Roll that footage again. But does regret matter if it doesn't inform the future, father? Does guilt have weight if it doesn't adjust our actions? If truth is fell, does that make it any less terribly beautiful in laying bare the substance of the world? What use is sorrow that we can't grow from, become better people from? If you don't learn from your mistakes, it is, I think, the first step into the grave.
I loved my father. I loved my mother. And for my own good, both of them are dead to me now. And from this regret I have learned: cut the head off the snake that bites you, don't thank it. I have learned how to secure my identity from thieves: that family is a poor ward against not just emotional abuse, but financial abuse. You have taught me, taught me that no one is truly irreplaceable.
My mother did her best to have her clone, told me I was her attempt to heal the wounds of her past, and then did her utter best to wound me herself when I became a woman, when I tried to be strong and free. To my father's credit, he didn't try to cripple me. He just stole from me, and lied to me.
Gods above, I wanted to keep some part of the family I grew up with, but what do you do when they don't give you a choice? What is family when it encourages you to destroy and take advantage of the family that builds you and encourages you to do better? The people that make you an adult? What do you do when they take the lessons they gave you on financial independence and twist them, steal from you, and then lie about it?
What do you do when it costs you your friends, your peace of mind, your ability to sleep? When they drive you to tears repeatedly over the choices that make you strong?
There are some costs too dear to pay. In the end of 2020, having drained dry the charity of my tribe, my own ability to subsidize, the willingness of friends to be supportive, my father emptied the account that had once been $100 of power company stock given to me to teach me about drip accounts. At the beginning of last year, when I called the financial company that managed the stock, I discovered the account had been drained. My father claimed it was his money: legally, it was mine. The choice was either file a police report or walk away.
This is my last gift to him: the gift to drop this ball, and walk away. There will be no charges filed. But I will not turn back, either.
That lesson, I learned earlier. That lesson, I will take to heart. The gift of fear. The promise of gasoline.
And the tribe, my remaining family, those who taught me to drive, to shoot, to hold boundaries, aren't the family I was born to. But in all the ways that matter, they are mine, and I am theirs.
Roll that film again. My tribe are those who built the Internet.
There is no other.