There I was, 24,000 feet in the air, sitting in the aisle seat, trying to shield the tears streaming down my face from the flight crew serving chips and soda, thankful that the lights were dim on this 11 p.m. flight. The stranger sitting in my row at the window couldn’t see me furiously wiping away the evidence of my pain. I sat there reading his text to me, thinking to myself, “He is EXACTLY like Patrick.”

Patrick is what the rest of the world would call my father. I just call him Patrick. We never had the typical father/daughter relationship – his dipping in and out of my life made that pretty difficult. I won’t bore you with the details of the particulars of our relationship in this post, but I will provide enough background to paint the picture. In some ways, this was the typical  “deadbeat father” story that most of us are familiar with. My mom and Patrick divorced when I was two years old. We moved a few hours away when I was seven years old, and from then on, I saw him twice a year: summer break and Christmas, although in a child support hearing, he told a judge that he saw my brother and me once a month. Even though I only saw him twice a year, there was this fear that I felt always. I never felt safe around Patrick, not in how a child is supposed to feel around their parents. I knew he was a dangerous man and always feared his wrath would be directed at me, and sometimes it was. He spent 20 years of his life in the military, a place notoriously known for breaking men down to build them back up while utilizing unaddressed trauma to do so – and Patrick had no shortage of it. He treated my siblings and me like soldiers in his platoon – soldiers he didn’t like very well. And he treated women even worse. 

The entire story of how my ex and I got together is one for a different day that will no doubt be uploaded at some point soon. When we were together, I thought he was the one. I thought he was the moon, the earth, and all the stars. He didn’t have a great relationship with either of his parents and held particular disdain for his mother, but I didn’t care. He had this way of making me feel special while simultaneously disrespecting me. He kept me on my toes. My nervous system was never calm in his presence, palms sweaty, increased heartbeat, tripping up on my words, all signs of what I thought to be a crush. Butterflies. And how lucky I felt at that time to always feel butterflies. It wasn’t butterflies I was feeling. My body was actually trying to tell me to retreat by manifesting physiological symptoms of unease. He had these moments where he would completely ignore me for a couple of days at a time. He refused to answer my calls or respond to my texts, essentially disappearing. Then returned like nothing had happened. *cue abandonment issues* My ex 

I noticed similarities between my ex and Patrick during our time together, but it never quite registered like it did that night on the plane. Initially, I thought, “Oh, they both are light-skinned, tall, sensitive, funny, charismatic, and a tad bit dramatic.” And they were. They were also both emotionally abusive, deeply misogynistic, felt entitled to undeserved praise, and had a particular brand of violence that disrupted your nervous system just enough while in their presence for you to take notice but subtle enough to make you think it was just nerves and not a genuine concern for your safety. According to discoveries I’ve made in therapy, I ended up in a relationship with a man eerily similar to Patrick because it was familiar. The feeling that I needed to earn love was familiar. The feeling of abandonment was familiar. The thought that I needed to give copious amounts of grace to someone who hurt me and would continue to, was familiar. The feeling that the aforementioned hurt was a declaration of love, was familiar. I accidentally dated my dad by dating someone who abused me in the same way.