Dear Father,

aka the DNA Donor I called "Dad",

As far as I'm concerned, this will be my final letter to you. In a recent exercise, I constructed the father of my dreams and I said goodbye to him. I believe that holding onto the desire for that father to someday be part of my life is what has kept me attempting to reach out to you. Hoping that one word I say would suddenly change everything. Hoping to change your mind and motivating you to be the father I needed.

This is a note I took in a T session some time ago and it's amazing how it continues to resurface in my life: Inherent in all of what I said to T is this deep down belief that [person in question] is capable of what I want from him/her and somehow holding it back from me. These are my illusions. That I'm not what I need to be in order to get from her/him what I want. That I need to somehow find the key to unlock her/him into being what I need. It's a carry over from the childhood abuse that taught me to assume responsibility. It can't be her/him....s/he is my parent/friend/significant other. IT MUST BE ME. This is something I need to let go of. I need to stop believing s/he is capable of more than what s/he is giving me because that is where I'm getting caught up and being disappointed.

Isn't that something.....this is the first time I've put that together to realize I do it with you and not just with Mom. But that was the whole point of this exercise. And it was the whole reason I've been afraid to just shut the door on my relationship with you. To stop trying. It was the dreaded "what-if?" What if one more letter makes all the difference? Because I held onto hope that I would someday get the timing just right, reach out to you at a receptive moment and say just the right magical words to transform your heart into being the caring, loving father you should have been. Well, fuck that.

You are who you are, who you have always been as long as I've known you. You're abusive, childish, immature, hurtful, hateful, prejudice, condescending, snide, cold hearted, selfish, closed off, sarcastic, controlling, unloving. Your arrogance and pompous attitude thinly veil your true personality which is broken, scared, insecure and damaged. I'm not going to empathize with that to my own detriment anymore. Things happened to you. Things happened to me, too. But I didn't end up like you. Because I took responsibility for my own life and made it better. You live in your own world and you can stay there. You can die, waste away and decompose there. Bastard.

You have robbed me of enough. I am SO DONE waiting for the day you realize what you've lost. I have lost enough to you. And I take back any energy I ever used to spend wishing on you to be who I needed. You are not that man. You never were that man. You are incapable of ever being that man. You're nothing but a horrid shell of a human being, rotting from the inside out. A complete waste of space. You are not worth my time and my energy. I am free from you. You cannot touch me, cannot hurt me ever again.