#cognitive exercise

"He doesn't show it in words, but actions". NO. Children need both! A child needs to be told they're loved and that their parents are proud of them! And actions? What actions? A tender moment here and there where he holds one of them when they're injured? What kind of pauper's love is that?

It's so hard to not see their opinions as a direct harm to me. All I can hear or remember are people telling me, "Don't take what he says to heart. You know he loves you, no? I've never seen a father do more for his child than yours."

Remember being 21, in the grip of my first bout of devastating major depression, having a nervous breakdown in the backseat of the family car. "Are you even proud of me? Have you ever been proud of me?" Dad, so confounded. "Of course, I'm proud of you! I have always been! Why would you think I wasn't?" Maybe because that was the first time he ever said it? Because of 21 years of nothing but criticism and exacting standards and little praise or acknowledgement, every failure acknowledged in disapproval and punishment? An entire adolescence knowing in my bones that I would never be good enough for him, never be as good as him, a disappointment, failure, burden.

Why would they excuse that? Why do they give him a pass, just because he "tries"? Why are we failures when we come up short, but his attempts are as good as successes?

When someone has an opinion that I hate, I usually just think "they've gone through something I don't know about, and just dealing with it the best they know how". The world is full of people with shitty opinions, conditioned to rush to the defence of privileged mediocrity. My getting mad and arguing the point won't do much other than ruin everyone's day. There's a time and place to stand your ground, and there's so much more awful stuff going on in the real world that we desperately turn to these fantasy lives for refuge. The real estate of imagination is limitless and can safely carry everyone's worlds and wants and desires.

Bruce Wayne is nothing but an 80 year hallucination of men long dead and still living, embodied only in ink and paper. My father, the real flesh and blood man, has been in the ground for seven years. They're nothing but imprints that linger in people's neurons, communicated and rendered imperfectly like a child's game of Pictionary.