I Was Building the Case Against Myself

There I was sitting in my car in a parking garage, engine running, forehead against the steering wheel, working up the nerve to dial a number I'd known by heart my whole life.

My hands were shaking. My face was burning. And I hadn't even said hello yet.

I'd just had one of those quiet, cracking-open realizations that don't arrive in a single moment; they arrive from a lot of small moments finally adding up to something you can't unsee. And the realization was this: I hadn't told my father I loved him in years. Not because I didn't. Because somewhere along the way, not saying it had become the one place I still felt like I had any power in the relationship.

For years, we hadn't embraced when we saw each other. I found excuses not to spend as much time around him. You see, in my head, I had carried a running story about him: he didn't show up or stick around the way I needed him to when it counted. And when I had moments where I thought, look I succeeded, I did something right, it never got to be just that. Instead I received, “Good job, but. Well done, but. You could've done this instead.” However well I did, it came back smaller than I'd imagined. I never felt good enough for him. Not in my own eyes.

I'd told that story so many times I'd stopped noticing it was a story. It just felt like the truth.

And if we're honest, most of us are holding a version of this somewhere. Maybe not with a parent. Maybe it's a partner you stopped reaching for first, after one too many times of feeling unseen. Maybe it's a friend you quietly wrote off, and now you tell people “we just grew apart” instead of the messier truth. A story about someone you love, told so many times, that you forgot you were the one still writing it. A story about someone you love is usually just the visible part. Underneath it, there's almost always a quieter belief about yourself that the story's been proving right the whole time.

There's probably a name sitting in the back of your mind right now, someone you've built a whole story around. You don't have to say it out loud, but just notice that it's there.

It took a weekend conference to finally open my eyes. The event pushed hard on this exact idea: so much of what we call reality is actually a story we built and then mistook for fact.

During one session, we were assigned to call someone we needed to take responsibility with. A shiver ran up my spine as I realized immediately who that call had to be: my dad.

Once we were on the call I quickly blurted out I needed to share some things, and asked him to just let me get through it. Which he agreed to. I told him I'd realized I'd been withholding my love from him, on purpose, for years, as a way to control something I couldn't control any other way. I told him he was my hero. That I loved him. That all I'd ever wanted was a relationship with him.

When he finally got to speak, he thanked me for calling and told me he appreciated the work I'd clearly done. And then he said the sentence I still think about, almost 10yrs later now:

“I'm so glad to know this, because I thought you didn't want me to say it anymore.”

The whole phone call took only five minutes. In just five minutes, I realized that the story I was holding onto wasn't just on my side. All those years I thought he was keeping his distance and setting conditions, he was feeling the exact same silence on his end.

Here is what many people overlook: the story was never actually about my father. It was a belief I held about myself. By staying quiet and holding back, I was giving him reason to believe I didn't want to talk either. Without realizing it, my own silence was creating the very distance I feared.

Maybe there's something you're not saying to someone, and you've got a very good reason why. Maybe you've decided they don't deserve it yet, or that saying it first would cost you something you can't afford to lose. I'm not going to tell you that reason is wrong. But silence is only one form this takes. However it shows up for you, pulling back, staying guarded, waiting for them to move first, consider this: is that behavior actually protecting you from what you fear, or is it quietly creating it?

That name from earlier, I'm not going to tell you what to do with it. I'm only going to ask if you've looked at what it's actually proving about you lately, or just kept feeding it.

This shows up everywhere once you look for it. It's a leader who assumes an employee isn't interested in growth because they rarely speak up in meetings, while that employee assumes the leader doesn't see their potential because they've never been offered a seat at the table. It's two people in a relationship, each one waiting for the other to reach first, each one reading the silence as proof they were right not to. Neither one is wrong about what they're seeing. Both of them, together, the whole reason the silence keeps going.

And if nothing changes, the story just keeps writing itself. Not dramatically. Quietly. A few less calls a year. A few more excuses. Until one day the distance between you and someone you love stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like just how things are between you.

My relationship with my dad didn't turn into something out of a movie after that call. It's still something we work at, with some conversations easier than others and some old habits creeping back in when I'm not paying attention. But the belief underneath it did change. I wasn't holding the old one anymore: that I wasn't enough, that I never would be. And once that stopped running the show, there was finally room for something truer than the story I'd been feeding for years.

Rewriting that story doesn't always take a massive, heroic gesture. Sometimes it's just five minutes of terrifying honesty in a parked car. It's choosing to step past the safety of your own silence and risking the possibility that the other person has been waiting for you to reach out all along.

If there's a conversation you've been avoiding or a truth you've kept locked away to protect yourself, I'd genuinely love to hear about it. What's the unsaid thing you've been holding onto? Reach out and let me know, or come connect with us at The Academy of MotivAction®, as we're here to help you navigate these exact patterns and restore the human connections that matter most.