I didn’t fully heal while my dad was alive. Not because I didn’t want to. Not because I wasn’t trying. But somewhere in my system - trained by performance and a deep sensitivity to patterns - I recognized this: I wasn’t fully safe yet.
He loved me. That’s never been in doubt. But he was tired. There was gentleness in him, but also a buzz - his own recursive brain, carefully wired and always humming beneath the surface. He cared and he tried. But when someone is as complex and sharp and kind as he was, it’s almost impossible to fall apart in front of them without being able to fully explain what is happening.
So I kept my shape. I held myself mostly okay. I made sure my suffering stayed legible, tidy, and narratable. Not because he asked me to, but because my own system read my perception of his limits as law. Healing was not denied, just deferred, waiting for a quiet that wasn’t vigilance.
That quiet eventually arrived.
My father never met Wyatt. Wyatt came six months after his death. Maybe that’s what made my next chapter possible - not my father’s absence, but the still from not having to act like I was fine.
With Wyatt, nothing needed translation. I didn’t have to manufacture “okayness” for his comfort before he realized something was wrong. What had been inside me for decades - the pain knotted and careful - began to unspool. The sensations got louder and clearer. My face steadied in the mirror after decades of distortion.
If my dad had met Wyatt, he would have adored him. My father would have recognized the humor and decency, the odd brilliance, and the steadiness. My dad never met this version of me - the one no longer contorting and half-comforting herself quietly out of frame.
It isn’t that I needed him gone in order to get well. It’s that my survival logic waited for the conditions to shift.
I think he’d be proud of me, like he always was, though I am, these days, a little more unruly, slower to account for what I mean, and less likely to sand down my own edges.
But I am more myself. Finally and fully.
He would have loved me here.