Don't ever let a statue convince you it is a person. That is a lie, told by the person who carved it.

You know those cult-like religions? The ones that demanded human sacrifice? The ones that needed hearts, needed children left on icy mountains, or virgins killed? Bear with me, because I'm about to tell you about a faith that requires sacrifice. The sacrifice of self, in this case.

Another lesson for the road: we look at statues for beauty. Because we know that there's nothing below the skin. Nothing to bleed and disgust us with weakness. They are cold, unreachable, and only what you see on the outside. They are honest, but humans lie.

My father is unimpeachable. Almost saintlike in how good, honest, and perfect he was. He was like this statue, perpetually disappointed by each of my petty moral failings.

My whole childhood I clung onto that goodness, frantic to be the same, to be good.

My father is a good person.

I am a good person. I am trying to be a good person.

I remember him staring down with shame after I'd pocketed some marbles from an aunt's decorative China bowl. He had tears in his eyes as he said he didn't want a thief as a child. There was talk of abandoning me to an orphanage, just to permanently scare me off doing it.

Same story when I brought toys to school and got in trouble. In grade 4 when I failed to protect a classmate from bullying, there it was again, the classic combination of a lecture and fathomless disappointment.

There was anger over grades. Huge showdowns over the many, many lies I'd told. I needed to lie. I was as far from perfect as one end of an ever-expanding universe is from another.

And I lied to friends, I lied to everyone I ever met to sell this illusion. Because I needed to be good, just like my father was. Somehow, I had to reach the potential he saw in me.

The moral teachings went on and on, each lesson drumming into my head, like the marching band before the firing squad, that I wasn't good.

But my father is a good person.

It started slow, the loss of confidence like blood just barely gathering at the site of a sharp cut from a toy tea set. I barely felt the first shakes of the ground when my trust began to erode.

It started when I realized my father didn't want a family, he just sort of had one because everyone did.

His threatening and shouting, and destroying the house led to more cuts. But they were still small, the earthquakes barely twos on the Richter Scale.

Then the real bleeding began. That horrible, half nightmare, half twisted memory of a night when he first hit my mother.

Maybe not first, but the first time I properly remembered.

The first time I felt like I had died, but was stuck eternally in the moment.

No amount of scarring ever stopped that one from bleeding.

And no matter how much I yearned for a return to the idyllic, unflappable faith of my childhood, the cuts continued.

One after another, thousands of nicks adding up in my Pollock painting of self-flagellation, as the realization cut me again and again.

But no, I don't get the painting, I don't see it.

My father is a good person.

Doesn't quite sound the same anymore, even in my head.

I find myself practising it, memorizing anecdotes of his goodness, in a bleak effort to trick myself into believing it.

Didn't Goebbels say that? "Tell a big lie enough times and people will believe it?"

I brainwashed myself with that lie, even as I knew it was less convincing than a Potemkin village.

My father is a good person.

It played with my mind, to be honest, the cognitive dissonance making me nearly always nauseous, giving me headaches when I tried to square the childhood values drilled into my head with the things I knew.

What is a good person?

My father...is a good person.

The news didn't help, the world's infinite cruelty rendered in factual words and clear pictures and sent around and around and around.

Is anyone a good person? Is it enough to be shallow, and polite, and pretend to care?

My father is a good person.

I noticed he laughed more with strangers than he'd ever laughed at my brother's jokes. He disliked all of us, and got angry on vacations.

I tried everything, becoming a boy to be better. Pretending to be smart to be better.

Why am I still trying to be better?

But it oozed. The wounds festered. They rot without the care needed. The skin needed to be cut off, my limbs cut off, eyes sewed closed, mouth taped to hold back that stream of questions.

It's a constant state of grief and denial to wonder, to know, and then to try to forget.

My father is a good person. Right? If he's not, and I know, am I a good person?

Is it bad to be afraid that your parents will kill each other while you sleep? Bad to prop up doors under handles when a nightmare wakes you up at midnight?

Bad to hide knives from a desperate, gaslit housewife?

Then came the death blow.

My father had always prided himself on his ability to pay back favours. He was honest, remembered those who'd helped him.

And I began seeing love and friendship as a transaction. I am only worthy, because I can give you something. My father gave people jobs, money, and they gave him affection.

My father is a good person. He is loved.

And one day, he told me.

He told me that his stepfather had murdered a young maid that worked in his childhood home. With his bare hands.

Sure it was terrible, he was quick to assure me as the blood drained out of my body, and nobody was more upset than me.

But I owe him, for raising me after my father died. You understand don't you?

That was the killing blow, and my father dismissed me in contempt as I cried and cried.

He couldn't understand how I didn't understand. My father had given me love, money, and a good quality of life.

Why can't you respect my responsibilities? He asked angrily.

I couldn't explain it. Years of public speaking and I couldn't utter a single word capable of conveying the sheer horror of the situation.

I felt the earthquake this time. The ground tore itself apart, the house shook, the world stopped spinning.

I could've been that girl. My sister could have been that girl. My father said he protected the vulnerable. My father always told me to do the right thing. How could my father be a good person when his stepfather still breathed?

My father beat the shit out of my mother for insulting him. But this was okay? This was honourable?

I was taught never to lie, but funnily enough, I've been doing it all along. Over and over, and rather than punish me, my father watered the seed of this lie.

He watered it in the blood of a thousand ignored cuts, until it grew, spreading its roots through the garden, and choking it to death. Nothing can kill it now, and I can't tear it up, without somehow ruining the soil of my mind.

The flower is blooming now, and rather than being stunning, it is unspeakably, unbearably ugly.

It bloomed very differently from its seed and I see it now, standing tall and unmoving.

I can close my eyes, but I can't breathe air without choking on the stench of its truth.

My father is not a good person.

And neither am I.