Day 725: Dad

Before I start writing today’s journal entry, I feel a need to give a warning. In Road to Ramen, I’ve made “personal” posts where I write about things in my life outside of entrepreneurship. Most of them are pretty light and are about things like my sleep schedule, my fitness goals, or reflections on various events. Once in a while, I’ll write about something heavier, like relationships or exploring my past. Today’s post is in the latter category. It is intensely personal, and if you’re here to read about me building Browserflow and being an indie maker, it’s going to have none of that so feel free to come back another time.

Okay, let’s get started.

I’m currently reading The Body Keeps the Score, a book about trauma, its effects, and the healing process. I’ve had several friends recommend it, and given my strong interest and personal experience with transformative technologies like psychedelics and meditation and their potential to heal and change us, I was curious to check out this book.

I’m only about a fifth of the way through, but I already know I want to read this again soon because it’s dense with great information. You know when you read something and it immediately makes sense and feels obvious in retrospect but it didn’t hit you in the same way before? This book is full of those moments.

This morning, I read a section that goes into how our body stores the coping mechanisms it develops in response to trauma and evokes that response whenever there’s a trigger. The example given in the book is of a couple who survived a near-fatal car crash and when they were guided into remembering that event, the man had a strong fight-or-flight response where his heart beat faster and he started sweating whereas the woman went into a freezing response where she reported feeling completely numb. Same situation but completely different responses.

This got me thinking about the traumatic elements in my own life and the ways that my coping mechanism might still be showing up today. I’ve speculated before that my tendency for doing things as a lone wolf (e.g. building a business solo) and being fiercely independent likely has roots in growing up having to fend for myself due to the lack of reliable parental figures.

I started to recount some of the events where I felt the greatest pain or a complete absence of control, and I noticed that many of them involved my dad.

My relationship with my dad has easily been one of the greatest challenges in my adult life. For those not familiar, I’ll give some background information:

• Age 6: My sibling and I moved to the States to be raised by my grandparents because my mom had cancer. My mom and dad stayed in Korea, and when my mom passed away, my dad remarried and continued living in Korea.
• Ages 6 - 14 (?): My dad visited once or twice a year. Eventually, he stopped coming and only sent my stepmom.
• Age 24: My dad and my stepmom moved from Korea to the States in 2016, the same year that I moved to Japan. My visits home starting in 2017 were the first time that I would see my dad on a somewhat regular basis, but given that I was still traveling most of the time, I’ve only seen him a handful of times a year.

In short, my dad was largely absent from my life. He felt that he needed to stay in Korea and make money in order to financially support us, which is a decision that I can understand. Still, the fact that he wasn’t around was a source of resentment. Thanks to an incredibly healing psychedelic experience in 2016, I was able to start forgiving my dad for not being there and begin mending our relationship.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to be easy because of an unexpected change in our relationship dynamic: He quickly ran out of his savings and started asking me for money in 2017. Initially, I said yes, but after sending him tens of thousands of dollars over the years and he kept asking with no signs of stopping, I started resenting him for it.

I struggled immensely with whether to continue supporting him. Given he didn’t raise me, I didn’t feel any joy in being able to help him in the same way I would if it were my grandpa in need. Emotionally, it felt like after spending my whole life being raised by an adoptive family, my birth parents had showed up at my doorstop one day and said, “Surprise! We need your help.”

Sure, he had sent money to support us growing up, but most of that money went towards my brother and sister’s education (luckily for me, Princeton’s financial aid was extremely generous and after my first tech internship, I was able to cover all of my financial needs) and I felt that I had largely paid him back with the money I’d already given him.

But he didn’t have anyone to turn to besides me: My grandpa and my uncle refused to help him; my brother hadn’t spoken to our family in years; and my sister didn’t have the financial security to help him. So I was his only hope, and it ate at me.

The situation is ongoing, and I still don’t have any solid answers, but it’s been significantly improved by him finding part-time jobs and my sister becoming more financial secure which means that she’ll be able to help going forward. So now, I don’t feel the burden as much or the uneasy feeling that he’s going to want to talk in private and ask for more money whenever I visit home.

And yet. Whenever I see him, I still feel mostly difficult feelings.

Over the years, I’d felt guilty about this: Why was it that when I saw my grandpa, I felt warmth, kindness, care, love, and gratitude, but when I saw my dad, I mostly felt aversion and uneasiness? I wanted to love him, but the feelings just weren’t there. And after reading about the body’s response to trauma, I’m starting to understand why.

When I look back on my relationship with my dad, the memories that readily come to mind are the extremely painful ones. The happy times when he bought me some toy are hazy; the times I felt betrayal are sharp. I know that’s unfair to him, but this is how it is. Here are the ones I can easily recall:

• Age 7: My dad hid the fact that my mom had passed away and told us that “she was too tired” whenever we asked to talk to her over the phone. Many years later, we found out that it was because he didn’t want us to be distracted from our schoolwork. My siblings and I were ages 7, 9, 14. I didn’t get to attend our mom’s funeral because first grade was simply too important.
• Age ~16: My dad told us that he got a huge promotion. In fact, he had actually been let go, and my grandparents told us that we needed to be even more careful about money than we already were.
• Age 17: My dad became furious, threatened to kill himself, and stopped speaking to me because I told him that I was considering attending Harvey Mudd instead of UC Berkeley. In Korea, Berkeley is a brand name school, and he had already told all of his coworkers that I was going to attend as soon as he found that I got in. (He had done the same exact thing a few years ago when my sister had gotten into Berkeley. When she visited Korea, she had to lie to all of his coworkers about going to Berkeley when in fact she had decided to attend USC.) The fact that he cared more abut his image and reputation among his peers than my preference for how I’d spend the next four years of my life was upsetting. Not to mention the absurdity of him feeling entitled to decide my future despite not having been present for my past.
• Age 7 - 18: When my dad remarried, he told my siblings and me that my stepmom had never been married before. We didn’t know why this mattered, but it started mattering when over a decade later, my grandparents accidentally mentioned her previous marriage. We later confronted our dad and asked him to tell us the truth, and he continued to lie. We didn’t care about whether she had been married or not — we cared that he tell us the truth. Knowing that he was deeply religious, we asked him to swear to God that she had never been married and he did it without hesitation. Later, when he finally admitted that he had been lying, he told us he simply had to because we wouldn’t have accepted her if she had been married before. He said that God would’ve understood which is why he was okay swearing on his name.
• Age 18: My sister and I visited Korea after my high school graduation and stayed with my parents. (This was the same trip when we confronted our dad about his lying.) One morning, my dad decided to wake me up by smacking my penis over my shorts. I felt incredibly violated. I told him that I was an adult and that it was wildly inappropriate, but he refused to apologize and became angry at me. The worst part was that I thought my sister, being closer in age and also having grown up in the States, would understand, but she also told me I was making a big deal about nothing. When I asked her how she would feel if dad had smacked her genitals, she said that it was completely different. I felt so angry and mistreated that I left the apartment, took a train to Seoul, and flew out of Korea that day.

So. It’s been over a decade since these incidents, and my dad has changed since then. But should I really be that surprised that I still flinch and stiffen up whenever my dad touches me? Or that when I hear him making confident assertions about things he knows nothing about, I feel revulsion? What I realized today was that these aren’t reactions formed in a vacuum — they’re engrained responses based on my past experiences with him.

It’s quite relieving to realize this. I now see that I don’t have to feel guilty for not feeling affection towards him. Sure, positive feelings toward him may grow if I continue to feel trust and safety in our interactions over time, but my body is simply reacting based on the coping mechanisms it’s developed from our past interactions. I can accept my feelings and responses as they are rather than beating myself up over why they’re not a particular way. In my desire to be kind to my dad, I hadn’t been kind to myself.

The other realization I had was that I don’t have to feel guilty if I decide to end my relationship with my dad in the future. If a friend or significant other broke my trust repeatedly in the same way, I would’ve moved on a long time ago. Does anything change due to the fact that he’s my biological father? It would certainly make things more complicated because that’d affect my relationships with other family members, but from an ethical standpoint, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with deciding to move on from a relationship, family or not. I can harbor no ill will towards my dad — in fact, I can want the very best for him — and at the same time decide that I don’t want him to be a part of my life. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

To be clear, I presently don’t have intentions to end things with him. I’m still interested in growing our relationship. It’s just that in the past when I contemplated ending things, I felt overcome by feelings of guilt and “how things should be” in an ideal scenario.

But as with all things, it’s not about how things “should” be. It’s about what they are. The things in the past happened. The way they affect the present moment, regardless of how desirable those effects are, are real. Can I accept everything as it is, without judgment?