Topic: You never get rid of the past.
Sometimes I can’t let go of my anger. I guess it finally hit me that a year has passed and that my friends have moved on with their lives. But I haven’t.
I’m still stuck in last year.
I struggle to tell people what it feels like, coming back to Williams. Yes, it’s pure joy. But I hadn’t realized until now that there’s also a lot of sadness and bitterness and anger over the fact that I’ve basically lost a year of my life.
Coming back reminds me a lot of the “what ifs.” What if I had stayed at Williams? What would I have been like? Granted, there are many things that I’m glad I learned about myself over last year, but I feel so bitter about how that came about.
And it’s so odd, contrasting myself with my personalities from the present and the past. I find myself smiling less than I used to. I’m still not used to the new me - cynical, dark, and pessimistic. I feel so old. I can’t talk to my friends about it because they won’t understand. They’ll pat me on the shoulder, tell me that everything will be all right, and move on to a happier subject. And that’s not what I want.
I need someone to listen, to truly listen. Not to tell me that, “Oh, something like that once happened to me.” I need someone who hears what I’ve said, cries/laughs/cusses with me as I’m telling my story, can dissect what I’ve just said, and honestly talk about it with me. I need to talk about it. I need to somehow reconcile all my negative feelings with my hopes for the future. I need to move on. But I can’t. And I think everyone expects me to move on now that the treatment is over, but I can’t. I still need time to figure things out. It’s a shock, going in. But it’s also a shock going out. And just too many things happened in between that my brain is all confused and muddled about how I should feel about it.
I spent treatment focusing on getting back to Williams. I needed hope, I needed optimism. But now I’m at Williams. And all those suppressed, negative feelings that I had during treatment are coming out now. Sometimes I look at my peers around me, and I resent them for just how lucky they are. How lucky they don’t have to think death. How lucky one of their parents didn’t abandon them when they needed them the most.
Because there has been something on my mind that I haven’t publicly talked about all year. But now I find myself thinking more and more about it, and I can’t let it go unless I acknowledge it. So here it is.
Last year, I was not only physically pummeled by cancer, but I was also emotionally pummeled by my father’s behavior towards me and family. My fucking father abandoned me.
He told everyone I was going to die. He told everyone how much money my treatment was and how I was wasting his money because I was going to die anyways (when in reality it was all paid for by insurance). He never asked me how I was doing. He never knew what was happening to me. FUCK, even my sister’s friend’s father knew more about what was going on in my life than my own fucking bastard of a father did. He even sent me a book that literally said that he regretted having me, that he was miserable because I was alive, and that he hoped that I would die by throwing myself out the window. He even had the fucking nerve to tell people that he was “suffering” when he never knew how my mother, sister, and I suffered.
First off, a parent by definition is never supposed to give up on you. A parent is supposed to unconditionally love you. Now, the fucking bastard did give up on me. And he only loved me when he could brag about my achievements. Throughout my last 19 years, I rarely saw my father even though we lived under the same roof. He came home late because he chose to, not because he had to. He treated my sister, my mother and I like shit - he expected us to respect him, but he didn’t think that he had to respect us. He never knew who I was, never knew who my friends are, never knew what I did in my life.
I managed to quell my feelings into apathy during the summer, but I still feel the reverberations even now. It’s like waves - at times you feel the full force of the impact, at times, when it has receded, you hardly notice it licking at your conscious.
But sometimes I feel the need to throw something, to scream in fury, to even hit and hurt someone because inside, it hurts me so badly that I need to somehow make someone acknowledge how awful it feels. And I need to stop this because I know I’m exuding such a negative field of energy that my suitemates don’t want to come near me.
