Dealing With: The Weight My Dad Carried and the Lens We Grow Into

Lauren Nixon-Matney • March 28, 2026
Dealing With: The Weight My Dad Carried and the Lens We Grow Into

Brandon Hart: Dealing With

16-bit pixel art ocean at night with stars and human silhouettes in waves, symbolizing emotional- depth, resilience, and searching for light in darkness, from Searching for Stars multimedia Book universe.


This morning felt heavier than it needed to.


Nothing was technically wrong. Life was moving. Kids were loud. The day was already asking things of me before I felt ready to give them. That familiar pressure started building. The kind that stacks quietly. The kind that makes your thoughts pound a little harder than your surroundings.


A song came on.


It wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t demand attention. It just sat there with me, steady and honest, like it knew something I hadn’t said out loud yet. The words circled the same ideas again and again. Coping. Enduring. Carrying things that feel heavier than they look.


And then, without warning, a name surfaced.


I hadn’t been thinking about the past. I wasn’t searching for meaning. The memory arrived fully formed, sudden and intrusive, like a shock to the system.


Fred.


And suddenly, I was thinking about my dad.


When I was a little girl, I watched him carry a lot without saying much about it. 


He lost his father as a young adult. His dad struggled with alcoholism and died after a house fire that began the way too many stories do. Cigarettes. Drinking. A body already worn down. My dad survived that loss and kept going.


Later, he struggled with alcohol himself.


He also lost a close friend.


Fred.


When I picture him, I don’t see a clear face. It’s more like a blur. A kind presence. A smile. A baseball cap maybe. He was a friend of my dad’s. Someone who existed safely in the background of childhood. Friendly. Familiar. Good.


What I remember most is the day we found out he was gone.


I don’t remember the date. I don’t remember the season. I remember the feeling in the house. I remember the phone call. I remember the weight that settled into the rooms after.


He had been very sick. Cancer. Pain that wouldn’t ease. Appointments that didn’t bring relief. He kept asking for help. Kept saying he couldn’t live like that anymore.


That morning, he went to the hospital with his wife. He made sure she was settled in the car. Then he walked behind it and ended his life in the parking lot.


As a kid, I didn’t truly understand any of that. I just knew something irreversible had happened.


My mom was devastated. Overwhelmed by grief and fear and the beliefs she had grown up with. I remember her crying, saying over and over that he was going to hell, that this was wrong, that it was unbearable to think about.


My dad went quiet.


It was the first time I remember seeing him do that. Not angry. Not loud. Just heavy. He walked away carrying something I didn’t yet understand. After that, Fred’s name rarely came up. Sometimes a memory would slip out, but mostly he stayed unspoken.


Years later, when my dad was sick himself, worn down by pain and frustration and systems that were not helping him, he said something that scared me more than I expected.


He said he finally understood Fred.


Not that he wanted to die. Not that he would ever do that. But that he understood the weight. The exhaustion. The feeling of being trapped inside pain that didn’t let up.


I panicked. I called Jamie... I made them go to the hospital. I sat with that fear until I knew my dad was safe.


This morning, listening to that song, all of it connected.


The lyrics talk about coping. About losing control. About standing in cold water and finding a way to stay warm. Not drowning. Just enduring.


That’s what hit me so damn hard. 


I heard my dad in it.


I heard a man who lost his father. A man who fought addiction. A man who carried the loss of a friend. A man who kept going anyway. I heard the kind of weight that does not announce itself but stacks quietly over a lifetime.


And for the first time, I felt that recognition land in my own body.


I’m not standing on the edge. But I understand the pressure now. The way life piles up. The way stress, grief, responsibility, and love can all exist at once and feel overwhelming. The water is cold. It shocks your system. But you keep swimming.


Brandon Hart’s Dealing With feels like it embodies something important. It doesn’t glorify the storm. It doesn’t pretend the water is warm. It simply acknowledges that sometimes surviving means weathering it quietly.


This morning as the song kept playing and the kids kept moving… the day went on.


But it seemed as though I carried a deeper understanding with me.


Some people carry more weight than we ever see. Some silence is heavier than words. Sometimes recognizing the darkness doesn’t mean you’re lost in it.

It just means you see it.


And maybe… just maybe you start looking for the light a little more on purpose.


The song fades out.


But I’m still here.

Still moving.

Still dancing.

Still searching for light.



Signal from the Past, Light for the Future:

I came across this in my dad’s briefcase recently.


He wrote it sometime in the 90s, during a season I now know was heavier than I understood as a kid.


I’ve been told he used to write a lot. He always spoke like a poet, sometimes in riddles, often mysterious and wise beyond his years.


Reading it now feels like getting a glimpse into a version of him I didn’t fully know back then. A window into the past.


And while the words are heavy, maybe even a little haunting, there’s a kind of beauty in them that still resonates.


Because I’ve had the perspective of seeing how the story evolved.



photograph of handwritten poem on notebook paper about darkness, Phantoms of darkness, Phantoms of Peace, feeling like poison, and inevitable growth through darkness, written in the 1990's by the father of Lauren Nixon-Matney author and creator of Searching for Stars a millennial's experimental multimedia memoir universe experience.

I’m about the same age now as he was when he wrote this… and when I read it, I don’t see someone who was the darkness.


I see someone who was in a dark season.



And there’s a difference.


Because even in that season, things were still growing.


Not perfectly. Not easily. But they were growing.


There was still love. Still life. Still moments of light that made their way through.


I think sometimes we mistake the weight we’re carrying for something we are.


But it’s not the same thing.


The soil was never poisoned.


It was always growing wildflowers, even when it didn’t know it.




And maybe one day,

years from now,

when my son is grown…


when life has had time to press its weight into him the way it does to all of us…

when he’s standing in his own version of cold water,

trying to understand why it feels heavier than it should…


maybe he’ll find this.


Maybe he’ll read his grandfather’s words.

Maybe he’ll hear mine layered beside them.


And I hope he knows this:


You are not the darkness you walk through.

You are not the weight you carry.


You are the one who keeps going anyway.


There will be seasons that feel endless.

Moments where your thoughts turn louder than the world around you.

Times where the pressure builds so quietly you don’t even notice it until it’s already there.


But that doesn’t mean you’re lost.


It means you’re human.

It means you’re feeling.

It means you’re still here.


And if you ever find yourself wondering…

if you ever start to believe the lie that you are the poison, the problem, the thing that’s breaking everything around you, 


Jaxon my darling 


I need you to hear this, even if I’m not there to say it out loud:


You are not the cursed soil.


You are the garden.


And even in your heaviest seasons…

even in the ones that feel dark and overgrown and impossible to sort through…


there is still something growing inside you.


There always has been.


There always will be.


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And then, a couple months after that, with prayers inside us building for a second child, we went to a park. One of those ordinary days that turns into something you don’t forget. And there were butterflies everywhere. Hundreds of them. Yellow, filling the air, lifting all at once like something out of a dream. And right in the middle of it… one blue butterfly. I just stood there, overwhelmed, because I knew. I knew I had been heard. Nearly one year to the day later, our second child was born. And then… life kept moving. Time passed. Things got busy. Full. Loud. Beautiful… but a little hazy, too. Somewhere along the way, I think I stopped asking like that. Fast forward. I’m sitting with my kids on New Year’s Eve, going into 2025, talking about goals and dreams. 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In the way you speak, in the way you encourage, in the way you remind people to keep going and to keep believing. It’s powerful. And it’s beautiful to witness. What you’ve created with “get your pink back”… that message, that reminder… it’s reaching people. It’s lifting people. It’s giving something back to women who feel like they’ve poured everything out. And that matters. It really does. I’m so grateful I came across your video when I did. And I’m really looking forward to everything you create next… especially your writing. You’re doing something good here. Keep going. Please never stop casting your light into the world… it really does break through the darkness.
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