In 1995 Newsweek published an article trumpeting the excellence of a magazine I had recently co-founded. “Funny, knowing, and wryly on target,” we were deemed. I sent the clip to my father. “Although I don’t regard Newsweek as anything special,” he wrote back, “it’s nice to know that someone besides you thinks it is all worthwhile.” Thanks, Dad.

Two years later, still trying to impress, I sent my him my latest career accomplishments: cassettes of my commentaries for NPR, and a copy of a feature I’d written for New York. He never replied. I would not communicate with the man again; three months after the pieces ran, he went into the hospital with mild pneumonia. He lied to the physician about how much alcohol he had been consuming, because wasn’t supposed to be drinking at all, and the withdrawals unmitigated by pharmaceutical relief sent him into a respiratory crisis from which he would not recover.

My father's expression to me regarding the Newsweek article was hardly new in my experience; I learned at an early age that to be labeled an “underachiever” was preferable to striving for a trophy or an award that would go unappreciated by the only person whose approval mattered to me. If I didn’t try my hardest, I wouldn’t succeed, and if I didn’t succeed, I wouldn’t be disappointed by my father’s predictable indifference. This was the pattern throughout my formative years.

From the day I enrolled at Berkeley, my intended career was clear—I had subscribed to Harper’s since I was 13, to Spy from its third issue—if unarticulated. I found myself living with a guy who was set on becoming a journalist. Rather than compete with him, I denied any postgraduate ambitions, to others as well as to myself.

This way, if I ended up not following my bliss and doing something else, I wouldn’t disappoint my friend Trevor, whose intellect and determination I greatly admired, the way I was seemd to do the same for my father, no matter what happened. While Trevor wrote for the Daily Californian and earned a four-point-oh GPA, I smoked pot three times a day.

After graduating I hooked up with some like-minded individuals and we started a ‘zine with not much more ambition for the publication than that. We garnered some attention from the right people— although if most people who today claim to have read Might were telling the truth we wouldn’t have gone out of business, we had a lot of editors at more established titles on our subscriber list—and soon we were publishing a legitimate magazine and getting written up in Newsweek and excerpted in Harper’s. The magazine was far too bizarre and uncompromising to be financially viable, though; we regularly mocked major corporations and mercilessly satirized the advertisers who might have been paying our bills. After nonetheless almost getting bought, first by AOL, then by Wired, we put the thing out of its misery.

Eight months later my father died. All that I would accomplish career-wise for the next five years, after having gone from the San Francisco Weekly to The New Yorker in the preceding three, were two unsold screenplays and a few articles and humor items. Recently, with the wisdom that four years and $22,000 worth of psychotherapy can bring, I came to realize why: I had replaced father’s eternal dissatisfaction by my career choices and endeavors with my own. In college I had failed to perform because I had placed Trevor in the role of my father; now I had cast myself. The tug of contradictory impulses that comprises personality had caused me to move as far away from my father as possible, and communicate with him only when necessary, meaning that his voice of my inadequecy was quieted somewhat. Having become that voice myself, later, I could not escape it, and it was therefore much more powerful and effective.

During that period, it would take me six months to write ten pages’ worth of revisions on a script. I basically stopped coming up with article ideas. I felt certain the screenplays I wrote would be disastrous, and though they haven’t sold I have read far worse (and you have seen worse, believe me) by seasoned pros. Then I persuaded myself I had lost the ability to report and write journalism, which, while not quite bicycle riding, isn’t a skill you lose in a few years without having suffered brain damage.

Failing to put pen to paper enabled me to remain shuttered in a little world of my creation, where my talent is extraordinary and my opinions unvaryingly correct. As long as I didn’t produce, I couldn’t face evaluation. Complicating matters was that the reason I write is mainly to convince everyone else of these truths so self-evident to myself. So my lack of output plunged me into depression. (With something like irony but not quite it, my father, a professional success despite his rampant alcoholism and misanthropy, left me a bunch of money, so I could afford to be such a loser.)

Not ameliorating the situation was that during the same period a friend and former colleague from the magazine Newsweek had written about was nominated for a Pulitzer, and another friend won a Golden Globe and an Oscar. Trevor was promoted to producer on “60 Minutes.” My high school debate-team partner? Co-host of “Crossfire.” I began to feel a sense of entitlement: why them and not me? Having not yet tried my hardest before failing to attain their levels of achievement, I wasn’t yet ready to entertain the likely propostion that they are simply more talented than I. The difference, then, was that they had worked incredibly hard. I had not. Why not? So began my introspection.

I came to my epiphany in a roundabout way: through compassion. As my wife and I started planning a family, and I tried to imagine myself as a parent, I thought much about my parents, and theirs. I remembered my oldest sister saying years ago that our father had been starved for affection as a young child, thus creating his own incapacity to show love and approval for us. I realized he had expressed himself as he knew how: by spoiling me rotten and sending me to good schools. The bitterness I felt toward my father after his death was keeping him alive for me, and was keeping his pathological attitude toward me alive. I had allowed it to, like a parasite, use myself as its vessel. I remembered watching and listening to the hospital machinery attached to the old man, five-plus years ago now, and suddenly I felt sorry for him. I imagined him as a toddler, yearning for his mother’s affection. I knew he must have been full of regrets as he died—not having spoken to his son in four months probably among them.

I’ve since become able to think about my work absent any internal reproach. I’ve finished another script, this one taking only weeks; I’ve gotten journalism assignments from major magazines, sold another couple of humor items, and enrolled in a class on the personal essay which has produced what you are now reading. It wasn’t from my father, God knows, but somewhere I learned how to accept, forgive, sympathize and understand. And these capacities have set me free.

His treatment of me was a function of his weakness, and therefore unique to him. I couldn’t replace it so I should stop trying. I’ve let his way of treating me die as he has died. It still bothers me that I bore the brunt of his weakness, even though now I know its source. Sometimes I’m still mad him. Buddha would probably tell me that anger and compassion are mutually exclusive, and he certainly knows more about it than I do. For sure, I’m still working this shit out. But at least I’m working.

When he died my father had barely had a kind word for me in probably 20 years; “failure,” “useless,” “worthless,” and “stupid” were more likely to be spoken in my presence. But I held that fucker’s hand as he drew his last breath.