Journal Entry – 29APR2018

Every day is an opportunity to learn and grow. The trick is being open to the lesson.

The company I work for hosted a volunteer day yesterday and about 80 of us adjourned from the office to clear rows of weeds and overgrowth from a public space in the city of Seattle. A farming non-profit administers this space and uses it to grow food and teach others how to do the same. Though I would have preferred the event to have been more actual helping and less about it being a PR photo opp, it was good to get out of the office, get dirty, and do something truly useful.

Work was my father’s standard for manhood. He grew up on a farm and to him the ability to work hard was the measure of a man. Any time I fell short of his unreasonable expectations, even when I was still quite young, he would treat me as if I were the weakest, most unmanly creature he could imagine.

I’m rather out of shape at the moment and haven’t done an honest day’s manual labour in longer than I can remember. But I set a pace and dug in, determined not to show weakness. I didn’t realise that I was still trying to meet his demands.

I ripped the soil steadily, tearing through thick mats of grass roots and standing weeds, and quickly outpaced all but a few of my co-workers. Some did far more standing around and adjusting their gloves than they did working.

I was angry and disgusted at their laziness for most of the morning. It wasn’t until nearly the end or the morning that I wondered why I was responding this way.

It wasn’t a competition. There was no prize for being the most badass weeder. It’s true that some people weren’t doing much but anything they did was something. Who was I to judge?
It didn’t take long to realise this judgment was speaking with the voice of my father, not mine. I was looking at the others through the filter of his narcissism. This was yet another of the ways I had internalised his wounds and made them my own.

My continuing challenge is to be present and aware of my emotions and thoughts so that I can recognise these internal voices and work to change them. He served up his vitriol to me through many of the most formative and vulnerable years of my youth. My brain was hard-wired to think in the ways he taught me- to judge and hate.

This is not who I choose to be. This is not who I am.

It’s exhausting, this constant vigilance against your own thoughts, but this is the work and I will do it to the best of my ability, there is no other option.

I regret my judgemental thoughts but I have come far enough to know they weren’t truly mine. I won’t waste time blaming or shaming myself for them. Instead, I will be grateful for the insight and opportunity to see even more deeply into the damage that was done to me. I will use this knowledge responsibly, to make my own small contribution towards ridding the world of evil.

I choose to be a different person than who he taught me to be. Making that choice means I’ve already done it.

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” -J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets