In life, I’m my own harshest critic. Sometimes it plays in my favor. For instance, when I’m at work I never am satisfied with anything that I do. But in my personal life is where I struggle the most. I expect myself to always do the wrong thing and always expect the worst in life.
I think a lot of that has to do with the relationship I had with my step-father, I really do. You see, I was told at the age of 8 that my biological father was dead (killed himself when I was 3, but he had an affair when he and my mom were married when I was a baby and they got a divorce). From that moment on, my relationship with my step father went from decent to horrible. I couldn’t trust him and I could tell that he didn’t care for me as much as his other children he had from other marriages. I constantly stayed in my room when he was home, never really talked to him, and just almost in a way was scared of him. Eventually as I got older the relationship turned more abusive in the physical sense where our fighting turned was more of a wrestling match. I was miserable at home and since nothing was ever good enough for him I always viewed that I was never good enough for anyone. My ex-wife contributed to that as well, but that’s another story for another day. The first 24 years of my life were spent in a situation where I never knew what it was like to have a father love you, to know what it’s like to be loved by someone you care for, or, for that matter, to even have friends, as I felt like I had to cut myself off from the world to please others. What got me through was the love of my mom and grandparents who made sure I had opportunities to succeed in life.
But the pains of my past has had an impact on who I am now. People know I’m hard on myself. I often joke about my weight (even when I’m trying to lose weight). I joke about my apperance. Why? I don’t know. Sometimes I say it because I think that is how others see me. But it goes beyond weight or apperance jokes as often I expect myself to do the wrong things and when I do I expect to be punished harder than anyone else would in that same situation.
I wish and pray that wasn’t the case. There is a fine line between being hard on yourself to being way too hard on yourself. I am overly hard on myself, as I’ve mentioned on this blog before. I know I have the love of God in me, a passion to share the love of Christ to the world, and a hope for a better tomorrow for our children. Yet even as I’m confident in areas of my life, I struggle with the things that have happened in my life, not so much my ex-wife (those wounds are all but a memory), but mainly never been loved by my father.
