After a lot of deliberation, and this stupid idea that somehow I could keep this a secret until I was legally moved out, I'm coming to terms with the fact that I want to, and almost feel like I need to tell my dad.
This is going to get a bit tl;dr because there's necessary backstory. Just as a warning.
My dad decided we were moving when I was 10, because it'd be easier to live above the family business then have to drive there at 4 AM if he got a call (My dad is a funeral director/embalmer, and is pretty much on call 24/7/365). I was crushed, I had a load of friends, loved the house, had a near perfect childhood. When we moved, I got put into Catholic school, which you guys have probably seen me bitch about at least twice. It was a living nightmare. I won't go into it, because frankly I could probably right a series on the hell I went through, but in some way I always blamed my dad for it. That school beat it into me that nobody would listen to me because I wasn't worth it, so I stopped telling my parents what was happening to me pretty early on. But that bitterness was still there.
When I hit 8th grade, I finally broke down and told him I couldn't go to a catholic highschool. At this point, my dad and I nearly never talked, and when we did it was mostly arguments or commands. I sobbed, for the first time since I was a kid, to him. I told him I'd kill myself, and not out of any "If you don't give me my way I'm gonna off myself and you'll be sorry" BS. I told him, honestly, that I couldn't do it. If I didn't kill myself, the stress (or the straight-out physical abuse) was going to kill me. He got pissed, but not at me. I went to a normal highschool, started feeling a bit better and being less of an all-around douchebag. My dad and I started getting along better.
Highschool was a lot of ups and downs for me, like everyone else in the world. I had a bit of a drug problem I managed to keep hidden, I had a lot of crappy friends but a few amazing ones, and for the most part it wasn't terribly remarkable (at least not in the me and my dad context).
College hit, and something changed. There's a lot of personal crap I'm not telling, because it's just...not something I'm bringing up. Suffice it to say, my dad and I mutually realized how stupid we'd been being to each other, and an actual bond started to form-a tiny, thin, brittle one, but a bond nonetheless. We never sat down and had heart-to-hearts, but we were joking and laughing and really meaning it for the first time since I was a little kid.
So, I'm a year out of college now. After our first dog died (my second year in college), it crushed us all, but it hit myself and my dad the worst. I get my massive love/weakness for dogs from my dad, and both of us just sat there holding him, crying dead silent. Everyone else sobbed, everyone else was a wreck, but me and him both fought it harder than hell. When he finally passed, we both broke at almost the same goddamn time.
I'm realizing now, that so much of that rift between us was entirely my fault. I never tried, I never even attempted to fix it. My dad didn't move us here to ruin my life, he did it so we could have our OWN house as opposed to a rented one, and so he could get to work anytime he needed. He didn't put me in catholic school to traumatize me, he did it because he'd heard horror stories about this town's public schools. In the past six or seven months, I think I've learned more than I have in years.
So that brings me to the issue at hand (I can almost hear some of you brave enough to tag along screaming "FINALLY").
On Easter, I talked to my aunts a lot about my being trans. I told them about how happy passing makes me, I told them a few humorous horror stories about getting in and out of a binder. I barely talked to my dad, though. We made jokes about my dog, we picked on each other like we always do, and I raved over his amazing cooking skills. It didn't occur to me till later that night, talking to Ben, how much it hurts keeping all the best and worst parts of my life from him. I know I'm not going to live forever, nobody is, and I've had some close calls already. Two years ago, when I had a serious drinking problem, I nearly died.
I passed out for three hours, they couldn't get me up, everyone there (and they were all sober) said half the time I wasn't breathing. I was cold, I was numb, and I was convinced I wouldn't wake back up. Ever since that, things have affected me differently. I keep thinking, if I'd have died then NO one would have known I was trans. My mom would've never known why I tried to kill myself so many times, and my poor dad would've known even less. He would've blamed himself, for all of it.
The hard part...I don't even know if I CAN tell him. I've been making my mom play messenger between us for over 10 years now.
I've only had two serious talks with him in my life. One started out of an argument, and the other because my aunt outed me to everyone (when I thought I was a lesbian). Both ended fine, the gay thing he took incredibly well. It NEVER came up. It NEVER became something he'd throw around to be a dick with. But being trans is...well, entirely different. Telling someone your gay, realistically, shouldn't change anything. They don't have to call you by a different name. They don't have to change everything they've thought about you.
And my dad is Russian Orthodox. After my dog died, he plunged even worse into the obsessive religion thing he's been on for a few years. It's never gotten in the way of family crap, he's never once bitched at me for being anti-religious, but still...I'm terrified that this is going to be the final straw.
Fat, 21 year old with no life, wasted 3 years at a community college for a job he never got, thought he was a lesbian, now thinks he's gay, is just a massive goddamn screwup...
I'm scared that this is going to be the end all. And I can't deal with that. I still 'technically' live there. And I still, for the life of me, can't get a damn job. I couldn't live without seeing my dogs, but I can't keep living like this.
I have no idea what to do, or if there's anything I even CAN do. And it's driving me insane.
