BRAVE

Writing has always been a place I can put all the pain and anger that exists inside of me. It serves to free up bandwidth for the other things I need to do, feel, think about etc. Also, it acts as a testament that these things that I feel are real and I can’t get gas-lit (gaslighted?) and or told to get the fuck over it.

There’s a soft spot in my heart for songs about dead-beat dads. Whether the songs are simply calling them out, like in Piece by Piece by Kelly Clarkson; or the songs are about them making amends, like in a line from Sober by Sauti Sol. The reason for the aforementioned soft spot is that I happen to have my very own dead beat dad journey. So yeah, they give me words I sometimes lack to name the things that have been taken from me courtesy of it.

I’m not about to go through the whole abandonment thing and all the ways it fucks you up. How this one person that was supposed to be there (constantly) chose not to be and how this consequently affected all my relationships (and I don’t even mean the romantic kind, just all in general). I’ve done that rant a lot, I’m approaching the subject from a different angle this time.

Said angle sounds something like this: At first I look at it from a point of, he drinks a lot so it could be said that alcohol stole him from me. Take the alcohol out of the equation and he’d be a pretty decent guy. This thought helps me sleep at night for a cool couple of years, whilst I pray for his delivery from the bottom of all those bottles.

But then that argument kind of falls apart completely when he’s on the other side of a near-death experience and sober. I hear and read about how almost dying helps you put your priorities in order, so it should be like a light at the end of the tunnel. An answered prayer. For a Sec, it seems like it might actually be, because I see him rearrange priorities, chasing dreams and achieving them. At the end of the day, though it hits me that if there was a list, I probably wasn’t on it. Alcohol is out of the picture, he’s supposed to want me, but somehow, he doesn’t. What does that even mean?

Where does that leave us? This part seems like it might take a lifetime to figure out. For a good long while, I turned myself into a playwright: writing lines for both him and me. The script evolved over the years: initially I was very angry, so I wrote him out as this selfish, egocentric asshole; but with every rewrite I humanized him a little bit more. Eventually, in the last draft he was just a person who had made some mistakes. Yes, it appeared I had been part of the collateral damage for those mistakes, but there was no villain/victim. He was allowed to want things. He was allowed to not want me. I was allowed to not be okay with that. I was also allowed to move on from that. Eh, life and what it is.

I quit my role as playwright over a year ago. I got so tired of having questions and filling in the blanks for myself. Frankly, it wasn’t working because I couldn’t quite make myself believe the lines I ended up writing for him. Dammit, I shouldn’t have had to!

At the end of the day, I had to admit that I barely knew the guy. This huge role I’d given myself lost the illusion of control it had given me over the situation. I was just a lost abandoned kid trying to find her way in the dark. What on earth did I know about being a grown man with his life story? Squat. Zilch. Nada. Not a damn thing.

Relinquishing control should have been hard, but ironically it wasn’t. I had sense of peace that I can’t quite describe descend over me. It felt like taking in a huge gulp of oxygen and realizing I’d been underwater for so long. But no more, no more.

I’m not, like, out of the woods yet and chances are, I never will be. But I’m working on myself, because turns out I’m no damsel in distress waiting to be rescued. I’m conversing with the voices in my head that make me not believe people when they say nice things, and at the same time they make me take the mean comments straight to heart. The conversations are basically around what makes the voices believe the nice things aren’t true yet the mean ones are facts. And then working out a way for them to sit with all those things, the good, the bad, the ugly and allowing it all to be a sum of all the parts I’ve got inside of me. I’m thus able to feed the good stuff, and gradually reduce the power the bad has over me. It’s not a perfect system, I don’t stick to it as faithfully as I should, but I haven’t ever really stopped working on it.

I’m making amends with myself, I don’t play victim as much as I used to. I take responsibility for the misguided choices of my (ongoing) youth and try to forge forward the best way I know how, at all times.

I’m not at the point of maturity where I’d say that if I could pick my cards, I wouldn’t pick different ones. I’d totally pick Kyle Jenner’s hand and run with it. But I’ll be honest, the hand I got has made for some twisted, beautiful and entertaining stories, poetry, prose and just experiences. So at the end of most days, I am able to be deeply grateful for who I am and who I’m becoming.

Also, my bomb playwright skills have been repurposed into writing an absolutely outrageous story moving forward. Fear in no way dictates how I write it out, so I guess I’ll call this Brave.

Signed,
Cher.

P.s. Evidently, it's been a while since I posted here. If consistency is key, then clearly I lost the key. I'm not good with keys.