Clarification

So, I want to make a clarification. As you know, I met my dad back in October for the first time in 18 years. I wrote a note about how the meeting went, which went well, but somewhere, some things have gotten lost in translation. People have this belief that if something is good, good things follow, and if something is bad, bad things follow. Therefore, good things don't bring bad things and vice versa.

Wrong.

This post is to clarify. Yes, the meeting with my dad went well, as well as it probably could have gone for the first time meeting him in 18 years. If you go back and read my post, you'll find that it went well. For weeks after meeting my dad, people would ask me how I was doing. This is how the conversation usually went:
"Hey, how are you doing?"
"I'm hanging in there. Things have been tough since meeting my dad."
"I thought the meeting went well?"

And the answer following is a very long explanation. So, to save myself from having to explain to a lot of people, I thought I would just put one here to send people to for reference.

So, even though my meeting with my dad went well, life has been very difficult since then. A lot of things have come up from the depths. After everything with my dad happened when I was 3, after all the trauma, I put everything away. I pushed it far down into the depths of my heart and mind, never to really be brought up again. I was a child and I didn't need to deal with that trauma. I had no need to, really. But, once I met my dad, those things came flooding back against my will and couldn't be denied access. They were just there, and I couldn't deny them. I wasn't okay.

The things that have come up are a bunch of emotions...more than I would like to have. They have been anger, sadness, fear, hatred, guilt, confusion, numbness, and probably a whole host of others. I've gone from being okay with my dad to not wanting much to do with him. I've gone from being able to say I love him to saying I hate him. It's so confusing. I've been having memories, flashbacks, and body memories that aren't fun to deal with. The confusing thing is is that I don't even remember what happened, but apparently my body does. It's almost like when someone loses a limb...they still have the feelings of that limb being there at times, but it's not physically there. That's what the body memories feel like. They feel like someone is touching me, but no one is there. I call them ghost touches for that very reason.

I've also been dealing with dissociation and a few other things. Life is confusing right now. I have a lot to deal with that I've never dealt with before. I never had a reason to deal with it before because it was never there. And now it's there...all of it. And I can't ignore it, even though I want to. A lot of things have been triggering me, and I don't even know why. There are so many things I need to figure out in order to deal with things, but I don't want to. I need to figure out why things trigger me and what the body memories are from, as well as the flashbacks and pictures I see in my head.

I feel like I am swirling around in a mess of things. So, life is not okay right now. I'm confused as to what I think about my dad being back in my life. Wouldn't you be? It's been 18 long years that I have wondered about him, and now that wondering has been put to rest, but shock has taken hold. It's been about 5 or so months since meeting him and I am still in shock about it. I still can't believe I met him. I touched him. I hugged him. I talked to him. I got to see that I look like him. We have a few things in common. I met my dad. My dad. I met my dad.

See why life has been crazy since meeting him?