I’m listening to “All There Is” by Anderson Cooper and there is an episode with Whoopi Goldberg. She is talking about when her mom died and how she started to feel like she was withdrawing to an unhealthy level and she said that she knew she was in trouble because:

Nobody wants this for you. Nobody wants you to not live your life.

And that line struck me. “Nobody wants you to not live your life.” And I think that a healthy parent would want that for their child, but I’m not sure my dad was ABLE to want that for me. He was lacking the ability to see what living my own life would be able to give me, since living his own life wasn’t giving something of worth to himself.

I wish that he could see these things. I wish that he could find himself. It hurts to be raised by someone who looked like a human, looked like the rest of us, but was missing these parts. It’s hard for me to live a life that was built for him. I’m learning to live my life for me, but it’s a process. I don’t instinctively prioritize myself. I prioritize everyone else, all the time. And when they’re feeling good, I just putter around waiting for them to not be feeling good, so I can make them feel better, since that’s what makes me feel safe. Managing other people’s emotions, and as long as they feel good/happy, I feel safe.

And that’s not really good or useful for me. And it’s an impossible task. So it’s time to let that go. But first, I need to grieve the fact that there is a world of people out there that can’t even conceive of the fact that one might have had a parent that didn’t know how to imagine that it would be valuable to support me living my own life — because he didn’t realize that he was living his own life.

I think that’s all I have to say on the subject for now. I’ll probably write more on this in the future, but for now, I hope that this can bring someone a sense of connection or makes them feel less alone in a time where they feel like there is nobody who understands this feeling.