[TheChamp-Sharing]

SHOW NOTES

Quick overview of this week's show:

• How a recent search for my biological father didn't end the way I expected it to
• How I've learned to cope with the mess of feelings associated with being abandoned
• The incredible bright spot that came out of all of this (a book)

TRANSCRIPT

In this episode, I'm going to be talking about some personal struggles I had this year, and how they ultimately led to the most important book I’ve ever written.

***

Hello there, and welcome to episode 5 of the podcast.

This time I want to talk about a life-changing experience that shaped me as a writer. It’s April 2018 as I record this and it happened earlier in the year.

This experience is about my biological father.

My parents divorced when I was young. I never knew my father, and from what I've learned, he never wanted to know me.

In early 2018, I decided to try to find him. I had a lot of questions, and to be honest with you, I wasn't brave enough to search him out until then.

Growing up, I was angry that he didn’t want to be around. Really angry.

But now was different. I had a three year old and I knew what it meant to be a good father. I'd learned some important life lessons. I mellowed out. I just wanted to understand.

On a complete whim, I found him on Facebook. I spent hours on his profile looking at his posts and profile. He’d aged quite a bit, had remarried, and he was living in Florida. He looked happy.

It took me two days to muster up the courage to send him a friend request, with a short message that I was his son and that I wanted to connect.

He ignored my request.

I knew deep down that there was always a possibility of rejection, but I wasn't actually prepared for it.

It shook me to my core. I wasn't myself for days.

I had to come to the fact that my father had abandoned me. I had never actually accepted it before. I just compartmentalized it, pushed these feelings deeper inside myself with the hopes that one day they might disappear. I had suppressed these feelings for my entire life—loneliness, inadequacy, anger—but I never knew that abandonment issues were what they were called. Not once did it ever occur to me that these feelings weren’t normal.

Forgiveness came unnaturally to me, and I had to back into it. But I did forgive my father.

***

But let me tell you about something that I’m still struggling with.

I learned that my father’s sister lived only a few miles away from my childhood neighborhood. She even taught in my school district. I probably saw her many times and never knew who she was. But she probably would have known who I was.

Growing up, I had always thought that my father’s mother—my grandmother—died when I was young.

It turned out that she died only a few months prior to me reaching out to my father.

I was blessed with two amazing grandmothers growing up—both were like mothers to me. So to realize that I had a grandmother who didn't want a connection with me, was really hard. It went against everything I knew to be true of what a grandmother should be.

I could take my father. I could even take my aunt. But I couldn't take my grandmother.

I remember reading her obituary and thinking to myself that it’s irrational that I would be more upset over the passing of a grandmother I never knew than the fact that own father abandoned me.

I couldn’t shake the emotions. There’s this heavy energy I feel every time I think of her—it’s so powerful it usually takes my breath away. I don’t know what it means, but I don’t feel this energy when I think of my father. That’s why it bothers me.

I keep thinking if only I had reached out sooner, maybe things would have been different. But at the same time, I’m grateful that my life turned out the way it did—I’ve been blessed with an amazing mother and maternal grandparents, and an incredible stepdad who filled the void that my father left behind.

But I can’t ignore the emotions I feel, and I’ve learned to cope with them.

***

There's a silver lining to this story, I promise.

I've always had this notion that I'm going to do really well in life, and I'm going to be wildly successful in spite of my father. Just to show him that I didn’t need him. I used that to overcompensate for the fact that I had abandonment issues.

This experience taught me that I am who I am, and that, in and of itself is enough. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. Not even to myself.

But spiritually, I had to heal.

And that's when I rediscovered something that I have known all my life but had somehow forgotten: Writing is how I heal. It's how I deal with life’s problems. It's me figuring out how to deal with the world through my stories.

When my father rejected me for the second time, writing was the religion I turned to to heal.

My wife and I had a long spiritual talk about this—about my father, my writing. We talked about my creative well and how it’s always full. She said something that I’ll never forget. She said, it’s not enough to fill your well—if you don’t use it to help other people.

I started thinking about that.

After all, at this point in my career, I was publishing 10-12 books per year, which is something that most writers only dream of. I was doing this with a full-time job, no doubt.

How could I share what I learned about writing with other people so that they could improve their careers?

That’s why I wrote my book, Be a Writing Machine. It was the exact book I needed to write at that point in my life.

In Be a Writing Machine, I talk about my father and my life, so one hand it’s therapy. One the other hand, I talk about how I’ve learned to be a prolific writer over the years in spite of difficulties.

It felt really good to write the book, and I did it purely to help other people. I don’t care if I never make any money for it. If it helps just one person or a couple of people, then it did its job. That book was my way of sending out some positive energy into the universe to compensate the negative energy I felt from the experience with my father.

As we come to the end of this week’s show, I’d like to share the book with you. Here’s a clip from the audiobook version of Be a Writing Machine, narrated by John Freyer.

 

***

Quote of the week: “Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.”

Marianne Williamson

CREDITS

Intro/Outro Music: “Kick. Push” by Ryan Little.