Where do I come from? What am I? Where am I going?

I offer no apologies. I am not addressing rumor shared at church. I speak mostly to myself.

The breakthrough is, if not a lie, vastly overrated in therapy. I am an easy crier, and so it is accompanied with tears, a breaking voice, and approximately 25 kleenex. It had happened many times before, and so I did not leave with the optimism and relief of other times. The good doctor wanted me to wait for a few minutes before I hit the rain-battered roads, but I assured him thus: "Death of a Salesman is my favorite play, but I am not ready to pull a Willy Loman. I will be back next week." I would not wait -- I had a new student to tutor, and bills to pay.

This anger -- it is real. Emotions are, and legitimate in themselves, even if their expression often takes illegitimate forms. I did not break any tables. I did not hit anyone. I did not even curse out anyone verbally. In some ways, the last post could be seen as tame, even impotent. It is unworthy of chatter after Sunday service, and I would ask those who engage in it to make a choice - discuss directly with me, or stop. Well-intentioned gossip is still gossip, and unworthy of you.

I have bitterness, regrets, anger occasionally spilling over into rage, when even the high walls I have constructed are incapable of holding in the accumulated pain. In this I am neither unusual nor pitiable. What I am, is lacking in the wisdom that finds a better way of dealing with it, more frequent, if less intense, expression -- more honest, if less pleasant, engagement with others.

I told my therapist that a fundamental insight had emerged over the last few years, as I contemplated my barren love life. Some claim theirs is barren or pitiable -- I do not claim those words for my own. But it is perhaps noteworthy that I have spent a total of one week of the last decade of social adulthood, and sixteen years of physiological adulthood, in anything coming close to a romantic relationship. I've never really had a "girlfriend". And I think it's worth thinking a bit about why, while not obsessing over it.

It is not that I did not have opportunity. It's not that I'm hideous or disgusting or incurably obnoxious or devoid of charm. (I do confess that, as I grow older, I have increasingly negative body self-image. As my previous shibboleths of value have come crumbling down, social pressures and norms have come creeping in through the ruins.)

I have concluded this: no woman I have ever met could break my heart as much as my father already has. But rather than take this as a mandate for fearlessness, the great pain it caused, and still causes, restricts my ability to share my heart with others, in all relationships.

It's why my friendships seem so unfulfilling. They really do exist only because the other sides carry the weight of setting up meetings and dragging me places. For this, I am grateful, though sometimes puzzled, and sometimes resentful. Medicine never does taste pleasant. And I have much emotional cancer to cure.

My problematic relationship, in concept and in practice, with my father, should not be new to most. But, then again, I am a more private person than I am willing to admit, despite the periodic outbursts of rage or despondency. I've tried coming to terms with what my father means to me, and whether I can forgive. I've even tried writing to a hypothetical future son, and exhorted the fathers of imagination to be better men, all in an effort to exorcise this first, and greatest, torment. It powers even my political and religious views on homosexuality.  I've tried discovering my existential why, and remain empty-handed.

It's worth noting that my interactions with my father aren't the sole influencing factor on my extreme reluctance (historically) to open myself to people. A language barrier with my grandparents, coupled with other issues concerning my relationship with my mother, led me to keep my own council on a lot of things starting at a very young age. It "worked" for some time, but obviously couldn't work forever. One cannot consistently succeed operating with an eight-year old's sense of emotional equanimity and judgment.

It's not that my father's odd mix of invasive and destructive presence coupled by intellectual, physical, and emotional absence hasn't shaped my life - the whole point of this is that it has, and so have the other things. What I'm trying to say is that, even as I've sort of moved on regarding that aspect of my life, the damage has been done. I have skewed lenses through which I view the world and measure worth external and internal, despite my attempts at rationality, insight, and perspective.

It plays a large role in why I am alone, and lonely, and have been for quite some time, and will likely be for a very long time. It will stop when I change how I live, or when I die. This isn't ideation -- it's simply how it's going to play out.

This wasn't supposed to be this self-indulgent. It was intended as an explanation, and an apology. Not for my rage - but for my inability to share, to open up.

I believe there were people who loved me, and who cared about me. I believe that, if I had been stronger, or wiser, I could have fallen into and out of love many times, and may have discovered my soulmate. That I did not was not because I thought you unworthy, or that I did not wish it. I wished for it passionately, intensely, perhaps too much. But I also self-sabotaged it, preferring to rot within this emotional palisade then open the drawbridge. And so you left, and moved on. People I knew, and people I never suspected, moved on.

And it's too late! To pretend otherwise is to be an even greater fool! At least it's too late for some relationships, some friendships that might have mattered more, or love that might have enriched both our lives before one or both of us found a way to fuck it up, or, perhaps less romantically, we grew apart. It's too damn late! And it is true -- we regret that which never was more than mistakes of commission. I had years, years, devoted to broad smiles and intelligence and assumed awkwardness and politeness, learning, too late, that had I cried, and swore, and made a scene, I might have won more than I would've lost, that I might have become a more mature, happy, and generous man.

It's too late for us, vague, amorphous, and perhaps wholly unknown Beloved. But in your honor, maybe I will get my shit together, maybe I will open my heart, and break this anchor of a past. Maybe I'll try to get back together with you -- and since there was no first time, it will be an effort to rewrite the past as well as the future. Blind faith and dreams -- but my eyes of analysis and insight have done precious little on this world, anyway. Best to be blind, for a time, and maybe stumble into the impossible on the way to the exit.

But do not wait.  I don't think anyone is. But in the arrogance that comes with depression and low self-esteem, one believes one holds the world back more than is actual. But just in case, do not wait. Go! Go! Fly and be free! I'll join you shortly, or never, but it's worth it. If you have have a chance, go! Get the hell out! And carry with you the best of me, even if you have to subject memory to twisted lies. Carry away a bit that is good. For when you fly away, I'll still see it in your hands, high in the distance, and it will be a beacon of possibility for me. For my good, and for yours, go.

So, to never-lovers past, to the friends I never let in, to family I tricked into believing all was well, to the father I never loved enough to forgive, or hated enough to leave forever, I offer this: my real pain. My rage. My authenticity. For if you love me as I am, broken and lost, then you will give me what I need to become sincere and compassionate once more. Two lifetimes of debt -- but second chances are never given with the intent to be repaid. At least not the ones that work. But I need, so badly, to borrow strength, and not from an abstraction like God or Duty. Those offer letters of credit not recognized in my emotional inner world.

A small window, a bit of light, to banish this shadow, if only for a time, and remind me that this is not as good as it gets, that it is worth trying for something better. Go now. Fall in love. Achieve great things. Leave me behind to sort out what must be sorted out. Leave, for both of us. Live.