Don't Let It Bring You Down

Follies of the Übermensch

Last Sunday morning, I received a text from a friend telling me that she was thinking of me. I had just woken up and was initially confused as to why this person would be thinking about me on this particular day. Then I remembered that it was Father’s Day and that we’d both lost our fathers recently. The night prior, before I went to bed, I thought briefly about my dad, that I would never see or speak to him again, and the enormity of that loss.

Photo by Mohamed Awwam on Unsplash

This was just before I turned on the new Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary on Netflix. I bring this fact up not because I want to promote his show - though I did find it fun to watch - but because he discusses the losses of his brother, who died prematurely to drunk driving in his early 20s, and his father, whom had had a strained relationship with.

In the doc, it shows a clip from Pumping Iron, another doc that was made in the 1970s that made Schwarzenegger famous. In the clip, he says he erased these two losses from his mind immediately because he was focused on the goal of becoming famous and he couldn’t waste time on anything that would get in the way of his progress. He couldn’t allow himself to wallow in grief, feel sorry for himself, to make himself into a victim, etc. It was very Übermensch shit and I wonder if he really felt this way because he admits in the doc that he’s prone to being a bullshitter.

Anyway, I was thinking about all this because I am the opposite. I am prone to dissecting my grief, to feeling “all the feels,” and to at times feeling sorry for myself. My husband hates it when I do this and tells me that I’m living in the past. He says I need to focus on letting that go and to accept it. And usually I do focus on the present and on the future. But it’s also hard not to have regrets.

My husband has more of the Schwarzenegger outlook than I do. I can’t help thinking perhaps that is what makes some people successful in their pursuits and others not. The totalizing focus on moving forward without looking back, without letting all the negative emotions from the past that weigh you down and get in your way. My husband is much more positive than I am but I think I’m far more driven than he is.

That said, I think it’s unhealthy not to accept grief, not to revisit what has happened and spend time healing. It usually catches up with a person. As the documentary advances into the second part, Schwarzenegger discusses how close he became to his mom because it was now only the two of them that were alive. He’d invite her to California and he finally developed a better relationship with her after what seemed like a very strict and extreme upbringing.

And then she dies, as all mothers do. And he said something that made me sit up. He said that suddenly he looked around at his life, all of his success, and wondered why he was doing any of it anymore. He wondered if underneath all of his ambition was a drive to impress his mother.

I understood that feeling. In my last Substack entry, I was grappling with a lack of motivation to push myself like I have done in the past. I’m not depressed. I’m actually quite happy, despite some issues I’m dealing with related to my career. But I think somehow in the loss of my father, I also feel like, who am I doing this for now? Even up until November of 2022, in the midst of the estrangement from him, I thought of how he’d talk to me again if I could just get my book published or my scripts optioned. He’d be proud of me again.

Would I prefer to be more successful as a writer? Yes, of course. But I’m also thinking outside of the traditional pathways because those no longer seem viable or worth the extreme amount of heavy lifting required to access them. It seems almost dumb to pursue traditional publishing paths at this time, but maybe I’m wrong.

I’ve still been thinking about the play I started earlier this year. It’s a ball of chaotic energy that still feels right to pursue, especially since the stuff I want to unleash on the page is pent up fury and sadness, but also gratitude for being alive. I know it’ll get written and hopefully, one day, it’ll be staged.

Anyway, apart from the poems I wrote at the beginning of the year, which I’ve published a bit here and there on this Substack, I feel that I haven’t written enough about my father and fear that he and his life will be forgotten. It’s been difficult to do this because what is in the way is what created the rift between us in the last year of his life. Sometimes I get so furious at certain individuals who manipulated him and enabled the destruction of our relationship.

But I also believe that he was very ill and I hadn’t entirely recognized it. That perhaps what killed him was also changing his mind and making him less himself. I can’t imagine he would have acted the same way if this was 5 years ago. This helps somewhat to explain things. But, as my husband says, this is all in the past now.

And yet, I still imagine that my dad is around trying to give me advice. Perhaps that is why I’m slowing down and not caring about the petty stuff so much (and most of the shit we deal with on a daily basis is petty). When I look back, I realize that what I regret is not savoring the good times with my dad. All the times he told me “to relax, sit a spell, take a load off.”

He was a very witty guy, very sharp. Though he only had a formal education up to high school combined with technical training and military experience, he was self-taught and well read. He was the person who taught me what a poem could be when I was tasked to write my first poem in grade school and I struggled with trying to figure out how to write the perfect poem. I still remember him telling me that poems were art, that a poem could even be in the shape of a cactus if I wanted it to, that I could use words to make things the way artists use colors.

At some point I’ll write more about him, but I’ll share with you three messages I found that he sent me in the past few years, one a response to a Father’s Day card I sent him in 2020.

And I’ll share with you a favorite song of his that I remember him playing on his guitar often when I was a kid.

My dad and us (photo courtesy of Holly Widdoes).