Another Side of Reality

I'm not sure if anyone else has been doing this during their quarantine but I've recently gotten into doing a deep dive into old family pictures. I got my lazy booty out of the bed, to reach my daily quota of leaving my room (my goal is 4 times), got my unicorn slippers on and walked into the dungeon that is also referred to as our basement. Our basement isn't finished, so it's basically just a giant storage room but everything has it's place in its own little quadrant.

As I warbled my way towards the "stuff that's really old but we'll never get rid of cuz it's from my childhood"- quadrant, I pulled out the office boxes of photo albums and other old memorabilia we hoard, and lugged everything back upstairs to investigate.

The point of my story is not about the cute pictures I found of myself, or the really old pictures I found of my (cute) parents, although I did find a lot. This story is about a journal I found. Not written by me, but written by my dad when he was my around my age. What came next in this discovery, with absolutely no exaggeration, changed my life.

Throughout my entire life, I saw my dad as being this kind, generous, goofy, smart yet always-gets-on-my-nerves guy. I know the gist of his upbringing and I've practically memorized his favourite anecdotes he tells over and over again. 

A lot of us, when asked, say we would love to go back in time to interact with our parents in their 20s. See what kind of person they were, the way they spoke and the things they did in their day-to-day lives.

This journal that I found brought me straight back in time. It gave me a glimpse into the person my father used to be, the way his mind worked, the things he was experiencing and grieving. It genuinely brought me into en entire universe that I didn't know had existed and the trip I went through was unparalleled to anything I'd read about in a book, or watched on a screen. These stories, thoughts and emotions I was reading about I had never even imagined my dad to say or think these words. It felt as though the person I had known to be my dad for my entire 22 years, was shedding a layer of himself that I never knew was there.

In the journal he talks about his insecurities, at the time. Obviously today, those things don't matter to him anymore. Fun fact, I was on my bedroom floor reading this specific entry when my dad waled into my room while I was in the midst of crying after having read what he wrote. I had no choice but to tell him what I read, to which he told me that the things he was so insecure and worried about back then never cross his mind today.

He also talked about his interests in the journal, mos of which haven't changed since, or I was not surprised to read about. The weirdest thing was reading about him write about his ex-girlfriend, purely because she is not my mom and imagining my dad with anyone else just makes me cringe (lol).

That journal changed my life because I felt as though I understood my dad so much more. Being able to see the words he felt in that moment in time, as compared to the stories he recounts today, are two completely different perspectives, to which the former is what struck me. Being able to read the pain my dad had felt at the time made me realize how similar he is to me, and how the lives that we lead intertwined in their own way. I'd never known my dad to be insecure about himself, that's just not the person I grew up around, he never showed me that side. Knowing that his happy, goofy, smart, kind man I call my dad felt just as insecure in himself as I did/do most days, in a way humanized my own dad.

With this discovery, I took the opportunity to pick my dad's brain on some of the other topics he wrote about in the journal, and I learned a lot more about him, and life as a whole. One of the most powerful things he told me, while I was crying on the floor and we were having this discussion is:

"Whoever you chose to be with, is the right person for you at that time. Whatever you chose to do with your life, is the right choice for you at that time. If later down the line, you realize that things aren't working out and everyone involved isn't whiling to do the work and make sacrifices to make it work, than the right thing to do is re-evaluate what's important to you in that moment. Things change everyday. Today everything could be great, yet tomorrow things change and you may realize that whatever you are doing isn't right for you, so you do what you have to do to be happy. No choice is the wrong choice as long as you continue to choose your happiness over ensuring someone else's comfort. That obviously doesn't go for everything; ensure your morals are still aligned, but when it comes to your job and any other relationships, you have to decides what makes you happy, and do it."

-Marie