Family

I know that I cannot renew my relationships with these people, they have moved on, like me, and forgotten all about me by now. I don’t want to make the same mistakes, though; I want to learn how to miss people.

Here is my situation: My parents settled down in Munich, Germany, 12 years ago and this is the place I call home. I graduated from high school there, I went to college there. I met lots of engaging and interesting people there. Two years ago I met my boyfriend and we fell in love, instantaneously, madly, spontaneously, crazily in love. After three weeks we were both wondering why we pay for two apartments if we stay at each other’s places all the time anyway. We moved in together and it was beautiful, friends came over for a glass of wine nearly every night, we went out a lot, we loved each other more and more each day, sex was as good as it gets … life was fine, finer than fine, IT WAS FINE! (Well, not quite, we had a major trust issue, but that is a whole different story!) I was halfway to my master’s in English and American literature and my grades were really good so my advisor urged me to apply for a graduate program in the United States. I applied and got accepted with a full scholarship. The program I got into is a two-semester program; my boyfriend assured me that we could handle being apart for eight months and urged me to pursue this opportunity. So I did and here I am. I did not mean to, but I did what I always do, I forgot. I talk to my boyfriend every day but it just isn’t the same. I know that we were happy and loved each other, but I do not feel it anymore. He is so sweet and persistent and he says he understands that I have this self-preservation thing and he does everything to keep it going, but I see what strain it is putting on him and I do not know how long he can keep going. I try to be as happy and loving as I can but I cannot disguise that I feel distant to him and he sees/hears/feels it whenever we Skype. I have been here for three months; this leaves five months to go. I hate myself for it, but I cheated on him here and, although I hate myself for being dishonest (both to my boyfriend and the guy I had an affair with), I am not really sorry. I have also developed a severe crush on someone. Is this a sign that my relationship with my German boyfriend, who was the one as far as I was concerned just four months ago, is over? Or will I get over it as soon as we are reunited? Is this just an ugly personality trait or can I work on it?

Also (this is of course part of the same issue), I have set up a blog to keep my friends in Germany up to date but I failed to write in it since September and I have an unopened e-mail from my best friend sitting in my e-mail account. Please help.

Heartless (that’s what my grandmother said when I did not feel like calling for one and a half years)

Dear Heartless,

Now, I’m going to do something in this piece that I’ve never done before. I’m going to write it straight through just once without editing. That means I’m going to have to think through every sentence before I write it. You see that preceding sentence? I’d really like to take it out. But I can’t. I’m not allowed. I’m going to just proceed forward. The reason for this is that I’ve been torturing myself. In this we may be somewhat alike. I have operated on the assumption that I can take a first shot at it and then go back and fix it. The alternative view is that we are who we are and we proceed as best we can, not looking back but moving forward.

If you’re not going to go back and fix everything later, then you have to plan ahead. The previous sentence cannot be expunged. That’s the game we’re playing. Likewise, your past cannot be expunged. You are the way you are because of how you grew up. You adapted in certain ways. You acquired certain habits to protect your feelings. Don’t feel bad about that. It’s how kids get by. Now you’re an adult but you keep doing some of the same things. That, too, is quite natural. Some of those habits perhaps you can let go of. But you are far from heartless. Rather, you have adopted certain habits to protect your heart, which is probably quite tender and full of feeling.

What I suggest you do is concentrate on what is in front of you. If there are certain actions you can take to ameliorate the effect of your neglect, then take those actions. For instance, you can read the e-mail from your best friend and respond. You can make decisions about the relationship you have begun. You can end it or you can decide to keep it going. These are things you can do. I would like you to realize just how profound an experience it is for me to keep writing forward and not go back and change things, but that is not your chief concern at all. It is just a way of indicating a parallelism between your plight and mine. We both are the way we are because of how we adapted to conditions of our childhood. And we both have a tendency to believe we could somehow go back and fix things. That is the perfectionist habit of writing that has caused me so much pain. But that is not your problem. It is just my experiment.

Before deciding to write one time through without editing I wrote a great many notes. It was, in fact, the uncomfortable habit of trying to fix them that led me to this method. But enough about that. Let us focus on you. By example, what I am suggesting is that you premise your future actions on the assumption that what’s done is done. You do not handle long-distance relationships all that well. There are reasons for this. It’s not a terrible thing, but it is the way you are right now. So rather than think about ways you might change yourself, I suggest you live the kind of life that gives you what you need. It sounds like you were very happy living with your boyfriend in Munich. Nobody was leaving anybody. It may be, given all the traveling you did as a child, that what you need is to stay in one place to be happy. What a great life! Nobody is rushing off. Everyone is right at home.

Still I have not gone back and revised any of this. It may, as a consequence, lack a certain flash. But it may also be more down-to-earth. I have, however, looked over the preceding to see what else I need to say. I need to say that at times it is helpful to act in a literal way as though what’s done is done. You have already had the affair. You can’t un-have it. But you can move forward. You can go to Munich and attempt to continue the life that was making you happy. As I picture that life, I sense the fulfillment of a piling-up of days. And I sense the fracturing that comes of travel. It is as though your travel to the United States was a kind of backward step. You stepped back into a realm to perfect it, as I might be tempted to step back into my prose to perfect it. If I know that I can only move forward, I will be more careful about what I say. Likewise, if you return to your boyfriend in a few months and try, from then on, to move only forward, letting the days pile up, steeling yourself against the illusion that you might turn back upon your past and alter it, you may find the happiness that you were feeling before you left.

Many things are possible. He may have changed. In returning to Munich, oddly enough, it may seem that you are attempting to return to the past — attempting to do the very thing I seem to be warning you against. But I do not sense it like that. I feel that the life you were living was precisely the life that will work for you. It kept you in the present. Also, it is likely that in going to the United States you repeated an old pattern that has caused you so much pain over the years: You left someone you cared about and were unable to maintain the connection.

So I am hoping you try something different this time. What you have been longing for since you were a child was for things to keep going. You have been longing for continuity. You cannot change your past. But you can make a choice to avoid repeating it.

So, because I have deprived myself of the agonizing luxury of infinite revisions, I will simply repeat, and hope to amplify, what I have already said: Please go back to Munich when your studies are complete, and try to live as you were living, one day into the next, together in a place that is your mutual home, knowing where you’ll be when you wake up tomorrow, knowing all you have to do is stay where you are and continue.

I know I cannot go back and change any of this, so I am simply going to pray it is sufficient. It is a kind of surrender, this approach. I am not saying I will write like this every day from now on. But I needed to know that there was a way out from the endless and irritating rewriting. And I wanted to be honest: Every sentence is as it first rolled out.

One last thing (this is interesting, isn’t it, as last thoughts keep occurring — as when people wrote letters in ink, there would be those frequent postscripts). Everything that needs to be said need not be said right here. This is a conversation, after all. We can correspond. In fact, not to open up a whole new topic so close to the end of the piece, but that compulsion that often arrives when one has almost finished writing — that compulsion to go back and make sure nothing has been left out — seems to arise from the assumption that everything must be said now. But as I say, this is a conversation.

So good luck for now.

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Why? you may ask. Because he is a complete and utter slob! He grew up on a farm and spends lots of time outside tending to his garden and fixing his many lawnmowers that he has fished out of the trash. I spend hours cleaning, all for him to destroy the house in literally a matter of minutes. It is ridiculous. To add insult to injury he does not wash his hands … EVER. Not even after going poo … I feel like I was hoodwinked and bamboozled, because there is no way in hell I would have ever put myself in a situation to live with one of my parents at this point and time in my life. I have expressed my frustration with the situation, but he doesn’t want to ever talk about it. I want to move, but right now I am not financially stable and I am so close to finishing school, I don’t want to jeopardize my studies.

Grown Woman Living in Daddy’s House

Dear Grown Woman Living in Daddy’s House

I don’t think you are an ungrateful daughter. I think you are a person reacting to a shitty situation in an understandable way.

After years of being self-sufficient you’ve been thrown back into dependent daughterhood. That has got to trigger some feelings you’re not prepared for. That’s got to be tough on the ego. It would be hard for it not to matter how well your father handled it.

And he’s not handling it all that sensitively, one must say. When our  survival is symbolically threatened, we sometimes reassure ourselves by making our immediate surroundings clean and healthy and spotless. It’s a good thing to do if you’re feeling threatened and insecure; it can cheer you up to clean house. So here’s an interesting symbolic contradiction: Here you have come to your dad to help you survive, and he is providing for you, yet also doing things that symbolically threaten your survival: Dirt, poo, infection, disease, loss of control!

Subconsciously it may be felt as aggression: Your dad is threatening your survival rather than nurturing it. He’s bringing danger into the house. He’s bringing dirt and disease into the house, meaning, symbolically, into your body. So he’s polluting you when you are trying to regain your strength. The literal-minded may quibble but we’re talking about emotions that take place below our conscious awareness, in the language of symbols.

On the surface he’s doing you a favor, and good for him. But he’s also not admitting your personhood or your power: He’s retaining his own power over his own place. That’s the prerogative of property ownership in a society that worships property. You are expected to grant him the prerogatives of ownership. But he’s not accommodating you, really, as a person. It may even feel as though he’s trying to push you out.

His hospitality may be begrudging; his messing up the house may be passive-aggressive; he probably wants to go on living as he is accustomed to living. There may also be some unspoken disapproval of your reversal of fortune, and perhaps a little unspoken “I told you so,” if you have been too independent for his liking. He may even be enjoying being the father to a relatively helpless daughter once again — a daughter who cannot force him to wipe his feet.

Assuming your parents are divorced, is he also repeating a pattern of conflict he had with your mother? Could be. They could have had fights over just such things. If those fights led to their divorce, you may also be experiencing uncomfortable memories of an earlier symbolic threat to your survival. Also, not to jump ahead, but this could also be a preview of the role reversal that happens as your dad ages and weakens and you take on the role of caretaker, being sure he washes his hands and wipes his feet, as a mother would do in raising a child.

But that’s just the messy symbolic stuff it’s my job to dredge up. On the surface, in the practical present, you’re a capable adult woman in control of her life and career. You’ve made yourself a plan that requires you to do some compromising. That’s what this is: It’s a conscious compromise. You’re still making your own choices. This is just temporary.

You’ve found shelter in a bad time. Your dad is your ally. He loves you. He’s providing you a place.  He’s doing what he can, in his way.

Hang in there, finish your course of study, thank your dad and stay positive. When you look back on this, as uncomfortable as it is now, you’ll be grateful there was a place for you to go. With the passage of time it may even become a fond if bittersweet memory.

I know she loved me more than anything, and she sacrificed a lot to try to give me a good life, but as a kid, I felt as if I was battling her alcoholism for her. I would constantly find single-serving wine bottles stuffed between couch cushions, and it was an almost nightly occurrence for her to drink herself to sleep, leaving the house a mess and me to throw away the empty bottles and rinse out the glasses she would leave next to the couch. After she would go to bed, it was usually a coin flip whether or not she would rise from her sleep to stalk around the house staring blindly at everything and shouting incoherently. More than once she, thoroughly drunk, thought I was a burglar and tried to attack me. The first time this happened I was 11, and in her mind she had gone back in time and thought I was going to steal her baby (me). She nearly strangled me.

What made my childhood much easier was the fact that I had grandparents nearby who did not seem to struggle with alcoholism or poverty or depression. They were good people who seemed to rise above all the stupidity we are capable of. In fact they helped my mother make ends meet on a few occasions, and they always seemed to come to the rescue when we were in a jam. I felt more often than not that my grandparents were like my real parents, and my mother was like some big crazy sister who loved me a lot but was still trying to figure things out.

And from a young age, the lesson they kept quietly teaching me was that alcoholism was a demon in our family. It ran in our blood, and had ruined cousins, uncles and sisters. And the best way to avoid this fate was not to start at all.

And for my part I promised myself that I would never drink, or smoke, or do drugs.

And I never did.

A lot of people may not believe me, but I have never so much as sipped a beer, or taken a drag from a cigarette. And there is my problem. Everyone who knows me knows that I don’t drink, and I feel like I’ve put myself in this box where I will never drink.

This was fine for my early 20s, and in some ways I felt superior for not having blown hundreds of dollars at the bars, or woken up with hangovers, or been so drunk I couldn’t remember what happened to me. I have always been in control of my life, and that is something I take pride in.

But I also feel like there is this whole side to life that I may be missing out on, and that maybe I should relax these rules I’ve created for myself. I feel that a lot of people can’t relate to the fact I don’t drink, and I also would sometimes really like to be able to have a beer with my friends and be their equal, and not this always-sober outsider. A few weeks ago at a champagne brunch with friendly strangers who didn’t know I don’t drink, the waiter poured me a glass of champagne, and when they toasted I held it up and looked at it for a long time before I realized my wife was staring at me.

What to do?

Dear What to Do,

Testing yourself for alcoholism is like testing yourself for flammability. You’re probably not. But what if you are?

“Given the fact that alcohol-dependence seems highly heritable,” why take the risk?

Why not instead ask what needs alcohol might satisfy, and then find other ways to satisfy those same needs? Why not seek safe, life-enhancing alternatives to drinking? Why not read Abraham Maslow and design your life around the quest for peak experiences?

We raise our glasses and drink ceremonially to sanctify some event or passage. We all drink from the same bottle. By imbibing the same drink, we are joined; it is a kind of sacrament. You can mime the gestures but something pulls you to fully engage. Of course it does. This is not just about getting a little champagne in your mouth. It is a powerful ritual.

My suggestion is to find even better ways, more direct, honest and compelling ways to have this same ritual bonding and expression of shared esteem and purpose. I suggest you make this a lifelong pursuit. Make it a way of undoing for good the perhaps multigenerational history of alcoholism in your family.

This way, if those who dispute the role of genes in alcoholism are correct, and behavioral factors are more important, then you will still be doing something to eradicate certain behaviors that were leading to case after case of alcoholism. You will be finding something that members of your family have a particular need for, and satisfying that need.

Look for something that seems cool but not too cool, something you’ve always wanted to do, something you’re drawn to, that’s maybe a little outside your normal range but not totally kooky and weird.

For instance, it may be possible to participate in the ecstatic communality of a sweat lodge. I don’t know. Maybe a sweat lodge would be too weird for you. I don’t know how much facial hair you have, or what your body mass index is. I’m just saying, identify the underlying principle and then find something that suits your social tastes.

That there are things wrong in the world, that there are things so awful in this world that knowledge of them drives us to want to blot them out of consciousness. Read today’s piece by Noam Chomsky, for instance, for a reminder of how thinly “normal American life” veils our history of brutal atrocities.

How are you supposed to think about these things and not feel as though you are going mad? How are you supposed to have a conscience and not feel trapped by history? How are you to take all this in, as a young person? How to reconcile knowledge of evil done in one’s name with the innocent desire to believe in one’s country, to identify with one’s countrymen, to feel strong and patriotic and confident about the future?

These, too, are legitimate questions. So, my friend, I urge you to take seriously the genetic and environmental risk factors for alcoholism, and actively seek ways to have ecstatic experiences in this insane world without killing yourself. Adopt adaptive behaviors that don’t make things worse.

My family never tires of doing the math: When I’m in my late 30s, he will be turning 60; when I’m in my late 50s (my mother’s current age), he will be approaching 80! And then I will be all alone in my old age, when I need a partner the most.

But after I listen to their forecast of illness and doom, I return to my life and am reminded of how happy he makes me, in the now. He’s the kind of person who insists on taking care of his friends’ cats every time they go away; who remembers the birthdays of all of his nieces and nephews (he doesn’t have kids of his own); who doesn’t like to talk much but always says hello to the doorman and to the neighbors in the elevator; who goes out early in the morning and shovels snow for a neighborhood school where he takes classes. He puts the same care, respect and attention into our daily interactions. He loves me fiercely, and I’ve never felt so happy or safe in a relationship.

Don’t think that our relationship is based on the stereotypical pursuit of money and beauty. I recently graduated from an Ivy League college and plan to get an MBA. He never went to college and has been working with his hands his whole life. We both recognize that I’ll likely have greater earning power in the future. But our having different backgrounds is actually a great thing. We never run out of things to talk about, and we appreciate the different things that each of us brings to the table.

Despite our different backgrounds, we fit well together. We both grew up as outsiders in our respective communities and have similar sensibilities and values. We share a passion for the same sport, for which we train together almost every day (that’s how we met). We communicate easily with each other and have never even come close to having a fight. And when one of us tells a joke, odds are that the other is the only one laughing when everyone else would stare with confused faces. In the six months we’ve been dating, things have fallen in place so easily that I have pretty much forgotten the age gap.

But not quite. My family’s prediction of future misery and resentment for me is always lurking in the shadows. Every time I talk with my mother, she mercilessly shines a glaring light on the monster, and it scares me. Recently, my traditional Asian family has called upon the ancient duty of filial piety and commanded me to end this relationship. It’s for your own good, they tell me. You can always find someone your own age to love.

I’m angry that my family is ordering me to make a very personal decision. At the same time I wonder, what if they are right? What if I fight for this relationship and alienate my family, only to find myself caring for an aging partner and young kids when I’m still building my career? Is our happiness now — and this overwhelming sense that “this is right” in every other way — worth taking this risk? And if the answer is yes, how do I explain this to my family?

Please help, Cary. I would really appreciate your thoughts.

Torn

Dear Torn,

I suggest you take more time with this. You’ve only been dating for six months.

It’s kind of odd, don’t you think, that in thinking about the future your family sees only one scenario, the tragically poor widow, bereft of companionship and burdened with a younger woman’s labors? No one seems to have mentioned that the very genius of planning is that you can plan for any future. You do not have to plan just for the catastrophic future of your worst imaginings. You can plan calmly and reasonably for a future in which one mate will retire sooner, age sooner and probably die sooner.

If you are planning to get an MBA then you must be acquainted with methods of estate planning and investment strategies. It seems a straightforward exercise to consider how an estate would be planned to take into account the age difference, as well as the differences in earnings that you have already mentioned.

Such a rational approach ignores what is really going on: For a variety of reasons, your family is fearful and upset.

Think how they must fear the awkwardness of their daughter having a husband who is only a few years younger than they are. This is not what they were expecting. They were expecting a young man upon whom they could look as a son. You do not say if this man is Asian, but if he is not, that introduces another difficulty for your family. They will have to adjust to the idea of a man who does not look like them or act like them, and who is nearly their age; they will have to adjust to the idea, if you have children, of children who look blended.

Speaking of children: Does he want to have children with you? Can he? Why does he have no kids? What about you? Do you want kids? Are you sure? Have you thought about it deeply?

There are a million other issues this raises. I have looked at them and thought about them but it is the larger picture that I want to talk about:

The world is changing. Your family must know this. That does not mean they are happy about it. They may feel a deep sense of loss of heritage and destiny. Who knows how they feel? Imagine what a comfort it must be to people of traditional cultures to look backward and forward in time and see in either direction an unbroken procession of people who look just this way and live just this way, and who far into the future will continue to look just this way and live just this way. How beautiful and reassuring that must be! Who would easily relinquish such a vision?

So please, do not scorn or disregard what your family is going through. It is not inconsequential or shallow.

But this is not just about you, either. You are awash in a great historical struggle. On one side are the myriad forces of globalism and modernity, threatening to wash away thousands of years of cultural continuity with a few clicks of a mouse. And frankly, as a romantic, individualistic, secular Westerner, I do think the future belongs to the pioneers and inventors, the scientists and entrepreneurs who will create a new world but in doing so will lay to waste the fragile ancient world that birthed us.

It seems to me that the world goes the way of the seafarer bringing strange germs to aboriginals, the way of strange new tools and tongues, and that we must and will increasingly mix and blend ourselves into fractal mirrors of each other, and learn to shepherd global flows of capital and genes, and since we must adapt or perish, why not fling ourselves joyfully, head-first into this raging and inevitable future, instead of being dragged into it by our heels?

You can’t reasonably expect your family to embrace this. To them it must look like just so much carnage and outrage. Nevertheless, you are part of a great, global awakening.

So think on these things and think about how the world is changing and where you want to be in that world, and think, too, about the magic of love and how it can, indeed, if given the chance, at times, conquer everything.

Whether it’s worth taking the risk may finally depend on who you are and what cultural system is most deeply embedded in your psyche. Are you a Westerner at heart? Are you a part of the Western romantic tradition, the tradition of individualism and love conquering all? Do you believe in the power of romantic love to overcome social obstacles? Do you? Are you that person? Or are you more deeply, at heart, your mother’s daughter?

Whom do you belong to? Do you belong to yourself, to the state, to your family, to God? How can you know? The answers are of course plural. You belong to your family and to yourself, to the state, to your friends and to your God if you think of the imponderable in such terms.

In any case, you don’t have to marry this man right away.

So take your time. See how things develop. Bring him around and see how the family responds. Maybe in time they will warm up to him, discover their similarities and overlook the differences.

Maybe.

But anyway just wanted to say that best as I can tell from the first name on the email address the following letter comes from a person of the female gender.

That is all. Except yes, I understand that we are in a rapidly changing environment genderwise. Let’s just let the changes happen as they happen. We don’t have to be proving ourselves to each other how sensitive we are to cultural shifts constantly. If you are busy felling trees or making advertisements or fighting a war or creating new kinds of facial makeup and don’t have the time or inclination to follow every small shift in gender politics I think that’s probably healthy.

But maybe it’s a youth thing too. Like following the pop charts and who’s in and out. It’s a sharply transitory collection of fast-moving data.

I try to be sensitive to individuals and their complexities. But I like my old, well-used tools, words like “husband” and “wife,” with all their old, cartoonish associations, like “castle” and “horse.”

Forgive me my crankiness. I got woken up too many times during the night by the old dog making his nervous, coughing complaints. Plus this warm, dry weather we’ve having in California in January is just spooky and a little creepy and scary. It’s got us all a little on edge.

So could I please just for heaven’s sake just get on to the letter now?

OK. I could.

Dear Cary,

I feel so frustrated. I’m naturally an introvert, so it’s hard for me to make friends and I feel like I have no one to talk to and no one to hang around with.

My entire life I’ve hated my dad. He’s cruel, treats me like a possession or a pet that he reluctantly finances but doesn’t really care about, and for a long time, when I was younger, we had physical fights as well. My older brother got the worst of that and my younger brother got some of it as well, and as a result, we’re all messed up and can’t hold our tempers. We all can’t stand losing or being “wrong” because our entire lives we’ve been taught we’re less than my dad, we don’t know anything, and that we’re always wrong. We were physically weaker so we always lost. Now this puts a strain on my relationship with my siblings because none of us can back down.

My mom and I are best friends but she lets everything go by. She’s always said we should give in and she’ll talk sense to my dad later, but stupid pride has always kept me from being able to do that. Something inside of me just won’t give in when he’s yelling at me like I’m worthless. She never gives a firm ruling in anything, even when my siblings and I would have arguments, and always wants to “compromise” to avoid confrontation. I understand where she’s coming from, as her dad is exactly like mine and she married young into the cycle. She’s lived in that environment her entire life and now she just wants to pretend it doesn’t exist.

I’m 21 years old and a senior in college, so I get a break by living on campus during the week and only coming home to work and attend church on the weekends. But during holidays and the summer it’s really hard for me to be in close proximity with the rest of my family. Especially now that my best friend, who is Mormon, has gone on a year and a half mission where the only contact she is allowed to have is through written letters, I’ve been feeling even more isolated. I don’t belong anywhere. Nothing I ever do is worth it. Nothing is ever good enough and I feel frustrated and helpless. I know I should just man up and move out, but the thought of supporting myself completely while finishing my degree seems so impossible that I tell myself I’d rather live at home and suffer than move out. It’s weak and pathetic, I know, but I won’t move out.

I just don’t know what to do anymore. I worry I’ll be alone forever because I’m scared to trust anyone for fear they’ll be just like my father and grandfather. I’m tired of being controlled. I’m depressed. I feel like my life has no purpose, like it means nothing.

Lost and confused,

Always Last

Dear Always Last,

So here are some things. So you are going to have a lot of strong feelings from this for a long time and they are going to be with you and so you are going to need to get used to them and not fight them or fear them because they are just feelings and feelings are not facts, even though that is a cliche and even though feelings feel a lot like facts. In fact feelings sometimes feel more like facts than facts do. But the facts are different, and college is actually a great place to begin sorting all that out. The facts are that you have a certain kind of father and a certain kind of relationship that results in certain kinds of feelings. And because the feelings are your feelings you naturally treat them as important. And that’s fine. That’s good. They are important. But they are not the only thing there is.

The idea as you grow into adulthood is to get big enough inside for all your feelings. Take a deep breath. Expand. Expand to take in all your feelings. You can hold them all. Maybe sit and meditate for a while and let all your feelings be. You can’t act on all of them all at once. You can’t do anything about them a lot of the time. So your task is to learn to walk around with them, letting them be there, asking them what they mean, asking them what they’re telling you to do, making friends with them.

Some of these feelings are telling you important things, like that it was wrong for your dad to treat you that way, and like you are not the person your dad treated you as, and like it is unfortunate in the extreme that you had to go through that with him. But these feelings will also tell you things that are just not true, like that nothing you ever do is worth it, or nothing is ever good enough. Those things are just not true. They might feel true but they’re not empirically true, and what you are in college for is to get comfortable with the empirical, because it will save your life. The empirical is outside you. It is bigger than you. Empirically speaking, much of what you go on to do will absolutely be worth it, and much of what you do will absolutely be good enough. For instance, your writing to me was worth it and good enough. It was definitely good enough. Your just walking around today is good enough. Your just being kind to your friends and family and getting through the day is good enough.

There is a lot about your life that is worth it and good enough. So some of what your dad left you with is all these helpless feelings and untrue statements. So your task as you get to be 22 and 23 will be to sort out the phenomenologically true statements about your feelings, like, I feel angry toward my dad and I feel hopeless and sad, from the empirically untrue statements like nothing I do will ever be good enough and I am a failure and I am unloved.

You are loved. You are good enough. You just had a dad who didn’t treat you right. It’s not your fault. It’s his fault. Your job for the next few years is to routinely work toward overcoming the bad and stupid ideas he left you with. “I’m not good enough” is a bad and stupid idea and it needs to be replaced with empirically sensible ideas such as “I can do the things I set out to do” and “Good enough for what?” by the way.

OK?

You have a whole life to live. Your feelings are going to be there and sometimes they are going to be uncomfortable and you are going to want to punch people and that is fine. That is nothing to be afraid of. Eventually things are going to make more sense and you are going to sort things out. So think of it this way. When you were 8 you had feelings and you had to learn to sort them out and you did. You did well. You got through being 8. It wasn’t easy. Eight never is. Eight is tough. It’s a lot of work moving on to 9 but you did it. And then 10. You did 10. No easy one either. Imagine. All those years you got through already. So now you’re 21 and you’re going to get through this one as well. And you are going to be angry at times and it’s scary but you are going to get through it.

And you are going to learn to identify the various feelings you have from growing up with your dad and learn to know what they are and where they come from and make decisions anyway and live your life anyway. Like this trust thing you have. You are going to see this distrust come up and you are going to know what it is and even though you know that your dad is only one man in the universe and every man is not your dad this trust thing is going to come up. So when it comes up you are going to learn to say to yourself and possibly to the man in question, you know, after growing up with my dad and all, I have this trust thing, just so you know.

So that is my letter to you this morning, on this strange and irritability-producing young morning.

Oh, and another thing: It goes by really fast, so pay attention to the good moments. Have as many good moments as you can. You’ll enjoy remembering them later.

My hometown was always a bit small for me. I always craved traveling and living (for a time at least) in a big city. As a result, I’ve moved from a city of about 500,000 to one of almost 3 million. Most of my family has stayed back home, 90 percent of whom live in the same state and 90 percent of those in the same city. They can and do see each other pretty much weekly. My work schedule and finances allow that maybe a few times a year. I talk with my parents weekly, but rarely anyone else, especially my sisters (two of whom still live in our hometown). Recently my grandmother had a heart attack (albeit a mild one, thankfully), and I found myself guilty that I wasn’t home like most of my family to be there. Though I must admit, part of this guilt came from feeling like fellow family members were a bit resentful that I wasn’t home either. Also recently, I learned from my dad that his father is still suffering from severe depression from the death of my grandmother three years ago, and he asked me to give him a call, if only to say hi.

I can catch an earful sometimes from my parents about not talking enough to people I should (especially my grandparents), and I feel genuinely guilty for not doing so, but another part of me just doesn’t make the time to do so. I can be told I should call so-and-so just to say hi, but I find myself never consciously making the time to do so. I love my parents and sisters and grandparents and family, but I just don’t ever make time to call and say hi. To be fair, I never really make the time to call just to chat with anyone, but why can’t I find the motivation to do so with my family?

My family also tells me that my nephew, who is particularly close to me, misses me a lot and he wishes that I lived back home again. To which I can only shrug. I like my life in the big city and being on my own, but it’s clear that I’m breaking with the tradition of my family of having a close-knit (again, literally and figuratively) relationship. I feel guilty for living 1,300 miles away; I feel guilty when I have to fly back after a holiday visit; but most of all I feel guilty that I don’t have the urge to talk to them on a semi-regular basis and that sometimes I out-and-out dread it. I have no reason really to resent my family. They’ve never done anything that would make me want to disown them, but I feel incredibly selfish that I sometimes find talking to them a chore (and I don’t know if family members think of me as selfish as well); that I’m not as close to everyone as my sisters are; and that I would often prefer to spend more time alone or with friends than with family. Why do I find interaction with them to be a chore sometimes? Why can’t I be the family member that everyone else seems to be? What’s wrong with me?

The Black Sheep

Dear Black Sheep,

I suggest you do two things, one long-term and one short-term. In the short term: Call your nephew. Just call. It’s that time of year.

In the long term … well, let’s just stick with the short term a little more. In the short term: Make the calls you have been putting off. Be honest. Pick somebody, one person in your family that you can be honest with. Maybe your nephew is too young to get into all this with. So maybe your nephew is not the person to get honest with. But get honest with somebody. Pick somebody in your family you can be honest with. Call that person. If it’s hard to make the call, say it’s hard. If it’s hard to be living so far away, say it’s hard to be living so far away. If you feel bad for not being more in touch, say you feel bad for not being more in touch.

You can do these things. You’ll feel better after you do. It’s the holiday season. Lots of people are having a hard time. A few people are just filled with holiday good cheer and making everyone else feel like losers, but most are neither ecstatic nor depressed, just trying to get stuff done and put a good face on it. Many people are seeing family members they don’t see often, in social settings that are novel and fast-changing; certain people are going to be overwhelmed by too much contact; others are going to be impatient with the ones who are overwhelmed; certain people will be having surprisingly strong reactions to stuff for no apparent reason and only later will be sorting out why they had these reactions. Dread of certain conversations will be rampant. Certain people will drink too much and make confessions. In others, long-held resentments will flower. Feelings will be hurt accidentally, even by people with the best of intentions. The young, hip and beautiful will sneak out, have their pleasures, and radiate derision and boredom toward the rest. Many will feel alone even when surrounded by love. Most of us will somehow get through it.

You’re not bad. Maybe you’re different. But that doesn’t make you bad. Maybe you have higher hopes and dreams than the others. That doesn’t make you bad. You’re following your dream.

What can you tell your family members? You can tell them that you love them and miss them and you’re following your dream. You’re doing what you have to do.

And, long-term, I guess the thing is, and this goes for pretty much all the letters I’ve ever answered: Long-term, for the rest of your life, you are going to occasionally have conflicting feelings and you will need to develop a method for determining what is going on. I mean stopping in the middle of a feeling and sitting down on the floor or on a wall or at your desk and asking yourself, with passion, with courage, with commitment to the truth: What is going on? What am I feeling? Am I running away from something? What am I avoiding here? Is there something present in my consciousness that I don’t understand? Is it possible for me to address this thing, whatever it is, this big ball of avoidance and confusion, this big ball of pain, this big ball of black nothingness from which I very much would like to turn away? What is this thing that has appeared before me? What am I looking at?

That’s what you need to do long-term: Interrogate your reluctance, your instinctive turning-away; interrogate with love and acceptance: What is this? Is it fear, is it pain, is it a memory? Is it a picture of your grandparents, is it sadness about possibly losing them, is it guilt about not responding sooner, is it fear of being rebuked or scolded? What is here? What is present? Ask yourself, What can I know about myself that I did not know before? What can I accept, with open arms, that I did not accept before? How can I move forward?

And who can I call next?

This is a great topic for the holidays.

I wish everybody a good whatever you’re having. Enjoy the break from the routine, have some laughs, enjoy your friends and family if possible, and do something you haven’t done before.

And make the call.