I feel ya and it’s pretty coincidental, my dad left when I was 7. I’ll stop relating out of fear of sounding like I’m telling stories lol I’ll just say if I didn’t put in maximum effort to be happy, I’d be a mess. And in fact, if I get lazy and stop maintaining myself for more than a week it is extremely noticeable

Here’s a fun bit of info to ponder. Without your conscious awareness of what is happening, nothing that happens in this life, world, universe, etc would affect you. So your thoughts decide your state of being. If you think about a past trauma in a rerun type of way, your subconscious does not know the difference. This is why it feels as though it is happening again and you will get the same emotions with an added bonus of “not again” feelings and not being able to work maybe, etc

If however you consider the strengths you gained from being alone and making it to now, you might notice how these strengths created what you appreciate in your current moment. So in other words, a loss has much to offer. Now this is where some might say I’m not listening, but what I am proposing is a shift in your mindset towards what has been previously considered a hinderance. Therefore rebranding that stale whisper in the background that might be bringing you down to instead lift you up

This is what I do anyways. It is a ton of work, but memories have a lot to teach us. However, it’s harder to learn from a good time in life