I need your grace to remind me to find my own

My dad is paranoid schizophrenic.

I’ve known all my life that there was something wrong with him, but I always thought it was the drugs. And since no one in my family could give me answers on what it meant to be schizophrenic I did my own research by way of many psychology books. For a long time I feared the genetic pass down of the disease and even still do. I was always afraid that I would be crazy, crazy like my father. And that scared me so much. It made me cry myself to sleep many nights. Everyone looked at me differently, my father didn’t have money, but he remembered what was important.

When I was 16, I found a card amongst my mom’s personal papers that my father had given me. In it said “To my baby girl, Here are two pairs of tights, so you can wear some outside and for fun and some for dressing up to go to church with your siblings.” He knew I loved tights and he also knew I was a pig pen and loved playing in the mud and outside. It was something so simple and yet, it caught my heart. The language isn’t big, and I probably couldn’t even read at the time, but I could hear his voice telling me this, like he always does, like he would when I would come over in my late teens with a new tattoo. He’d semi scold me and then show me the sparrow and sun on his arm and tell me when he got it. He always tells me the same stories, just like he always used to point out my tight obsession. But hey, a girl got to have some clothing they like? Because as I hear it most of my life from birth to 4-years-old was spent naked.

I remember watching I am Sam in the basement of my friend’s house and there was a part in the movie where I just burst into tears. The movie hit me hard as a child who struggles with a parent with a mental disability. In the movie Lucy (the daughter) is reading a book to her father, but she refuses to read the word. And Sam, her father knows she can read it, the dialogue goes as so:

Lucy: I won't read the word!
Sam: I'm your father and I'm telling you to read the word. Cause I can tell you to because I'm your father.
Lucy: I'm stupid.
Sam: You are not stupid!
Lucy: Yes, I am.
Sam: No, you are not stupid 'cause you can read that word.
Lucy: I don't wanna read it if you can't.
Sam: No, because it makes me happy! It makes me happy hearing you read. Yeah, it makes me happy when you're reading.
Lucy: [Lucy reads again]

In that moment I couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down my face because I spent a good chunk of my life feeling that way. Feeling that because I was smart it was somehow a bad thing, not because anyone told me that, but rather, because I didn’t want to seem like more even though both of my parents promoted my reading and writing abilities. It still stung the emotion in the moment of this movie. Being a child scared of losing her father because she was smart. I fear that even now and I know I don’t make the effort I should to be closer to him.

I remember on my 9th birthday, my dad was wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet and completely out of his mind off his medication but he was walking down our street carrying a birthday cake for me. My mother did as much as she could to protect us from him, but sometimes she wasn’t able to foresee things like this. And in these moments I feared becoming crazy. I feared being like my father. I saw how other people treated him and how my mother talked about him with disgust. The way my family talked about him and the way people say “well you didn’t have a father in your life.” And because of this, it afflicted me. Even though my dad has the IQ of an 8th grader and he has somehow managed to be a better parent than my mother ever was. I had a father in my life who taught me compassion.

Most of my memories of my father are pleasant. They are good things that warm my heart and make me realize that crazy doesn’t mean you don’t have the ability to love. Crazy doesn’t mean you can’t be there for your child. Crazy doesn’t mean that you are any less of a person. Crazy just means you’ve got something that isn’t firing right inside your head. In his instance, it didn’t affect his ability to give me good memories. It doesn’t affect his ability to call me and see how I am doing. To tell me how proud he is. To tell me that he has the photographs I sent him taped on the wall and how he tells all his neighbors about his little girl, living in the big city (when I lived in NJ that is.) Crazy hasn’t affected his ability to make me feel lucky.

It's a blue day and I hope love lies down this road...

Why did I let people change who I was? Why did I let someone else’s thoughts of how I should be persuading to make adjustments?

First in New Jersey there was the relationship that never actually was. I allowed his negative talk and view of the world around him to scare me into the house. I stopped wanting to be in public, I stopped wanting to be the center of attention. I stopped participating in conversations. I stopped getting out of the car to view and see things. I stopped being me.

And then there was Daniel. And he was afraid to be in public with me. Afraid because he was not secure in himself that being seen with a fat chick was scary for him. He made his excuses and said I was wrong, but his actions then and now speak volumes on how he really felt. He was fine with me as long as it wasn’t a show. He was fine with me as long as it was in the basement or behind closed doors.

And so now, I’m introverted. The girl who midway through high school came out of her shell and used to be the class clown. The girl who could spit fire at anyone who doubted her. The girl who random people came up to in public places and said “aren’t you So-an-so, I read that article you wrote, it was amazing.” I was a voice. I was something.

And now, I hide in my house. I hide in the back of classes.(except British Lit, because he gives me a nerd boner)

I’m only myself at work, in a small office of people with learning and physical disabilities. The moment I walk out of there, I’m in my shell.

How did this happen? How did my strong-tongue-spit-fire-self let others dictate how I would feel. How did I let the illusions of their interest in me blind side me? I suppose when you live the life I have with the abandonment I’ve had… You develop this need for love.

You crave any type of attention and need it so much that you don’t realize when it’s just a visage.

Seriously? How did I become that STUPID girl?