Day 26: Hello Dad!

I gave my father the address for this blog today, so in theory he could be reading it. I doubt it, though.

A perusal of the stats for this blog show no readers that weren't directly linked. That means my best friend and my father and my therapist, the only people I've directly suggested it to, haven't bothered to take a look so far. Generally I'm OK with that, I just think it's curious that 488 relative strangers can think something is interesting enough to take a look at (my highest pageview for a single entry so far) whilst close people you would think would want to know out of burning curiosity couldn't appear to give a damn.

I guess I've always found it curious that people find reading such a chore. I read as easily as breathing these days. As a dyslexic, it took me a while to pick it up, but once I did I raced past my peers. I don't retain facts from text very well, I'm better with a narrative, but zip around the internet reading things all day.

The best I can imagine reading for those who do find it a chore is the way that I read French; that is, I can manage to pick the sense out of most sentences, but it's difficult, and slow going. It might be more that it's like reading Cyrillic Russian, though, and even making out the characters is hard. So I sympathise, I really do.

It's odd giving the keys to your diary  to your father. Not that this is a diary in the strictest sense, I don't reveal everything of myself here, though that was the original intention I quickly decided making it nsfw was too restrictive on any audience. Still, of all the people in my life that probably has the most skewed image of me it is probably my father, so seeing the person writing some of this might come as a surprise.

I'm by no means unique in wanting to live up to what my father expects of me, but I am quite possibly an extreme in terms of lack of ability to live up to that. Feeling that I was a failure because I couldn't do that, when there were a perfectly acceptable other set of standards that I could have easily met, had I but known myself better. It's tragic, and I blamed my father for my low self-esteem for a long time (even thought he wan't there most of the time). It's only relatively recently that I've come to understand it isn't his fault, but society as a whole, and if I was so unaware of all the baggage I came with I cannot be surprised others were.

I've made so many bad mistakes in my life, mainly down to lack of knowledge. For the longest time I felt guilty over them, depressed, felt worthless. But I've come to the conclusion that we should only be ashamed of the things that we do that hurt people, and even then only if we did them knowing that they would. Otherwise we make reparations where we can, and where we cannot we let them go. World, you made me be born into this body, and all that that means in our society, but if you let me ignore it from now on then we can let the past go together.

So on the off-chance that you are reading this, Dad, know that I forgive you, and I love you.