It was not just a guitar

Even having one interpretation that I feel strongly about for the first dream, I know I may find other layers at other times. I’m still discovering interesting things about it. I can only tell you where my head is now.

One thing with caring about all of these Twitter teens is that I worry sometimes about not being able to relate enough to them; they have dealt with so many things that I haven’t. On the plus side, a lot of people who are trying to heal have triggers, where hearing about things or seeing pictures can lead them back into their illness. Perhaps one advantage for me is that I don’t have any triggers. Nothing I see or hear is going to tempt me to cut or purge or kill myself.

Lately I have had doubts. I was safe from those things, sure, but I could see starting to feel helpless and depressed, and maybe doing some emotional eating, if I took on enough pain. Empathy’s good, and I value it, but it means feeling things.

I still thought I was pretty safe, but someone had gotten an Ask question: What is the worst dream you’ve ever had? It wasn’t my question, but reading it was enough. I knew right away. It was the one where my father stabbed me.

It was just a dream. It happened when I was 17, my age in the guitar dream. It was when he stopped speaking to me over the whole driving thing. Actually, I had a few bad dreams then. When I was awake I told myself that it was a relief to not have to deal with him, but my subconscious showed signs of stress, and that one was the worst.

In the dream I was stabbed in the stomach, and Dad disconnected the phone and left. I just remember lying on the floor bleeding and looking up at the phone, and knowing that even if I could make myself reach it, I did not have enough in me to get the phone plugged back in.

It was just a dream. For all of his flaws, he would not really do that. He never even hit me that often. He did hurt me though, and the emotions that I felt in the dream, of fear and abandonment and betrayal, were all things that I felt in my waking life. And helplessness. I felt helpless.

It was the phone. Being stabbed in the gut was bad, but the strongest feeling was that I couldn’t get help. I didn’t tell people what was going on. It was too shameful. My family knew he wasn’t speaking to me, but they didn’t know how I was feeling about it. They didn’t know about the nightmares. They did not know that I was suffering. He could walk away, but I couldn’t.

Anyway, that was over twenty years ago, and I hadn’t really thought about it, until I saw that question, and then it wasn’t leaving my mind. The last time I went through soul-searching, one of the conclusions was that my relationship with my father had a lot to do with my lack of other male relationships (http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/06/in-which-i-blame-my-father.html). I also decided that I was probably going to stay this way, and I had kind of made peace with that.

Other things have shown me that I may be wrong. Or maybe I am going to be single for life, and that’s fine, but there will be moments where I feel the loss more, and this is just one of those moments. The point is that right now I am wanting love, and as something that I admire and desire and think about, but that seems completely beyond me, where I am completely unsuited to any kind of success with it, a guitar is a good symbol for love.

When I reviewed Reggie and the Full Effect, I said that “Take Me Home Please” had me crushing on James Dewees, and that was not a joke. I have been listening to his music over and over, especially that song, and thinking about him and gazing dreamily at videos. Having gained a little perspective since I was a teenager, I know in many ways he is just a stand-in, and I’m not attaching too much significance, but still, I’m infatuated.

The point is, whether I responded to the song because I was ready to think about love again, or the song affected me and moved me into a state where I was thinking about it again, I’m here now. So James Dewees could be the guitar, and Frank Iero is the gatekeeper to James Dewees, which has a certain logic. Or maybe the guitar is just love. Either way, my father smashed it, and that hurts.

But he’s not here anymore! He’s not in my life, except to the extent that I carry him with me. The roots of my relationship issues and self-esteem issues run pretty deep. I don’t even know what my potential for getting past that is, but I need to figure it out.

Right now, even when my creative mind imagines someone desirable being attracted to me, I’m always asking them if they aren’t worried that they could do better. I might even have enough presence of mind to not ask it in real life, but I will still be thinking it, and maybe thinking it too much to not say it. That’s simultaneously insulting his judgment and not making me look that good. So probably if after this next period of soul-searching and study I can imagine not thinking or doing that, it would be a pretty good goal.

I knew I was going to be revisiting the issue anyway. Actually, everything is following a logical progression. I keep getting led to the next step, and I can handle that. It does leave room for a fair amount of surprises, including one big one that we will cover tomorrow.