My father never gave a shit about me. He was cruel, humiliating, emotionally abusive, deeply selfish. He never once, in 46 years, praised me or celebrated one of my achievements. If anything, he made me feel like he resented me for my success.

But he bragged about me to everyone at work. He bragged about me to relatives. I remember hearing him bragging about me at Thanksgiving one year, and thinking that he really was proud of me, he just didn’t know how to express it to me.

I believed that lie, which I told myself, for twenty years. The truth is, he never cared about me, he wasn’t proud of me, he didn’t care about my feelings or even noticed that everything I did was in an effort to solve his puzzle, and convince him to love me. He only cared about himself, and he only cared about how he could use my hard work and my sacrifice to feed his own insatiable ego.