“I am not my scars”

Growing up I was always known as a daddy’s girl by my family members. I was in constant need for his love and attention. Once I started high school, that need faded and eventually turned into bitterness, then anger. I started cutting myself in a pathetic attempt to get my father to notice me and how angry I was. I went through multiple therapists within a 12 month time period. I was constantly on suicide watch in the psychiatry center, but what I didn’t tell them was that I didn’t actually have the courage to do anything close to that. I would cut just enough to make a scene, but not enough to have to go to the emergency room. Each time it would only be my mother who had any feelings about what I was doing to my body. My father would go into his room quietly. my adolescent mind took this as another sign that he didn’t care.

When my parents finally separated, it became so much easier to let my anger grow into hatred for my father. I constantly looked back at my childhood searching for something that I had done wrong, seeing if I had done something to make him neglect me. I had no idea that my parents had not been happily married for a very long time, and I instead took his unhappiness personally, thinking it was my fault. I tried to reconnect with my father on multiple occasions but each time I see him it makes my hatred grow. There has been no contact between the two of us for more than two years now. I try so hard not to deal with any of this and to pretend that I am fine with no having a relationship with my father but as much as I try to tell myself and others that I don’t care about him, it still has a major affect on me. There will always be a part of me that wants to have that relationship, as much as I hate admitting that. Every little girl or woman deserves to have a healthy and loving relationship with her father. That one relationship will be the paradigm for every relationship she has for the rest of her life.

Ever since I was told that my father was getting remarried, I started having these dreams of my perfect world where my father accepts me for who I am and supports me with every decision I make, but then I always wake up.