What follows is an extended excerpt from an email I wrote to my father recently, and I feel strongly that the wisdom in these words God brought to me first through the man I love. My hope is that you will find wisdom in them, too.
"I realized that I always try to meet people where they are in a situation even to the point where I subsume or set aside my own needs. And I often try to be the diplomat or catalyst that makes everyone okay.
While it's good to have empathy and strive to meet people where they are, it's not good for anyone - those people included - for me to neglect meeting myself where I am, too. I need to have the courage to say what it is that I am thinking and feeling, and have the courage to give myself as much consideration as I strive to give to others.
Learning to do that (and do it well) may take me a long time, but I have to try. I cannot guarantee that my own feelings or anyone else's will not ever be hurt. But, crazy as it might sound, I've been living my life thinking that I could somehow "make everybody okay." I don't have that power. I can only do my best to consider other people's feelings, ask them to tell me what they think and how they feel, and share what I think and feel, and do my best to honor myself and others.
And then I have to trust that the love between those people - in this case the love between father and daughter - is strong enough to meet the challenge of acknowledging that we can't prevent all disagreement or difficulty. I have to trust that being honest in love brings growth and new depth of understanding to our relationships with each other. That sometimes that growth and deepening comes not from avoiding discomfort but through facing it together.
I love you and while not everything that has happened between us in the past has been comfortable and there's no way to guarantee that everything in the future will be without difficulty, I believe that our relationship can be more honest and benefit because of it.
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to make you happy and wanted you to be happy with who I am. The problem with that is that I cannot "make" you anything. Our relationship is not 100% under either of our control - not mine and not yours. It survives and thrives through our love for each other, being as open as we are able to be and realizing that we will be imperfect in any number of ways even as we strive towards more meaningful relationship."
