Daddy Issues and Death by 'Crazy'

It turns out that the worst thing about having a Dad is actually the lack of one. I have more than ever been discovering the endless waves of effect that have rippled through my psyche after my break, five years ago, with my parents, most especially my father. I've noticed, finally, that it's the emptiness of wanting a 'Dad' again that's the worst. Because, of course, noone can fill that place satisfactorily but him, and he can't fill it satisfactorily. But all this doesn't keep me from instinctually seeking a reparative person, someone who could function in the role of Dad without actually being MY Dad. Someone who might, in fact, have something better to say about my desires and dynamism than that they are uppity and I am continuously and unwittingly 'too big for my britches.' Though those ideas echo from almost 20 years ago, they still echo loudly and sometimes almost deafen me. They are strongest because those memories are the last ones I have of a relationship with my father - the relationship when I still listened to the words he had to say, and took them to heart. Soon after he said these things I realized that he had missed me entirely, that I didn't really exist as a presence or a person to him; I understood the version of me he spoke to when we talked was not really any reaction to me, but to a series of cluttered memories, which crowded around me and obscured me when we interacted. But our relationship, though tenuous and brumous, was still extant. Then it came suddenly clear exactly how much crazy/insane is the opposite of 'valid human being,' because I was stabbed with the point of that word, and distinctly refused as a person. That was where our relationship stopped. He killed me to him (think, 'you're dead to me') but not in the way one might expect. My father separated our universes: mine where I was sane, and his where I was crazy. And there was nothing I could do about that. This separation came about through a discussion of schizophrenia in our family, one in which I took a more modern approach to the idea of mental illness which had little or nothing to do with craziness/madness/insanity and other words that conjure up fear and dehumanization. But through the conversation, becoming ever more heated on his end, in my attempts to define what it was I was trying to say in words that he would understand, I stooped to the word I thought would make the most sense - and now I know, stir the most fear - crazy. I said she was crazy (right now) and she needed help. And he said I was crazy and thus I needed help. He said it so loudly that the car rang with it. This moment was confusing and upsetting for many reasons: 1. I felt the full dismissal of his old-school Foucaultian take on insanity (purposefully insane, harmful to others, nefarious, evil, refusing to be part of the greater community of understanding and their take on reality). 2. I was made to be the object of my own concern in the conversation (I was crazy, and needed help, and I should take care of that and stop trying to blame others). 3. I was a meddling bitch. The crazy comment also dismissed my two years of intense relationship with my schizophrenic sister, wherein I had swung from being sure that something was very wrong with her but feeling that there was nothing I could do but 'be' with her, to truly believing her psychoses...because it seemed the least disruptive and kept her the most stable. The dismissal of self was like death. It certainly was an epic 'casting out' of the family center, and I felt it completely as such. I could live outside it and be an 'acquaintance,' but I would never be a part of the family again. It was death by crazy.