Fear kind of controls my life. If you look at me closely, you can probably see it. It shows up in how I move, how I keep people at a distance, how I pull back right when someone tries to step in. Running away from that young woman’s wedding. Being notoriously single. Every woman who has ever tried to love me has run into the same invisible barrier. My baby sister sees it too. With her, I tighten up almost instinctively, as if letting her get close might open something I’m not ready to feel.
Yesterday I spent about five hours baking pies for no one. Five slow hours in a quiet kitchen where the only sound was the oven humming like it was trying to keep me company. I even recorded the whole thing, hoping the camera might give the moment a little meaning. One of the pies might have a destination. The rest feel like offerings without an altar. I will probably eat one myself, so that still leaves three wandering around without purpose.
This morning I woke up in tears. Not the kind that sneak out while you’re thinking. The kind that show up before your brain is fully awake. I had a dream, or a memory, or something in between. My father was there. His life, his death, and everything unresolved between us rose up like it had been waiting for silence. That relationship has always lived inside me like a stone at the bottom of a well. Heavy. Deep. Echoing up through the stillness of my life whenever I get quiet enough to hear it.
I only had one father. Somehow life handed me two mothers, but only one father, and I treated him poorly. When I look at my own children, it feels like I walked into fatherhood carrying the same confusion I had as a son. I used to tell myself he wasn’t a good father, but that never held up. The truth is he wasn’t a bad father. The fear, if I am honest, is that I will fail the same way I imagine I failed him. That I cannot be a good father or a good partner or even a good friend. I don’t fully understand it.
All my life I’ve said I needed to protect people from me. It sounded responsible. It sounded noble. But when I look at the details of my life, it does not make sense. I have never been someone anyone needed protection from.
I have been to jail a few times. I stole from Harvard University. I sold pirated software. I violated the probation that came with selling that software. That is the entire list. I’ve had other brushes with the law, but nothing that made me dangerous. Most of my closest friends came from that era anyway. I helped them with their computers, sometimes illegally. If anything, I exposed them to risk. I never protected them from anything.
So what exactly have I been guarding people from? Why do I keep everyone at a distance? Why do I step back the moment someone tries to step closer? I do not know. I have done this for as long as I can remember. And now I am 42 years old on Thanksgiving morning, waking up in tears and writing what feels like a confession.
For what? And for whom?
Maybe for myself. Maybe because carrying fear for this long has become too heavy. Maybe something cracked open yesterday and I am finally trying to understand what came out. Maybe the life I want requires a version of me I have been too afraid to let exist.
Whatever the reason, this is where I am. Finally looking at the truth instead of orbiting around it. Trying to understand it. Trying to understand myself.
And maybe, in some quiet way, the pies were trying to say all of this long before I wrote it down.