Mirror mirror

My dad was very charismatic and funny. Everyone always told me how much they loved him while he was abusing me and my family.

A man so addicted to porn who didn’t want to work and who masked his racism behind every negative experience he had with minorities from having worked in a boys home.

A Mormon who tried to teach me how to justify polygamy and all the nonsense the Mormon church had in its dark history.

A former debate champion whose tactic was to speak kindly while taking low blows and to ensure the other person felt stupid whether they were right or wrong. His entire strategy was to tear someone else down while being funny and using a tone that made his kindness reflect a sense of superiority.

A race car enthusiast who owned a few race tracks and was a great announcer who lost them throwing our family into greater and greater debt.

And who moved us from town to town, and state to state, every time the church was beginning to see his mask slip because his open addiction had him leaving us unattended or having me babysit my siblings at a very young age.

A feather who has since admitted that he was jealous of the attention I received from my mother and how that was part of his abuse towards me.

A father who while driving us cross country to try to pressure my mom back into being with him by teaching us Bible verses about submission and how a divorced woman was an adulterer and all the other toxic things people use Bible verses for he told us how a few miles back he had almost driven us head on into a semi and changed his mind. Then asked me why I looked like I was in deep thought.

When he held me down thumping my sternum wanting me to say uncle because he thought this was a fun game to get me to surrender while I refused surrender and desperately wanted him to know he would never win this game so I continued to hurt and feel the bruising and cry and scream but I would never in a million years let him bring the words “uncle” from my lips no matter how many tears I cried.

The man who would tell me how much he held back because if he hit me with full force it would kill me so he could terrify me.

The absolute horrific memory I had of a dream I told my mom about as a child and my mom immediately recognized it wasn’t a dream and collapsed screaming and crying in the grocery store parking lot. I thought it was my dad in the dream but we eventually settled on it being a babysitter. Who knows? I still see my dad in that memory.

This is the man I listened to and believed when it came to my self image.

This is who my entire sense of self chose to believe every time I looked in the mirror.

And I saw someone who never existed with my own two eyes until maybe five years ago.

It’s strange who we choose to believe when we hear insults and lies.

My dad told me the story that his father in law who was a golden gloves boxer had made him give up on Boxing Day one when he punched him in the face. He thought he would pass that lesson to me.

But I kept coming back again and again as a small child no matter how many times he threw me.

When I came back around after beginning to teach martial arts as a teenager he decided to try the lesson again and I threw him.

So he tried to break me psychologically when he could no longer beat me physically.

He told me he always saw me on the outside of the group when I was having fun with my friends.

He told me I was being rejected in groups I wasn’t feeling rejected in because I wasn’t the center of attention like he was.

And I slowly started moving myself towards the outside of the circles as that sense of rejection grew.

He told me my mother had pushed too hard delivering me. How it elongated and misshaped my forehead. How it made me look funny and caused partial retardation and social skills and trouble with thinking and processing information.

So the next time I was laughing with friends during a card game and didn’t realize it was my turn I got silent and sad and felt like this was surely due to my handicap and I must actually be retarded and less intelligent and assumed I didn’t deserve a seat at this table. They asked what was wrong and I just sat there beating myself up.

I looked in the mirror and saw a caveman with a gigantic forehead. He had told me I was too masculine and that women wouldn’t like a guy who was too muscular or a fighter or too masculine so I sought out every way to look less large in my muscles and to remain lean and agile but not to grow too much.

I continued martial arts though and I grew stronger because that’s just what happens.

When I joined the army he laughed his ass off and when I asked why he said it was because I was not a conformist. In the end this is actually a compliment and there is a whole nother side of my dad that is better than what I’m telling here because the side I’m telling here is meant to tell a particular energy I want to use to craft a message for those who need it.

In basic training one day a drills Sargent asked me if I was stupid.

And I had grown up believing I was.

So I answered that I was and shouted it as I was supposed to shout every answer.

He called every other drill instructor over to hear me repeat it as they laughed at me and made me say it over and over.

Years later I was in a job as a supervisor where leadership had become my career path. Then I began fixing things no one else could fix. I began resolving things no one else could resolve. I began connecting dots no one else had seen or considered. I began reshaping processes and saving massive amounts of money. I created processes that did not exist that saved lives.

And suddenly people were telling me how smart I was and how I needed to dumb things down because of how smart I am.

They made “what would Lehi do” bracelets for people which is a bit over the top but suddenly the man who believed he was deformed, ugly, stupid, and all these other things was being celebrated for his intelligence on such a massive scale.

During this time as lies were falling away I found myself in two situations back to back where I was sexually harassed at work by two different bosses, which is one of the most awful experiences ever that left me feeling so gross, but from that to people recognizing me as someone who was attractive over and over in healthier ways I began to see myself differently in incremental ways.

The other day I was talking to my friend about the last girl I had shot my shot with who I had determined from her silence and ongoing warmth that it was a no. And my friend among many others at the place I hang out was talking about how attractive I am and others there have continued pointing to my level of attractiveness with a lot of affirmations that carry so much weight and substance but they do mention that I care too much about it and tend to stand out as someone who is excessively well groomed rather than relaxed and I’m working on that one.

But I remember the day I saw a picture of myself and recognized myself like someone who had not looked at himself in the mirror every day of his life would have.

And that day I saw someone normal. Someone who had a certain look that fell in a certain bucket but was at least normal. No longer the quazimoto I had always seen in the mirror while believing my father’s lies.

And it was so beyond strange to recognize how capable our eyes and brains are of seeing some thing that is not even there at all.

Now a few years beyond that moment I am able to recognize that I am attractive. And I’m able to recognize that attraction is also subjective and while I will be attractive to some I will not be everyone’s type or attractive to those looking for a tall blonde haired blue eyed beach boy or whatever image just doesn’t belong to me. But for those looking for the more densely built darker haired man of depth and strength and who’s energy is calm enough to make others feel calm around him…well I’m that persons type.

So now I love a life of knowing I’m intelligent in all the ways where intelligence thrives while still learning social dynamics like small talk more and more because I am a deep person and we all have to learn the side of us that isn’t as devoted while recognizing the parts that’s re string. I’m intelligent enough to be humble and know how to learn and to know that I don’t know it all and that intelligence is a muscle we grow and exercise.

I’m attractive enough to know it’s not going to be attractive to everyone but that there are enough examples of those who lock in and believe they have never seen anything more attractive to them.

I am confident enough now to know that lies do not define me but also honest enough to know how many years they shaped me and that undoing these things is a process.

And all this to say that if anyone reading this is looking in the mirror and seeing something that rings them sorrow or shame or a sense of self worth please find a way to know the truth.

I know rejection even with the best intentions hurts and can reinforce these wounds. But we have to realize that we are often the ones rejecting others with care and good intentions as well.

We aren’t attracted to everyone and we shouldn’t expect everyone to be attracted to us.

That’s normal. It’s not a signal that something is wrong with us. It doesn’t mean something is wrong with someone who wasn’t our type when they showed interest. It goes both ways. Give yourself as much care as the person you said no to because then it becomes easier to accept a no and move on without having it cripple our entire self image.

Because everyone is so fucking beautiful or handsome to someone.

Especially when it’s not conventional beauty.

But no one is the most attractive to everyone. Not even your most idealized celebrity. Someone is calling them ugly or saying “I just don’t see it.”

Not because they are ugly but because we all see very different things.

I knew a woman who was the mother of one of my friends.

She was skin and bones

And she never got past seeing a lie in the mirror

And it’s a wonder when we see someone who is so emaciated still seeing an illusion that’s so powerful in her mirror that she sees obesity when everyone else sees skin and bones.

She died.

She died because her eyes kept seeing a lie and a story shown to her through borrowed eyes that were not her own.

And I promise that if what you see causes you to use the words “ugly” that your eyes are lying to you.

And here is the other side of this that is far more complex and fascinating.

Mirrors don’t work.

Because just like we have this capacity to see from imagination instead of reality and for me a gigantic fee head depressed on the sides and frankensteined and these overly masculine features etc…things that are not there…

Other people have a memory of you that won’t line up with any mirror either.

When the pandemic began and we all went to work from home I was speaking with one of my best friends one day and we got onto the subject of tattoos.

She mentioned all my tattoos.

At the time I only had one tattoo and it was my wedding band because I was married at the time.

She was shocked and told me she had described me to her husband as having full sleeves and all these tattoos.

And I was like “you are one of my best friends and you don’t even know what I actually look like when we have interacted and sat next to each other for how long?”

It had happened before when I was in sales too. A man had come back and asked about me. He described me as having all these piercings and tattoos.

I had none at the time. But I did have long hair and a lot of necklaces and often got confused for a band never…I miss the emo days lol

But this is my point.

No one else really remembers us accurately either. Even our best friends recognize energy and associate that energy with images they think that energy belongs to. Even our best friends.

So they did not notice that hair out of place.

They may remember a completely different face.

But what is most inerrant is the energy we carry into the presence of a place or into a face to face conversation.

You are not ugly.

You are not stupid.

You are not broken.

You are not damaged goods.

You are not any of the lies people who shouldn’t even have a right to speak into our lives should have ever had any right to say.

Why are we listening to liars anyway.

Abuse is a hard mirror to break.

I’m breaking one progressively that is a more recent connection only ended a few years back, but these are always a process for our nervous system to release.

But if we could give more credit to people who love us than to people who hate us…

We might see someone really amazing looking back at us in the mirror.