Last week during therapy I read parts of my last post regarding my relationship with my father and this coming week we’re supposed to discuss how I feel about it.

One of the questions she had during our conversation was asking whether it felt better to finally tell someone about this. I corrected her and let her know that I have told many people in my life what happened. Specifically, I had to tell my dad’s family that he molested me when I noticed that my older cousins were letting their kids be around him, presumably unchaperoned. I mentioned that the guilt I felt hiding his secret led me to speak out to prevent something awful from happening. Even writing this down, I still feel a tremendous nausea and disgust, my mind doesn’t even let me imagine what could have happened I just have an extreme feeling of pain, a ball of hurt that won’t let me put to words my fears of what could have happened. I have to allow myself to feel that pain, it’s coming from my own past, but I also have to note that it didn’t happen. I did the right thing, spoke up, righted what I could.

But since talking with his family about it, it’s been more like a family secret than a family reckoning. I do think I would have moved on from this, except my aunts keep sending me updates of him now that he’s moved to Mexico. It is uncomfortable but manageable to see him once in a while at family events. It’s disturbing to have his pictures sent directly to my phone. I will probably need to mention this to my aunts at some point. I do know that in the aftermath, one aunt and uncle specifically chewed him out. They called him out for his pathetic justifications that it’s just something they do back where he’s from and iced him out for a while. He showed up at their son’s funeral, there are some events that unfortunately all people show up for. I have only talked once or so about this with a couple family members, they just wanted to confirm what they had been told and I said, basically, that my mom hadn’t handled telling them well and I acknowledged that, but the truth remained the truth. 

Complicating matters are that my father has been diagnosed as a bipolar schizophrenic. His diagnosis has varied with time, as medical science has advanced and clarified the differences between the two. A quick google search and based on my experiences with him, it does seem like he’s on the more extreme end of his illness. I have seen him have hallucinations and speak in tongues… When he has episodes, we often have to get him into a facility where they will bring him back under the effects of medication. He has several times now decided on his own that he will be lowering his dosage, because he doesn’t feel good on them. I empathize, but his illness is not manageable without a more complex support system, both from the medical field and from his family. While not in an episode though, his pride leads him dismantle the support systems and ignore the medical field. To highlight how distant I am from him though, he had an episode after, or was in the midst of one, during my cousin’s funeral. I learned from his younger brother that he had been experimenting with his dosage before he’d even gotten onto the plane from Mexico and the emotional distress of the funeral knocked him off course. I haven’t gotten an update from his family and hadn’t bothered to check in…

Briefly, I’ll mention that I have also told my other parentals, one of my sisters, some friends, older partners… I actually prefer not telling people anymore. Unfortunately, it also means I don’t provide context for my past sexual behaviors, but I also haven’t met someone who I really wanted to know me that way, with full context. Knowing what I know of my experience, I don’t feel shame. My younger self was doing what I thought was correct at the time, reacting in self-destructive ways but I outgrew that mindset.

I found my high school journal and I cringed while reading it. I was so excited to be hooking up at the gym, I had made a game of it and felt I was so grown up to be exploring my sexuality in this way. I even noted the times it went too far and I just wanted it to stop but I just didn’t. I knew then this wasn’t great, but I kept doing what I was doing, apparently not sure enough in myself to stop, to advocate for myself. I see that mindset now in people even my age, where it’s just about numbers, just about keeping the sex going, and that’s why I cringed. I feel like there’s more to life than just having sex, there’s prioritizing having good sex with good people and really enjoying each other on those personal levels. There’s also still going to bathhouses and nude beaches, we do contain multitudes after all. But for younger me, it was specifically running away from what had happened, that pain underlied those interactions.

Continuing the question, what does it feel like to have talked about it? She asked me more about him, did I want to hurt him? I told her yes, obviously. I explained to her that it was unlikely I could do so without getting caught or hurt myself, so I wouldn’t, but I wanted to. I have even imagined turning up at his home, back in the ranch he grew up in and lives in now, and just shooting him in the head and ending him. I told her I felt justified, not just because of what he did to me, but because I felt it likely that he would do it to other kids. After all, his justification was that that’s just how things are done back where he’s from. So now that he’s back where he’s from, why would I doubt that he’d go after the young people in El Timon, Guerrero. If she presses me on it, I’ll explain to her that this is a place so remote that I wouldn’t be able to get back there without help from my family, he would literally know I was coming. I’ve only been once, maybe twice in my life, spent several months there one summer. This is a remote and disconnected place, rural and lonely. I would argue that I can connect with the rural people of the USA, but back there was the added difficulty of political and narco violence. I had an uncle who ran to be mayor of a larger municipality adjacent to the pueblo they grew up in. He won, but was told the same night of his victory that he had a couple days to leave the region and never come back, or he and his family would be assassinated. Las Tierras Calientes…. Both sides of my family come from this region and I’ll need to mention more about it but I want to do so separately. 

To wrap up for now… I feel relief to have told my therapist about all of the prior things and can work with her to continue working through the issues, processing the feelings of weakness? I certainly think I was still judging my younger self, wanted to have been not so young, not so weak, not so exactly tuned for victimhood, so that I could have done something sooner. But those are ways of thinking I need to leave behind, to allow my younger self back and to acknowledge that pain and how young I was… How I didn’t need to be anything more than what I was because the adults in my life should have been better equipped to have helped me and or not been fucking pedophiles in the case of my father.

I’ll never get that clear shot with him. And now I’ve put this out into the universe, showing premeditated intent to harm him. But I don’t doubt that I’d enjoy it. Fuck him.

I want to take some time to go work out but I don’t think I’m done with this prompt unfortunately.