throwaway account cause honestly i’m still confused about how i feel and i know reddit can be brutal. i’m not even sure if i did the right thing or totally overreacted.

i’m 24f. my stepdad passed away last month after a long illness. he came into my life when i was six. my real dad wasn’t around and my stepdad basically raised me. taught me how to ride a bike, helped with homework, showed up to every school thing. we didn’t always see eye to eye but like… he was my dad, y’know?

when he got sick i helped out a lot. visited every week, helped mum with care stuff when i could, even used some holiday time from work to be there more toward the end. before he died, he asked me if i’d say something at his funeral. nothing formal, just a speech. i said yes straight away.

the night before the funeral, me and mum were going through some old boxes to set up a little memory table. in one of them, she found a sealed letter with my name on it. said he wrote it a few weeks before he passed and asked her to give it to me. she’d forgotten about it til that night.

i took it upstairs and read it alone. it started off sweet — stuff like thank you for being a part of my life, proud of you, that kind of thing. but toward the end, it shifted. he said that when he first married my mum, he didn’t want me around. that he’d tried to convince her to let me live with my grandparents because he wasn’t ready to raise “someone else’s kid.” that he didn’t know how to handle it, and honestly just resented how fast everything changed.

he said eventually he came to love me and that our bond became one of the most important things in his life. that writing it down was his way of being honest and showing how far we’d come.

i stared at it for like an hour. i tried to just brush it off, like okay yeah it was a long time ago and ppl change, but i couldn’t stop thinking about it. all these years i’d believed he chose me. that he wanted to be my dad. and suddenly it felt like that wasn’t true. not at the start anyway. it made me feel… fake. like the speech i was supposed to give would be a lie.

i didn’t sleep that night. in the morning i told my mum i couldn’t do it. didn’t say why, just said i wasn’t in the right place emotionally. she said okay, but i could tell she was disappointed. my uncle ended up speaking instead.

now some family are saying i was cold. that i let him down on the day it mattered most. my mum hasn’t pushed, but i think she knows something’s up.

i still don’t really know how to feel. part of me feels like i let him down. but another part of me feels like he let me down first. and it didn’t feel right to stand up there and talk about how much he meant to me when all i could think about was how, at the start, he didn’t even want me in his life.

so yeah. AITAH for backing out of the speech after reading that?