Anger and pain
Sweetly and sublimely, we have a wonderful ability to twist our emotions to make the world bareable. The worst treated in society can embrace hatred, anger, and violence as their creed because they can't just ever get back to talking about the pain of their experiences in the world.
I know that it's somewhat strange that I share different pieces of information about the pain in my life here, but seriously there's a lot more people talking about how angry they are about different things in the world all over internet. If there was half as many people trying to express their feelings of pain with their lives as people who were talking about killing people and hating them in the world, we'd likely have a great start towards ending a lot of the violence in the world.
The one piece that's burning a hole in my brain tonight is thinking about how sensitive I am to people who suddenly decide to cut off communication with me. My general immediate thought is to dismiss them and dislike them. The truth is that I can say it probably stems from the pain I felt from my father sort of cutting off the ties with my brother and me as we grew up. From just leaving home and setting up a new household where we weren't really welcome to being able to stop calling him and not ever hear from him again. I mean before he passed away, I could call him every month or two and that was enough. I don't think I ever got a call from him in the whole time I've lived in Sweden. That was about 4 years that I made all the calls to keep us in touch. Then the other part of it was that there wasn't any sense of trying to keep us connected to the rest of the family. When he passed away there was a lot of different connections that I found myself rebuilding with relatives I hadn't seen in years and throughout the years I had only ever seen and met them because I just happened to be there.
I was cut off by the man who brought me into this world. I didn't fit into the perfect image of the winning executive lifestyle that he had in mind. When I was successful, he was proud but didn't want to have me around because I definitely didn't reflect his views of what was important in life, even if I somehow had acquire some of his strengths and discipline towards the world.
The greatest example of this was my stepmother passing out the watches from my father's watch collection after he passed away. First of all, my father had a watch collection that was Rolex, Heuer, Omega, Longines and every other damned expensive watch you can think of. It was the day after he died and she came out parading the watches for us all to get a watch. My brother, myself and my step brother in law Mike were sitting there and my stepmom passes a watch to my brother and talks about how my dad would want him to have it. I'm just sitting there shocked and she walks up to me with the Omega that my dad bought when he came home from Vietnam and offers it to me, to which I tell her "no thank you". I was working 40 hours a week and trying to go to college with a full schedule and still out of money while he built his watch collection. They were just a symbol of how much he cared about being good to himself without paying attention to his children and their livelyhood. Not to mention my stepmom was offering up these watches to my brother and me when I knew there were a lot more that she'd be looking to sell off.
I feel the pain in how disconnected I was from him and I know it affects how I feel about situations where people get close to me only to decide to walk away later on without being in contact with me at all. There's some friends that I can go a couple years without talking to and talk to them again and be perfectly connected because we know each other tightly enough to know there's no unfinished business - we just reconnect like snap. I just find myself in situations of pain with open ended situations because that was really the nature of my situation with my father. Of course he was my father, but I really had no idea or expectation of his presence at a certain point.
As I learn what hurts me in life, I can master it - hopefully.
I know that it's somewhat strange that I share different pieces of information about the pain in my life here, but seriously there's a lot more people talking about how angry they are about different things in the world all over internet. If there was half as many people trying to express their feelings of pain with their lives as people who were talking about killing people and hating them in the world, we'd likely have a great start towards ending a lot of the violence in the world.
The one piece that's burning a hole in my brain tonight is thinking about how sensitive I am to people who suddenly decide to cut off communication with me. My general immediate thought is to dismiss them and dislike them. The truth is that I can say it probably stems from the pain I felt from my father sort of cutting off the ties with my brother and me as we grew up. From just leaving home and setting up a new household where we weren't really welcome to being able to stop calling him and not ever hear from him again. I mean before he passed away, I could call him every month or two and that was enough. I don't think I ever got a call from him in the whole time I've lived in Sweden. That was about 4 years that I made all the calls to keep us in touch. Then the other part of it was that there wasn't any sense of trying to keep us connected to the rest of the family. When he passed away there was a lot of different connections that I found myself rebuilding with relatives I hadn't seen in years and throughout the years I had only ever seen and met them because I just happened to be there.
I was cut off by the man who brought me into this world. I didn't fit into the perfect image of the winning executive lifestyle that he had in mind. When I was successful, he was proud but didn't want to have me around because I definitely didn't reflect his views of what was important in life, even if I somehow had acquire some of his strengths and discipline towards the world.
The greatest example of this was my stepmother passing out the watches from my father's watch collection after he passed away. First of all, my father had a watch collection that was Rolex, Heuer, Omega, Longines and every other damned expensive watch you can think of. It was the day after he died and she came out parading the watches for us all to get a watch. My brother, myself and my step brother in law Mike were sitting there and my stepmom passes a watch to my brother and talks about how my dad would want him to have it. I'm just sitting there shocked and she walks up to me with the Omega that my dad bought when he came home from Vietnam and offers it to me, to which I tell her "no thank you". I was working 40 hours a week and trying to go to college with a full schedule and still out of money while he built his watch collection. They were just a symbol of how much he cared about being good to himself without paying attention to his children and their livelyhood. Not to mention my stepmom was offering up these watches to my brother and me when I knew there were a lot more that she'd be looking to sell off.
I feel the pain in how disconnected I was from him and I know it affects how I feel about situations where people get close to me only to decide to walk away later on without being in contact with me at all. There's some friends that I can go a couple years without talking to and talk to them again and be perfectly connected because we know each other tightly enough to know there's no unfinished business - we just reconnect like snap. I just find myself in situations of pain with open ended situations because that was really the nature of my situation with my father. Of course he was my father, but I really had no idea or expectation of his presence at a certain point.
As I learn what hurts me in life, I can master it - hopefully.