A New Perspective

My trainer Heidi and I were talking about our parents in my last session. (I’ve been working with Heidi for almost a decade and definitely referred to her as “my second therapist” back when I was still seeing my therapist.)

At first, it was pretty light, funny stories - like the time that my dad got so mad at a car salesman for trying to pressure him into buying a car that day (instead of letting him go home and “sleep on it”) that he immediately left, went to another car lot, and bought a car that day, without sleeping on it, mostly out of spite.

But then, as we kept talking, I told Heidi something about my dad that I’ve never been able to figure out. After Dad died, Mom sent me a bunch of paperwork from Dad’s desk - including a big stack of performance reviews that my dad had gotten at various jobs throughout his career.

That in and of itself is not the weird thing - to me, the weird thing is that Dad kept these reviews even though they weren’t good reviews. I get keeping copies of documentation that is full of compliments - I do it all the time. But Dad had stored pages and pages of notes from multiple jobs that essentially said, “hey, you’re doing fine but not great; you talk back too much and you don’t have a good attitude; you would be more successful here if you learned how to shut up and nod along when your boss talks to you.” (It’s not even the reviews he was getting that surprised me - that’s all very on-brand for Dad - it’s just that he KEPT them.)

“I don’t understand it,” I told Heidi. “It feels like self-torture - why would you keep all this documentation of the fact that you didn’t belong and they didn’t appreciate you?”

But Heidi didn’t see it that way at all - I don’t remember her exact words (except for the fact that she yelled “HOLD MY DIIIIIIIICK” at one point), but to her, it was a power play. It was a reclaiming, as if to say, “Yeah, that’s who I am - you see me, but you can’t change me. I have it in fucking WRITING that I know who I am and I won’t shift it an inch for you.”

Which was SO GOOD for me to hear, both because it’s been a long time since someone (especially someone who never met and did not know my dad) gave me a different perspective on something Dad did, but also because it made me so sad to think about Dad glumly filing these papers away, letting the words get to him. It makes me feel much better to think of Dad smirking at his desk, putting the reviews away as a giant middle finger to everyone who didn’t appreciate him for who he was.