You know the lyrics and I know the melody

“Hey ol’ buddy, how’ve you been?
Not much has changed here on my end…”

Hello, OD. It’s true. Not a lot has been going on since my last entry. I think that was about ‘Hurricane Sandy’, but I can’t remember.

I haven’t felt like writing much. It hasn’t been for any real reason, except that I haven’t had much to say. At least, not much that seemed important enough to re-tell.

Tonight is different, though. Tonight is about missing. I’m missing both the living and the dead. I’m missing things I should have had but never did. I’m missing parts of myself that have been chipped away. “I’m still alive, but I’m barely breathin’…”

I haven’t been sleeping well lately, so that could be part of the whole problem, but either way, the problem of ‘missing’ still exists. I’ve taken to mentally writing letters to people when I can’t sleep. I’ve written them to some of you, I’ve written them to a good friend who has passed away, I’ve written multiple letters to my father, detailing every asshole-like act he’s ever done against me and I’ve written multiple letters to an ex-best friend explaining exactly how she hurt me when she pulled her own stunt several years ago. I’ve actually been toying with the idea of sending that one, but I just can’t make up my mind. Maybe someday.

All of this missing is leaving me feeling…hm…empty and insecure. I don’t like this feeling at all. I usually handle things well, but at this moment in time, it’s getting to me. Mostly it’s the missing of the living is what’s getting to me the most. It’s the fact that these people are within reach but don’t make the effort. No, I take that back a little. I don’t want to blame them for not making an effort. No one is really to blame. It’s just that more time has come between our last talks or visits than I’m ok with. And I know time has a way of creeping up on people and passing them by without a second thought. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. I’m not happy about it.

It’s nice to keep in touch with people via Facebook, so for that I’m grateful. It’s just that sometimes it’s not enough. I posted on Facebook that I was missing people and feeling reflective, and I received three less-than-ideal responses. “Nothing wrong with that,” “reflect but don’t miss,” and “don’t dwell.” I know these people meant well, but I don’t think they truly understood what I was saying. I get that, because I didn’t give details. I tend to keep my very personal life to myself, so it’s very rare that I’d even think about posting something like that, let alone actually doing it. I did block several people from seeing it, because the last thing I need are the few family members I’ve agreed to be ‘friends’ with on there seeing it and getting in touch with my parents to tell them I’m all depressed or some such thing. It’s not the case at all, but I don’t want to have to go through an explanation. It’s no one’s business but mine and those I choose to share things with.

One thing that’s got me really shaken up lately is religion. I’m not going to get into a whole huge discussion about it because, frankly…I’m tired of being berated. If you want to discuss it civilly,that’s fine. Leave me a note. Beyond that, I won’t go too far into it. But what’s gotten me is that it’s taken me my whole life (30 years in February) to get to a stable point in my beliefs. I know what I believe and I’m comfortable with it. I’m happy with it. It fits and it just feels right to me. I’ve incorporated Native American ideas, Buddhism, some Christianity and some other random things that really don’t fit into any of those categories. But at the moment, that all feels good to me. It fits well into my life.

I’ve never, ever been happy or okay with organized religion. I’ve always despised being told what to believe. I’ve always questioned how anyone can possibly tell me what someone else meant in a book that was written so long ago. I digress a bit here, because I once read an article where a boy in high school wrote to all of these famous authors whose books he was studying in school and asked them the same questions the teachers were asking the students about the meaning different parts of the books. A random example would be, “why were the curtains blue in the bedroom? Teacher says it was because the main character was sad that his mother died when he was 4.” And the authors all responded! Most of the time, everything the teachers were told to teach, all of the responses they were given to the questions were found to be completely false. The authors responded in their own handwriting that the answer to the random ‘curtains’ question was simply that the author liked blue and needed a few descriptive passages to make the chapter more interesting. So if that can happen with an author who is still alive and can still discredit all of those ‘teachings’ we learn in regular high school and junior high about all of these classic novels, what does that say about all of these preachers who are teaching the ‘exact’ word of their gods? There have been so many hands in the pot and the stories were told so many times, over and over again that it’s like playing a giant game of “Telephone”. (Remember that game? One person sits on one side of the room and whispers a sentence to someone else who passes on what he thought he heard, and so forth down the line until the end person stands up and recites what he last heard. Usually it’s so completely different from the original version that it causes a huge laugh for everyone.)

Not only that, but why would anyone be ok with picking and choosing different parts of their own ‘bibles’ (depending on their religion) that suit them, but ignore the parts that don’t? It’s not a ‘pick or choose’ kind of thing. Take one, take all. That’s where religion gets used as a weapon and I’m not ok with that either.

Anyway, I rambled on and on about that to tell you this: my mother and I got into a discussion about money a few months ago and randomly she started spouting off that if I “hadn’t left religion, I wouldn’t be having such a hard time finding a job.” Wow… I wasn’t aware that Christianity handed out jobs! You’d think more people in the world would be lined up outside of churches with their resumes in hand! First of all, I’ve never, ever declared that I’ve “left religion”. I’ve simply tweaked it to suit me. I don’t go to church (remember…not organized religion for me), although I do still babysit in the nursery of the church where I was forced to go for 16 years. Then again, neither does she. My mother will watch one of these televangelists every morning and call it good. That’s fine. She does her ‘worshiping’ in her own way. I do it in my own way. I’m just sick of the hypocritical crap and the fact that she can’t respect my own choices enough not to ram them down my throat whenever she feels the need.

I was raised Baptist, and these days, that has a bit of a negative connotation to it. I’m not ok with that. Again, I was never comfortable enough to identify with any one particular religion, but I would say, “yes, I was raised Baptist,” and leave it at that. These days, even that’s a little hard to admit to because of all the negativity.

But because of that little incident with my mother, it left me feeling kind of guilty and shaken up. My beliefs aren’t shaken.. it’s just the fact that she chose a vulnerable fraction of a moment in my life to try to beat me down yet again. And she chose something that she knows I won’t talk to her about. And the reason I won’t speak to her about religion is because she rolls her eyes and completely disrespects how I feel about it. I have all the freedom in the world to choose not to discuss important things about myself with people who won’t respect me. Correct? Stop me if I’m wrong here.

All of this leads me to missing pieces of myself that were chipped away. Up until fairly recently with all of this talk of bullying in schools, I hadn’t realized that my own father was the bully in my life. I never had a problem in school. Aside from stupid skirmishes that all kids get into with each other, I never had a problem anywhere other than home. My father was the biggest bully. He mentally and emotionally abused me to the point where I used to wish it was physical just so someone would ask what happened and I could tell them. He spent a lot time mentally beating me down to the point where I thought it was completely normal to hate and be terrified of a parent. I couldn’t understand when my friends told me that they loved their fathers. I thought that was just a freak thing. I mentioned that I’ve written mental letters to people when I can’t sleep, but I’ve also played out a lot of mental scenarios. One of which is where I move far away and after about a year, I call my parents up one day and I tell them that there’s this man in my life that I’m uncomfortable with. That he yells at me until I sob hysterically, then tells me to ‘get out of his fucking sight because he can’t stand me’, and that he backs me into a wall with his finger in my face, screaming that I wasn’t good enough, or screaming at me until his face is red in the middle of a parking lot so all the other passersby can hear, or throwing a steel-toed boot at my head after I fell asleep on the couch after working two jobs and going to school to wake me up, and that he unplugs the telephone house line because I’ve had to sneak the cordless phone up to my room to call someone after he chose to scream at me until I was hyperventilating and that I just needed someone to talk to. That he was so controlling that he cut me off from the world when all I wanted was someone to help me. Then, in my little scenario, he gets pissed and tells me to get away from this man. I respond with, “I’d love to, but he’s my father,” and then I hang up and give him something to think about.

I actually feel better writing all of this out, but honestly… that last bit is part of what I feel like I miss. I missed out on having a dad. I have a father.. a man who raised me… but I don’t have a dad. I stopped telling him that I loved him roughly 20 years ago. I don’t feel it. We’ve had our funny moments together over the last couple of years ago, but when I think back through my childhood, I only remember the arguments and the feelings of complete betrayal, pain, being terrified and the tears. I don’t remember good things. And that’s sad, isn’t it? I missed out on that. I have more good memories of friends’ fathers treating me like I was someone special than I do of my own family treating me that way. I’m not trying to dwell. I’m not stuck in the past where I can’t get beyond that. It is what it is. It’s made me more self-reliant. But it’s also given me some major PTSD to the point where I shake and shiver and have minor panic attacks if I ever have to ask a parent for some serious help. Two years ago when we were all sick with the flu, I believe what I had was a kidney stone due to the meds I was taking. I dealt with that completely alone, by myself without telling anyone because I didn’t want to deal with having to go to them. There was one Christmas when I was 17.. I had picked out a HUGE vintage ‘Coca Cola’ sign to give my father. Unfortunately, it was too big to fit in my car at the time, so I asked to borrow his truck. I couldn’t tell him why, but he made me tell him how long I’d be so he knew when to expect me back with his precious vehicle. After giving me the keys, he told me that if I damaged it in any way, not to bother coming home. That statement right there has always told me right what I wanted to know. If I ever screwed up, I couldn’t come home. I couldn’t count on things being ok if I was ever in trouble. So I keep to myself and I keep my mouth shut. There are still some things I’m sure I need professional help dealing with, but I’ll get through this on my own.

Eventually I’ll stop missing what I never had, and I’ll stop missing the living so much once I get to see them. I’ll probably wake up and be ok. But for right now, I needed to write this and get it all out there in the universe. It’s all part of who I am. There’s a lot in here that I’ve never told anyone. There are some stories in here that I have shared. Either way, this is me. I’ve felt emotionally abandoned in a certain sense for as long as I can remember and when it all hits me at once, the floodgates are opened and I start missing everyone. “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”- JD Salinger