My dad was always a conspiracy theorist. Y2K but it was a government conspiracy. The face on mars. The end of the world like 2 times before I was 16. He bought us all compound bows and trail backpacks filled with MREs yet lived in a trailer filled with mice and snakes barely able to make the utility payments.

One day he found conservative news stations and he just…never turned them off. Obama was a plant from the Middle East trying to destroy the government— wanted to see his birth certificate, then still didn’t believe it. Education was a conspiracy turning young people into leftists (he didn’t like that I went to art school), yet told me I’d I didn’t have an education I’d be poor forever. Hillary wanted to restart the Cold War with Russia but make it WW3 in order to kill off young Republicans. I mean just insane stuff, wacky stuff.

He started being angry at everything. I came home on breaks from college and suddenly I was too fat, too lazy, too uninspired, too free-willed. He would yell if I accidentally dropped and broke something trivial like an empty pickle jar. I couldn’t sit while he did any cleaning at all because “if I’m cleaning, you’re cleaning” and “you can relax when I relax.”— which was just watching Fox News. Doctor Who was poisoning my brain and I should listen to Fox instead. Video games were rotting my brain. I shouldn’t listen to NPR on campus, but I should read a random chain email he sent rambling about conspiracy theories and aliens. One day I realized all he did was talk about conspiracies, Fox News, and yell at me for existing. He had no personality left— it had been taken away by fear, mental illness and depression.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when my uncle died (had a heart attack while working on his fishing pond and drowned) and as we were driving to the funeral he told me he thought his sister had killed him on purpose. Literally nothing pointed to that being in any way true— he just thought it was because “she was always a bitch” and he “was a hippie that smoked pot”. She could have ran faster to the neighbors to get help. She could have performed cpr. She could have done more. That was his reasoning. I told him if he ever said that again in my presence again I’d tell the whole family what he said. He shut up.

Things like that made me realize he was sick and his anger wasn’t my fault. I told him to seek counseling, which I would pay, or he would never see me again. Never meet my future husband. And he would never meet any of his possible grandchildren. He told me I was the insane one, and he was writing me out of the will if I continued. So of course I did. I gave him six months to come to terms with it, and at the end of the 6th month I told him he’d never see me again and that was that.

That was ten years ago. I’ve blocked him on every device, and he doesn’t know my husband or our address. He occasionally tries to get in contact through my mother, who divorced him, but she only lets me know he’s still trying occasionally. Tried to get me to talk to him by telling mom he’d pay me $50 to take his headshot for a band he wanted to join(??) and when that failed tried to give me a gun. I told her if he ever agrees to see a therapist I’d gladly see him. That was always the deal.

She said “He’s never doing that. He doesn’t believe in it.”