Ganked this amazing link off a friend’s Twitter page. It’s the story of how the new My Little Ponies show helped one 21 year old man face the evil abusive stepfather whose alcohol fueled beatings made his childhood hell.

I have only sampled the new show a little bit, but the two episodes I have seen have simply blown me away with how amazing they are. I am not at all surprised to see that the show has not only become a wild hit, but has transformed countless male adult humans on the Internet from jaded, cynical, misanthropic nerds manque into rainbow colored pony loving “bronies” filled with love and happiness and wonder. The show is that good. If you want to check it out yourself, this YouTube channel has all the episodes.

One last bit of squee : this is the power of truly great art. It can reach right into people’s lives and give them strength and comfort and courage and love sweet love. I can’t think of any higher calling as a writer and creator than to try to create something which has the chance to be that powerful a force for good. That alone justifies all of art, regardless of all else art can do .

And not only can a phenomenal show like the new My Little Pony inspire a brave 21 year old man to face the very Satan of his entire life, it inspired him to share the story with the rest of us, so that we can be inspired by his story and maybe find some courage to face our own personal devils in our own lives.

I had an abusive father too. Not nearly to the extent of TwilightSparkle, the 21 year old man who wrote down his story for us to read, but he was still abusive to us verbally and emotionally. We were always hostage to his short fuse and lack of patience. We trod on eggshells, never knowing what would set him off on one of his tirades, and I think we were all pretty afraid of him a lot of the time.

It was especially hard at meal times. He would get home from work and take a nap before dinner, then wake up in a foul mood and take all his anger and frustrations out on us at the dinner table. Turns out, both he and my brother David have a problem with waking up with very low blood sugar and hence in a very dark mood. Having experienced hypoglycemic episodes myself due to my diabetes, I can tell you just how bad they feel. You feel like you are dying and the whole world is icy cold and everything hurts and you seriously want to kill the world.

That doesn’t excuse my father’s rages, however. He could have simply learned to shut the hell up until he had enough food in him to behave. But no, he always thought he was justified.

My sister Anne, the oldest of the four of us, and my brother David, the elder of us two boys, got the worst of it. For some reason, his anger always focused on them, and not on me or my sister Catherine. Perhaps it was a personality issue… my sister Catherine and I are both more shy, nervous, and bookish than Anne or David, and that was probably the deciding factor.

When I was younger, I would try to negotiate between my Dad and my siblings. I have natural mediation skills and they came into the fore during these meals from hell. As a naive child, I was convinced that all the conflict was just a misunderstanding, people not communicating properly, and I desperately threw myself in the middle and tried to solve the problem rationally.

Picture, for a moment, the absurdity of me, a small redheaded child, trying to act as negotiator for my whole family when I am the youngest person in the room and hence lowest on the totem pole. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

And of course, the problem was not a lack of communication or people not understanding each other. The problem was that my father is a chronic lifelong abuser. Picking on those he loves is a necessary part of his psychological makeup. He needs to vent his rage on those close to him. He has no other way to cope with stress and frustration, and as long as he keeps believing that his rages are always justified by what other people are doing, he will never find another way. He will never need another.

Sure, that drives away everyone he loves, but hey, as long as he’s right, who cares?

All this brings me to my point (surprise!), which is that I wish I could confront him like TwilightSparkle confronted his own demonic Dad. Like TwilightSparkle , I know that I would want to scream at him, throw things at him, even physically attack him for all the pain and damage and fear and sheer misery he put into all of us, including my mother. The amount of rage I have against him for all he did to us (and there is more, much more, than I have talked about here, including ruining my life as an adult too) is off the scale. Just thinking about it makes me tight in the throat and chest, and my fingers flex like they want to make a fist.

And that’s the problem. Jsut writing this much about it makes me feel like I am going crazy, and so it’s not hard to imagine that actually trying to confront him would simply blast my fragile sanity into tiny burning pieces. I know that this is probably not literally true, but subjectively, it seems like a real possibility.

But I also know that carrying all this intense white-hot rage inside me is probably a major component in my depression. Resolving it with a confrontation with him would honestly probably do me a hell of a lot of good, even if he doesn’t admit or change anything.

Well, he’s in Ontario and I am in BC, so it’s not going to happen in person any time soon. I have thought about phoning him out of the blue, but… I would likely lose my mind.

Maybe some day, I will write him a letter.