My Life. A Pandemic Ignored.

So much of Donald Trump's behavior is familiar. Every time I see him I am confronted with a lifetime of lies and life gaslit. I vacillate between seeing him as validating and freeing in that he leaves no room for realistic wondering if my dad can be saved and hating every fucking second I'm confronted with the reality of what, exactly, I've been through. My dad and Trump are the same age. They grew up a town over from one another on Long Island. My dad in Floral Park, Trump in Astoria. Something must have been in the water. The similarities couldn't be more hidden but the key to understanding Trump comes from understanding my fathers. Beneath their wildly different masks they are the same wild animal. Monsters in different disguises. Watching the Trump presidency while simultaneously doing the work to reverse engineer a cure to the narcisstic abuse I suffered for decades has been a singular experience. I've both lost what I thought was myself and found who I truly was.

The last four months have been horrible. Filled with public horrors. Death, racism and stupidity are rampant in the streets. Those of us capable of empathy are completely spent. I have no idea where we go from here. Observing Trumps inaction and pivot away from the pandemic was like watching the story of my life unfold in real time. I was the pandemic. My dad was Trump. The original break came for me with my parent's divorce. Everything after that is a haze of narcissism, emotional instability at best, abuse at worst and neglect. I see now as an adult it all worked for the man who was supposed to be my parent. My protector. It could not be more clear to me. I was a pandemic.

I had problems. Real problems. A child going through a messy divorce will. A child left in the care of an emotionally destroyed and completely unstable mother will. A child of a severe narcissist will. All these things were happened before I turned 8. It went down hill. And no one cared. Least of all my dad. He treated the problem like it was my fault he didn't parent me. He believes he has done all he could do when in reality he did nothing. And then he banished me. Trump illuminated that. My father knows what he did. WHen he sees me he sees his failure and his emptiness. He see me as a failure because I don't make money. That is his only metric for success. That I am a loving, loyal, curious and compassionate man means less than nothing. When he sees me, as when Trump sees the pandemic, he can only make it about himself. And it makes him feel bad. A narcissist's entire life is one of avoidance of reality as a means to avoid feeling so he did the only thing he could do. Manufacture a way for me to leave his life without it looking like his fault. That's why a man who never participated in rehab or therapy for even a minute went to Al-Anon instead. To listen to old women bitch about their alcoholic stories. So he could "detach with love" because he could no longer abuse me. Silence is abuse and he wields its like a sword in the hands of a samurai. The final act of abuse has been to go completely silent. Its potent. Trump is basically doing it with Fauci and covid. Out of sight out of mind.

It's a hard thing to watch with the knowledge I have. I know that Trump will never care about dead americans just like my dad didn't care about a dead son. They don't have it in them. All of this has been unceasingly sad validation of what I didn't want to know or accept. The illumination of truth is a burden. To seek peace is to acknowledge you are at war and to accept that you may lose. Any peace that comes will come at great cost. Very rarely do we reach the peace we fight for without losing whole parts of ourselves that are gone forever. There's no surgical technique to cut out all the bad and none of the good. We have to make sacrifices.