My Father Never Complained. I’m Still Learning Why.

“Image Created by ChatGPT”

We didn’t have much growing up. But we didn’t talk to about it the way people do at that now:- on podcasts, in therapy sessions, in essays like this one. We just to lived inside it.

When My father was the only earning member of our whole family. One salary, one man, one quiet determination: — holding together a household that the world would politely call middle class but was the really something more fragile than that. There were months when I didn’t understand how the math worked to do. I still don’t. He must have made the numbers of bend in the ways I never saw.

He worked hardly. That was his entire biography for most of my childhood. He worked, he came to home, he ate whatever was on the table, and he didn’t to ask for more questions. There were illnesses that came for our family the way illness does :— uninvited, expensive, indifferent to timing. Operations. Hospital corridors. The particular silence of a waiting room only, where you’re calculating, not praying.

He never complained. Not once. Not that I heard about.

I have a good job now. As a Manager. A salary that my younger self would have found unbelievable. There is no any urgent bill I cannot to pay. There is no medical emergency I cannot face any type of problems. By every metric I was taught to pursue, I have arrived.

I am also and I say this with no drama, only honestly :— less at peace than I was when I had almost to nothing.

This confused to me for a long time. I thought it was very ingratitude. I thought it was very anxiety, or ambitions for misfiring, or some character flaw I hadn’t yet to identified. I tried to harder. I earned more than more. I upgraded to things. The unease did not to upgrade with me, it just found new rooms to sit in.

Here is what I think now:

There is a many kind of attachment that the masquerades as a motivation. It tells to you that the next thing will help to complete you. The next level, the next number, the next achievement is very hard. And so you go deeper into it, not because you are greedy, but because you are genuinely believe, each time, that this will be the one that finally lands.

It doesn’t to land. It never lands. You just go to deeper.

My father never went to deeper. He had a fixed point, his family :— and everything else was a just weather. The operations, the thin of months, the years of without any surplus. Weather. He stood in it and did not become it.

I used to think that was very limitation. That he is simply didn’t want more.

Now I think it was the most sophisticated thing for you. I have ever witnessed. To want exactly what to you have. To find the fullness in the actual rather than the imagined. To not let the gap between where you are and where you could be swallow the own life you’re already living.

I am not there yet. I want to things. I check things. I compare to everyone, quietly, in ways I’m not to be proud of. But I catch with myself now, which is more than I could do you before.

And when I catch of myself, I think of him:— sitting at a table with food he didn’t choose, in a life he didn’t to design, with a contentment that had nothing to do with circumstances.

He blessed me with my education, with my opportunity, with the chance to write an essay like this from a place of comfort he never experienced.

The last thing he’s a teaching me slowly, without any words:— is how to actually live inside in the life I have.

I’m still learning.

#Life #MentalHealth #Family #Identity #Self #Gratitude #PersonalGrowth #Mindfulness #Parenting #Contentment

Thanks for reading and your love❤️, please follow for more honest and human techs…