You know that feeling when you are sitting in a stadium and it is so loud and everyone is cheering but you feel like you are under water and everything is muted and I think maybe I should have been happier today seeing him walk across that stage but I just felt like I was watching the last piece of myself disappear into a white coat and I don't know if that is a terrible thing for a father to say. He looked so much like his grandfather and I guess that was the point because we decided a long time ago that someone in this family had to be the anchor and provide the stability that I never could with my charcoal and my canvases that never sold for enough to cover the rent and so I pushed and I pushed until he became the man I was supposed to be and now he is. Sometimes you look at your hands and you don't recognize them because they haven't held a brush in twenty years and they just look like old, tired tools that spent too much time working extra shifts at the warehouse so your youngest could have the tutors and the prep courses and I think maybe I have what they call a *depersonalization* of the self where you stop being the protagonist and you just become a supporting character in a story you didn't even want to read and but it's hard to complain when you see the MD after his name and everyone is telling you what a GREAT JOB you did and how proud you must be. And I am proud but I think I am also grieving for the version of me that died so he could live this way and I don't know if that makes me a narcissist or just someone who is very, very tired and I can't find the words to explain it to his mother because she just sees the success. You spend decades making sure the *structural integrity* of the family stays intact and you sacrifice your own *ego-functions* to make sure the kids have a different life and then you get to the finish line and you realize there is nothing left for you once the race is over and it is like I have been holding my breath for thirty years and now I can finally breathe but my lungs have forgotten how to do it and and I am just sitting here in the dark at 2am looking at my old sketchbooks from the seventies and they feel like they belong to a stranger or a ghost or someone I once met in a dream. My son hugged me and he said we did it Dad and I just nodded but I wanted to say NO YOU DID IT and I just faded away while I was watching you do it and I think maybe I am just a ghost in a suit now. I think maybe it is a specific kind of *melancholia* when you realize you have traded your soul for a secure retirement and a son who saves lives but you don't even know what you like for breakfast anymore because you spent so long eating whatever was left over and but then you see him smiling in that picture and you know it was worth it and but then you look in the mirror and you see a blank space where a person used to be and I don't know if anyone else feels this hollow on the day their biggest dream comes true.