ARCHIVE: An Update, an Insight, and a Barbaric YAWP

*** This entry was originally posted to LiveJournal October 18, 2007 ***


It has been a very long time since I've blogged. I appreciate those who, according to MySpace, continue to check and/or read my blog in my lengthy absence.

Well last time I mentioned that all this old Dad stuff has been coming up, but that I hadn't yet found a way to get in there and work through it. Well, I found one!

I started writing Dad a letter. Yeah, I know, he's been dead for about eight years. It was for me, anyway. I got a little way into the letter and then I hit upon this part of me that was still a little boy just SCREAMING at Dad in rage. That's a part I'd hidden very well, even from myself, for a very long time.

So on Sunday I created an opportunity to let that little boy out. I thought it was going to be all about rage. I knew there was sadness too, but I thought it'd mostly be rage.

Was I ever wrong. And in retrospect I should have known better. I remember (now, anyway) that when I was young I always used to cover sadness with anger (as, in my judgment, SO MANY little boys learn to do). So that rage? Yeah, that was a smokescreen. What I discovered was that I didn't even have to get through the rage smokescreen to get to the sadness. With some great help, I managed to completely circumvent the rage and get right to the sadness.

I grieved. Heavily. At length. For his absence in my life (LONG before his death). For what I didn't get from him. For what I DID get from him. For what I judge as the tragedy of his life. For having all this trapped inside me for so long. For all of it.

It was amazing. I'm enough of a realist to know that it's a process rather than an event. Still, I have noticed a shift this week in how I view men and in my trust level in them. In other words, I don't see my father in every pair of male eyes--including my own--so much now. He's there in me; always will be and I WANT him there. But this felt like a huge step toward INTEGRATING the pieces of him that are in me, rather than being haunted by those pieces.

So now I'm feeling much better and far better equipped to go staff this NWTA. Last year I got some amazing insight for myself there (avid readers will recall). This year I got some amazing insight before I even GOT there, so I can't WAIT to see what happens while I'm there!

That's assuming we don't all blow away in the storms tonight. :-)

Actually, a bit of a wild night of storms could be JUST the thing.

"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world."
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself