me.

In fact, my dad probably didn’t want children at all, but he most certainly didn’t want me.

Holy shit, right? Except … if you had asked me a year ago how that sentence made me feel, I’d have told you it made me sad, maybe angry.

Now, it was a weight off my chest.

I have written so often about feeling unwanted in various romantic relationships, feeling unwanted and insecure at parties.

Unwanted.

But really, the reality was so simple. My dad had this picture in his mind of what having a son would be like. He’d had a good relationship with his own father, they’d connected. He had a very clear image in his mind, and … well, I didn’t fit the picture. At all.

He got this weird nerdy kid instead, who loved to read, had different interests, didn’t pick up social cues very well. A kid who asked a zillion questions and then asked follow-ups, who wanted to know how things worked, and why they worked that way.

And well … he couldn’t deal with it.

He was unable to put his expectations aside and deal with the reality in front of him, and instead got stuck on his own disappointment.

Instead of being happy with what he got, he expressed judgement. Told me all the ways in which I should change. In which I didn’t measure up.

But as I said, this wasn’t a realisation couched in sadness. It was a weight lifted from my chest.

Why? Because none of this was my fault. It was his.

I was just me. And I wasn’t his cup of tea. But him being unable to look past that, and step up to being a parent? That was all on him.

And I say this filled with forgiveness, since generational trauma is a thing. But I felt unwanted, because I was. But, it wasn’t because I was unlovable or because there was something wrong with me, it was because of a man who couldn’t put his disappointment aside, who was unable to reconcile reality with the picture in his head.

So yeah, it’s no wonder I so often felt unwanted. But … these days, I am so loved. I am wanted. I add joy to the lives a whole group of people.

Does everybody like me? Hell no. Less so since I’ve tried to do less people pleasing. But that’s OK. I don’t need to be everybody’s cup of tea.

My dad has been dead several years now, and I’ve slowly been reckoning with his legacy. With all the burdens he left me with.

Yesterday, I let a large one fall by the wayside.