You could be right on some levels, but empirically, my experience isn’t the absence of ‘dads’, so much as the baleful influence of toxic stepfathers and an absence (in the main), of the actual parent. As it happens, my father was apparently, a total and utter piece of shit. I’m kind of glad that I never knew him or even had to meet him.

Plus of course, people like me, were subject to a whole other level of poisonous expectation, enforced chivviying to expected roles, and all the rest of it.

I think that the real toxicity is strategically emplaced at a very early age, say, from 0 to 7. Then of course, there are the poisonous siblings who fall into line in terms of promulgating the toxic orthodoxy.

Pandemic Lockdown, plus the ability to dissociate online and on mobile GSM has helped (ghosting, but with explanation), has helped.

It will take time to recover from this, but I believe it is doable.

Being who and what I am - and finally acknowledging it after all those years of resistance, repression and all the rest of it - may eventually pay off.

I like the way that you are able to empathise with and connect with seemingly oppositional and disparate perspectives, without indulging or championing one “side” or another.

It is true, the psychic lacerations and injuries have deformed me, but i think, it might just be possible to rise above it.