My new therapist wants me to write letters to my mother. Ooooohhh boy. Where do I even start with that? It would be one thing to write an epic, sprawling, manifesto of rage, hurt, and loaded questions. Probably pretty therapeutic. But what I think I’d rather do, is small, short, everyday letters to my mother, full of intimacy and the lovely mundane details that I love to read in the work of others. I know the deep shit, the looming shadows, the claws of pain that rip me to pieces. What I don’t know, is how I would relate to my mother on a small scale, a constant, prayer-like meditation of all my days. So let’s see what happens.
Today I am doing a bit of a spa thing. I recently found some grey hairs sprouting up, and they are filling me with a mortal dread that I can barely contain. So like everything else that frightens me, I am choosing to hide from them, and to hide them from me. I’m doing a henna and amla treatment, and so far, having this bag of drippy baby poop on my head has been fucking miserable. When I first spotted the greys, I immediately tried to remember you. How old were you when you first noticed these? Granted, my first memories of you don’t begin until you are at least 10 years older than I am now. Unfortunately, those early memories don’t involve your hair, but maybe I can think about your beauty regiment. I remember that your body seemed really large to me. In reality, you were probably a size 8, probably 5’6, an average size, maybe on the tall end for an Asian woman. I remember the texture of your thighs, the bluish purple of your varicose veins. I have always been afraid of getting those. I remember that you became concerned about your weight, starting to power walk around the block. Back then, and even into the early 2000s, we didn’t really have access to the Internet as we do now, and we didn’t know that diet had a lot to do with weight. I remember that you napped often, which really laughed in the face of my own insomnia. I wondered if that was a thing old people did, napped daily. You had psoriasis, patchy brown and scaly spots on your elbows and knees, and you were always applying this smelly ointment on them. You hid from the sun, wearing long sleeved shirts, gloves and hats, even in the hottest summer days. You tried to hide me, tying ugly bonnets on me, making me wear visors, headwear that I tore off myself the moment I got out of eyeshot. I don’t know why you didn’t just use sunscreen. We both would have had a much better time. I loved the sun, I still do. You use to tell me that being animated with facial expressions led to wrinkles, and would always catch me laughing or smiling and tell me to stop. Now all of my joy has a catch. Maybe I should thank you for it, but in the back of my mind, I wonder if it’s worth it. The mental weight of constantly mediating one’s reaction to the world might not be written on the skin, but it’s paid for in other ways. I do remember the first time you henna’d your hair. It was in my early college years, and man, was it ugly. Orange and black, it was more of a white hair highlighter than a fix. That image is what propelled me to research henna, amla, and indigo blends as hard as I did. I won’t look like you. I refuse. It scares the shit out of me. For years, I used to chew my nails down to the nubs. I’ve since stopped, but every so often, Ill look down at my hands, and for a moment, I’ll see yours. Rough, strong, brown hands. Shiny skin, broad white nails. Those hands hit me, held things that hit me, scratched at me, grasped my own. I hate your fucking hands. Mine are longer, more delicate, and despite all your efforts and mine, a much lighter color. Sometimes, after weeks of growing out my nails, I would see your hands, superimposed over mine like the echo of a curse, and I’d immediately rip off that hard-earned nail growth, the blood seeping out of them like a red sigh of relief. Occasionally, I still want to. I am within 5 years of the age you were when we first met. We look nothing alike. I look like my father, thank god. You have a rectangular face, while mine is on the round end of heart shaped. You have a long nose, mine is small, squat and smushable. We have opposite parted hairlines. You kept yours short, chin-length. Mine flows down my back.
You are like a ghost that haunts me in the slyest of ways. I only catch you out of the corner of my eye. I smell you sometimes, in certain types of cloth, in the jar of garlic paste. I hate those moments. It smells like claustrophobia, of stale air. It smells like yearning, like imprisonment. I can’t hardly stand those moments. I hate that your smell creeps through the grates when the heat is turned on for the first time. You feel like the chill that penetrates the late summer nights. It tells you that this can’t last forever, that one day, the winter will arrive, and nothing will be okay. This is not the feeling that one should get from their mother. I am angry about it. It’s bad enough that you ran my childhood like a concentration camp. It’s heartbreaking that I missed out on all that comfort, that care, that love. How am I suppose to go out in the world, to love and be loved, if i was never shown how? And now, I am a full fledged, grown-ass adult. I’m suppose to make my own way, to be strong in my life, my choices. I’m suppose to have conviction, some kind of foundation to build myself upon, and I don’t. I don’t have that. I still feel like a lost kid, unmoored, adrift. We are still ruining my life. Yes, now I am complicit in this too. Moreover, I am angry that we never got to turn a corner in the relationship, to be adults together. Maybe we would have never been the mother and daughter that text everyday, or get coffee and chat, or go hiking or whatever. But maybe we could talk, and have a laugh every so often. Maybe you could give me unsolicited advice, and I could tell you about my day. But no, I can’t barely stand to be in the same room as you. I feel like screaming. It hurts to lay my eyes on you. Seeing you is like a flashing neon sign that is bellowing “DANGER”. Seeing you is a horror show of everything I don’t want to be. Seeing you sends me into a week of panic attacks, a month of intermittent insomnnia, a high-ass shrink bill. The worst part of it, is that I can’t harden my heart to this. I can’t turn my back to you. Despite all the years of violence, trauma, the evilness in your voice, I want you. This wanting of you reeks of betrayal. Betrayal of my strength, my work, my journey, my very life. It turns me into a fraud. I’ve worked my whole life to be nothing like you, and hidden in the deep recesses of whatever flimsy facade I’ve managed to create, is just that same sad little girl, who’s wishing that her mother would come to her.
It’s infuriating bullshit, because it’s not reality. You won’t ever come and scoop me up. Unless it’s to throw me to the ground right after. No matter how much power I put into it, the work I do to get better, to be healthy, to forgive, having a true mother will never be my reality. Being in that state of child, where my job is simply to exist and learn the world and your job is to keep me safe and teach me the world is just something I didn’t get, and won’t get. Reality is that I will never be safe and cherished. I will never know “carefree” or “innocence”.
Reality is that it’s dinner time, so I gotta cut and run. Pragmatism, not idealism.
P.S. God, you were a shitty cook. I’m not.
Today I did not experience any triggers. I had a good time. I expressed myself completely and properly. I explored and accomplished everything I wanted to. I learned about stuff, I had a killer yoga practice, I worked in my garden, I went foraging and processed my wild harvest. I was content with the person I inhabited today. So, yea. Suck a dick, Mom.
The nice shrink lady wants me to write a vision of how I wish my childhood had gone. She does not know what she’s asking for. I remember having these fantasies as a young child. I’d dream of being whisked into a different life, a warm and safe life. It would be quiet, and calm. There might even be laughter. It would always come if I was at someone else’s house. I’d see their full refrigerators, stocked pantries, houses heated, the way they spoke to each other at normal volumes, the lack of tears and chaos. I would be transported into this life, almost automatically. I wouldn’t be hungry, my face wouldn’t hurt from being so dry and cold, my socks wouldn’t have holes in them. I’d have friends over, you would fix us all a fun snack. I wouldn’t be scared, watching and waiting.
When I would have this fantasy in my head, whatever morality machine that lived inside me wouldn’t allow you to be dead, or hurting. You’d just be removed, innocuously. You’d have moved back to China, willingly, and not under duress. You’d have had some sort of episode that erased me from your memory, and we just naturally fell into separate lives. At my very worst, you had fallen into a coma. You were peaceful and sleeping, in stable condition, but you just couldn’t be my mother anymore. Years later, when you had your stroke, I’d wonder if I had done that to you. But I’m innocent. I never wished for this. You were always okay! A shard of irony would twist in my heart, because I was 19, and it was too late, for either of us.
In every dream of my ideal childhood, it would just be my dad and I. We’d be in a cozy room, in armchairs, by a fire. Dad would be doing paperwork, I’d be reading. I had a blanket tucked around me, not because I was very cold, but because it was nice. We were quiet, together. We were doing exactly what we wanted, and it was sanctioned. We were okay.
As far as child fantasies go, mine was pretty dull. No grand adventure, no excess, no magic. Just the simplest version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. Pretty attainable, really.
There’s a deep sadness in this. A little girl with boundless imagination, and all she wanted was to be safe and warm and read a book next to her dad. There’s a deep righteousness in this. A little girl with boundless imagination, and she wanted to do no harm to the Big Bad in her life. You could learn from her, Mom. I wish you had treated me with the same kindness as I treated you with.
Maybe that’s the ticket. Maybe the kindness that lives in my heart is my roadmap to forgiveness. And maybe then, you’ll really be gone from my life, and I will finally be safe. Until then, it’s still you and me, and Dad.
I talked with Dad last night. It was a short call. I have mixed feelings about that. I’m generally grateful for short phone calls, just less chance of something triggering me, or infuriating me, or hurting my heart. But in the same exhale of relief, comes the flood of guilt. You talk to him once a week, Mei, sometimes less. You can’t give the man 20 minutes of your time? It’s so boggling to think about how that relationship changed. It was mostly you and me, Mom. Day in and day out, the two of us, with me trying to disappear. Hoping you’d forget about me for small pockets of peace. When I did get time with Dad, I hung on to every precious second, like they were running out. I felt so damn good around him, so free, so much like a child. I loved him so much, it hurt. Like that love was too big to be confined in my small body, and it’s mass was breaking through my skin. I loved his wonderful face, with kind eyes, and crooked smile. I loved holding his rough hands, one pointer finger in my whole fist. He told me that even though he worked as a doctor, he didn’t have doctors hands. His were short, wide, rough and strong. He said they were farmers hands. He’d laugh and tell me that patients would flinch at the sandpaper nature of his skin, even though he slathered on moisturizer. He said this with pride. He’d tell me that you could tell a lot from a person from their hands. He said that when I eventually looked for a husband, I should look for a man who had the hands of a worker, but smooth and soft. It meant that he was capable of great physical labor, but had instead chosen to use his mind, so that he could make a comfortable living without taking it out of his body. He said I’d be happy with a man like that. He told me I had piano fingers, long and nimble, quick and delicate, which is why they had started me on piano so early. He never told me about your hands, Mom. I’m not entirely sure what you did. He mentioned that you were a teacher for a time in China, but that was really it. You helped out around the office, you were, very briefly, a waitress. You raised me, and kept the house microscopically clean. Except for the kitchen and bathrooms. I kept those. I think you hated that kind of work. You made me wipe each tile individually, and would use gloved hands to check the caulking, the grout, and spaces behind the toilet. I was 6, Mom, and the tiles were one-inch squares. It took hours, and I cried with frustration. Ironically, these are the spaces I love to clean now. The kitchen is 100% my domain, I am more comfortable doing it, than any bathroom or living room. It fits into the atmosphere of my OCD perfectly, when not much else does.
Working with Dad was different. The time I got with him was his “leisure time”, but the man never stopped working. He was always fixing a car, hammering something, cutting a tree, dragging various heavy items out of one space and into a different one. But I got to be outdoors, breathing the fresh air. This was something I craved, constantly. The rise and fall of the sun terrified me. I felt each passing moment that I was not outside as a curse, as something taken away, a missed chance. And you very rarely let me out, Mom, so I felt this pain constantly. I still do, torn apart by the need to accomplish, and by the need to grab hold of sunbeams. It was absolute torture, Mom, it was probably the worst thing you did to me, and I don’t even think you knew it. I could handle the cold, the hunger. I could handle the hot magenta lightning flashes of pain that slashed out of all the different objects you hurled my way. I could handle being on my knees, shamed into begging for you forgiveness (for what?). But I writhed in the knowing that while I was bound, the dark was coming, and the sun was fading away. Another day, and another and another and another....
Dad would lament that I wasn’t born a boy. He’d do it jokingly, lighthearted. I took it so seriously. I’d try to learn the “boy things”, battering away at a little piece of wood, while he worked on the real project. Trying to hammer straight, trying to screw things down. Constructing things is still a task I am shit at. Turns out, it’s not a physical issue. After all, I have piano fingers. Turns out, I have an huge problem with spatial reasoning. It’s all a mirror-scape to me, topside down, inverted, refracted. Dimensions get lost in translation. Mom would lament that I wasn’t born a boy. She’d point out my father, working hard by himself, without assistance. She’d tell me I was killing him, that my existence was going to be his undoing, dying to support my worthless life. And so I tried, tried to do the “boy things”. I dragged garbage cans, cut tree limbs, little buckets of dirt. I felt useless and weak the whole time, so I tried to make up for it in speed and perseverance. I would do the damn thing until I died trying. I am full grown now, a tall person, although still rather slender at 5’9 and 115 pounds. I was recently helping my dad move, hauling boxes and furniture. Dad is now 80 years old, still with farmers hands, but also farmer knees and back. He stopped and looked at me, and for the first time, he said, “Wow, you work so fast and well. I couldn’t do this without you. How do you do it?”. Shocked, I stammered out something about being a server and a bartender, and the breakneck nature of the service industry. But what I really meant to say is, “Dad, I’ve been trying to be a son to you for my entire life. I was just too damn small before.” He told me I was purposeful and valued. That’s all I ever wanted to be. I wish you could understand that I didn’t have to be a boy to do it. Just a child that didn’t want to kill her father, or be killed by her mother.
I guess it all sounds pretty good, right Mom? You pushed me, pushed all my buttons, threw me into the fire, down stairs, on the floor, into the deep end of a pool, and I came out strong. You can rest easy now, pat yourself on the back even. But I’m scared, Mom. I’m scared all the fucking time. I’m an adult now, so we call it anxiety disorder, but the truth of it is that I’m so scared. I’m scared of every mistake I make, of even the possibility of a mistake. I build entire dams made of buffers against that fear. I feverishly work through to-do lists that I make, lists that are so long and involved that I can’t possibly complete them in the time allotted, and then I beat myself up for not finishing my tasks. I work my body, miles of cardio, hours of exercise. A regiment that is not sustainable, and burns me out every time. I get hurt, I get sick, I can’t rest. I feel the crushing weight of the entropy of my world, every second of every day. I feel panic with every inhale, and defeat with every exhale. I go to work, and I prepare for everything that can go wrong, I back up my back ups. I get in before everyone else, and I’m the last to leave. I’m part of a team, and yet, I do the lions share of the work, because if I don’t do it, then something will go terribly wrong, and it will be my fault. I can’t fucking sleep, Mom. I’m going through every transaction I had that day, and I had hundreds. I’m checking to see if I could have possibly done it better. I’m ruined, Mom. I can’t manage my time, because I have no idea how time is related to tasks. Something might take half an hour, but I have to have a 15 minute buffer before and after, and in between every phase, and by the time I get done planning, it’s a 3 hour job and I can’t do it because I’m out. I can’t focus on anything, because the rituals surrounding it snowball over me and I’m defeated before I even start. I’m an adult now, so we call it ADD and poor executive functioning skills, but the truth of it is that I’m set up for failure, and I’m so ashamed, and you’re going to whip me with a metal hanger, and I’m killing my father, and I’m on my knees begging for forgiveness (for what?).
Mom, tell Dad I’ll call him back.
The news is extra-incredible today. Trump is refusing to commit to a graceful exit from the presidency if he loses (please lose, you scumbag). We had a near miss with a school bus sized meteor. People are rioting. The virus is still running rampant, and the country is on fire. As a kid and younger adult, I had a love affair with the idea of a post apocalyptic world setting. It feels like we’re living in the end times, and I am still miserably un-trained, reasonably dependent on the grid, and my outfits won’t be nifty, studded leather, steam-punk get ups, but probably ugly pajamas. Fucking fantastic. So what do I do? I try to be what I’ve always try to be, an example of incredible, but it feels insincere and like going through the motions. Before sobriety, I’d go all hard-core bacchanal on this bitch, make mistakes and let myself go Id. And now I’m on Amazon, weighing the cost of liquid vitamins versus how much money I made this week. Story of my life, I’m $200 away from public aid, and from making what I need to survive. Lovely. I don’t have it in me to go deep today, to free-fall into the pain of my memories. My bottom line is that it all feels fucked right now. I wonder about your point of view in these times. You, in a 7-layer, Dante-esque prison of isolation, of separation from information, of mediation, of communication, of corporeal limitations. I wonder if you are afraid, if you think of your ranking in zombie-apocalypse terms, and if you feel fucked too. I suppose you’ve had 16 years of the worst case scenario, and maybe all this is just another Friday to you. I’m so sorry for you, Mom. I started to write about your stroke, and then backspaced out of it. I just don’t have the substance in me to do it justice today.
I had my shrink appointment yesterday, and we talked about reframing my mental narrative. This is nothing new to me, I’ve been practicing reframing all year. But she suggested that instead of reframing in my idea of reality, that I think of the most positive possible outcome. I remember doing something like this when I was younger, in my daydreams, as a sort of fantasy life. The problem that comes from fantasy, with the addition of a killer imagination and the ability to entrench myself quickly and deeply in any mental landscape, is that it always ends, and coming out of it hurts. It occurred to me that I haven’t let myself daydream in quite a long time. I guess as an adult, letting myself indulge in something so far from the truth feels like a mockery. Hello, Shame, old friend. I’ve long wrestled with the idea of success, versus my life. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s something between fear of failure and fear of success, which is just so tautological in nature, that I find it laughable. There’s also change. The landscape of my mind is so very capricious, that even if I let myself dream of a good life, that good life is so mutable, that I couldn’t use it as a compass if I tried. But, I did promise to give all therapies a chance, even if they seem pointless, so here we go.
What does success look like to me? Well, in my teens and twenties, it always involved art. As a writer or as a visual artist. I would do good art, have the time, space, and freedom to let my mind expand, breathe, and then contract, take it all in. The magic of the world, in the mundane, in the micro. There’d be room for my buffers to exist, and not butt heads with anything as common as “making money”, or a “schedule”. There’d be adventure, friends, and every wonderful day would be met with a party that lasted all night. Every hour would count down to a new event, a treat, something to look forward to. There would be no ending to joy. I guess it was a direct reaction to my childhood, where things were so bleak, so small and sad, that I would look forward to things like a church outing, one TV show a week, one gift, as if my whole world hinged on it. I guess it did. It makes me cringe now, just how grey that little girl’s world was. And if that “thing” were not to pan out? Well, then all the lights inside of me would go out. Disappointment is probably the human emotion that I find most tragic. I used to wonder why I did it to myself. Why I would even let myself hope. The answer was that I had no choice. It was fickle hope, or pain and cold. Is that the world you meant to build for me, Mom?
For all my dreaming, there was always a dark place that never really believed it. I had grit in me, I’d try for a goal until it killed me. But if I’m being honest, I also didn’t really think I’d make it. There was a gap, a missing link. I knew how to put in effort, but I didn’t really know how to lock it in. I still don’t, really. My mindset is always, “I’ll believe it when I see it”. And for someone who sees so much value in controlling her environment, well, it’s definitely out of my control. That missing piece both pushes me, and deceives me. I never know how much effort is the right amount, and so it’s all of me, or none of me. I think this is why I always feel like I’m reading the instructions in a foreign language, or that the rules change. I very much wish to identify this, at least find its name. One time, I had taken some acid, and was deep in a trip. I found myself on the train tracks, and there was a slow moving train behind me. God was in the train, and was both life force and obvious death. I had to keep going, or else the train would kill me. I plugged ahead, best I could, one foot in front of the other, with the train steadily closing in on me. It’s pointless, death will come. Keep going! It’s pointless. Keep going! On and on like this, until a friend who was acting as Watcher shoved me off the tracks. Drug addled symbolism or not, it never occurred to me, that I had the option of getting off. This feeling of hopelessness follows me, and the feeling of Duh does too. God is in the train....
What a does success look like to me now? Well, my dreams change seasonally, which doesn’t help. I’ve since given up on the dream of being an artist. Turns out, I’m not very good at it. It’s sad, because having skills as a writer used to be my superpower. It use to be the thing that made me even a little special. The muse would come in the darkest hours of the night, and I would be illuminated by the spark of a poetic phrase, a chord that would lead to worldbuilding. It was larger than me, I couldn’t control or explain it, and that was exciting. Turns out, I’m simply mediocre. Ironic, because being mediocre was always something that frightened me. I was okay with being very bad at something, and of course I wanted to be very good. But average seemed unworthwhile. And that’s where I am as a writer. Better than many, but not great. For some reason, that clicks off my give-a-shit. I wish it didn’t. It might be the thing that makes me make myself great. Currrently, the flavor of the week is foraging. For the past 6 months, I have feverishing pursued identifying and propagating wild edibles. The artist is now trying to be a forest ranger. If I’m being honest, I’ve gotten surprisingly far in it. I’m not half bad. I’ve gotten to understand how wild things grow, I’ve implemented research successfully. And I haven’t poisoned myself and died. Point. My built in OCD fits in this foray, my search for absolutes, for tangibility. I may not know a great number of species, but the ones I know, I know for sure. But like everything else, I can feel this passion drain out of me, fading, like the season. It’s hard to invest in yourself, when you can’t trust yourself to even show up. I’ve no-call-no-showed myself so many times that even though I’m a good worker, I’m ready to terminate. So, I guess the real test of success for me is just showing up. I wish I could find my purpose, my passion, and I wish it would stay. Even simpler, I wish I could just name the demon that keeps me from it. Is it just ADD? Thousands suffer from this, and you can fix it with a pill. If that’s the thing that keeps me from my life’s worth, I’m going to laugh my ass off.
I just want to be self-actualized. As a first worlder, it’s the next logical step for me. I wish I could find the path.
I was talking to my co-worker Sara yesterday. Just some small talk, chatter. I’m usually not about those conversations, but I like Sara. She’s smart, outspoken, articulate, and fun. She was telling me some basic details about her business. She sounded so capable, well-researched, informed. I’m so very attracted to people like that. I want to grab some of their shine, just to be around it, to soak up what it might be like to be so sure of oneself. I want to be apart of it, I want to learn. I find this to be a driving force in a lot of my relationships, especially romantically. I feel like there has always been a piece missing from the roadmap I’v been given. The landscape and the rules always change on me. I think maybe it has to do with my suspected autism, problems with being literal, with being unable to read certain social cues. It’s funny to be this way, because I am also simultaneously deeply empathetic. But that empathy seems to come from a different place. It’s like reading auras, but as a sound. Many times, I’ve told someone that they sound lower or more staticky or distorted, and ask if anything is wrong. You can imagine how this goes. It’s the overt I don’t understand. Sometimes the concentration needed to be engaged in conversation is so great, that I actually lose power, and stop understanding English. Literally, the spoken word, my native tongue, turns foreign and I don’t know what words mean. This even happens when watching TV. Wotthehell. But what a person is experiencing inside, the thing they are trying to hide, that, I can usually read like a book. Usually, sensitivity like this is inherited. So I wonder, could I possibly get this from you? My first instinct is no, because, if you could see how I felt, would you have treated me so badly? But then, my mind travels to your friendships. At first many, and close, and then, as you got older, they fell away. There was always a falling out, an unforgiveable act. I remember your long phone conversations. Decades ago, when we use to talk on the phone for fun instead of communicate with text, when speech was less mediated and immediate. I remember, even as a small child, sensing a sort of manipulation in your conversations, a passive agressiveness. The exact interaction that I least understand. I remember wondering if you really thought that THAT was good advice. I wondered if you knew that what you said wasn’t actually nice, that you just demeaned your friend’s pleasure, their passion, the thing they did that wasn’t female duty, but rather, a outreaching of the soul.
Now that I’ve had my fair share of trying to be a mean girl, a person searching to control something that wasn’t hers to control; and more expertly, being on the other side of a mean girl, I wonder if you indeed had the same sensitivity. Maybe you could see how your words and actions darkened a persons heart, a muddying of clear waters. Maybe you liked it. I’ve spent a lot of output trying to walk in your shoes, to be sympathetic, to try to see the person underneath the monsterous acts as something other than a monster. But maybe you were exactly that thing. A shitty person that did shitty things, that browbeat her husband, that abused her daughter, that wasn’t a good friend. A small, petty person that did things to garner favor, that bartered in things unquantifiable. I can feel that desire in me, to hurt those that are smaller than me, to fight for control over things not in my dominion. I guess it’s fortunate that I am hamstrung by the inability to see large and far enough to gaslight; too neurotic to be cruel. At the end of the day, I want to chase the light and take it inside me. I don’t want to make it dark. It’s been dark, long enough.
Today I read a little meme that stated, “Your love language is the thing you didn’t receive as a child”. Well, shit, that would be all of them. Let’s have a look: 1. Words of affirmation 2. Quality time 3. Receiving gifts 4. Acts of Service 5. Physical touch
Quality time: I think this used to be mine, back when I was lonesome, and needed someone to help keep the wall of screaming anxiety at bay. This is no longer the case. It’s funny that things can change so much. Now my quality time is alone time, and I protect it wholeheartedly. I wonder if it means some of my dysfunction got better, and some of it got worse.
Receiving gifts: Gifts used to mean a lot to me. I had so very little. But gifts also are a double edged sword. They were used against me, taken away from me. They are loaded now. It’s a weight on me, something I have to repay, something I ruminate on too much.
Acts of service: Yea, I’m too much of a control freak for this. Although, being offered help is something that always surprises me. I forget that I can ask for help. I also doubt the integrity of the help, and obsess over where credit lies.
Physical touch: Fuck that. I don’t like being touched. Even the softest, most innocuous touch feels like suffocation or like a ripping of skin.
Words of Affirmation: I think at this time, words may be my love language. Tell me I’m doing a good job, and beating myself and impressing you becomes my number one objective.
So, words of affirmation, eh?
I can remember the words you used to affirm me. All in Chinese, most things I had to intuit with context. You told me I was a domesticated animal, a unwanted bastard child, a ghost. You called me things that got me in trouble once I repeated it. Dad would never, ever tell me what they meant. It took 20 years, and lots of technology, but today I learned that I’ve known how to call someone a “fucking cock” since I was 3. Really? Fucking cock? That’s simply inaccurate when used on a toddler. Come on, Mom. Curse better. I learned that you told me to go to hell, called me a cunt, called me a bitch (which in Mandarin, is a very adult term, since the symbol for woman is intrinsically used), cursed my “unknown origin” (what the hell?). You told me I was acting as a prostitute when I hugged my dad and uncle, called me insane, a son of a bitch. Wow, thanks Google translate.
I’ve tried to find these phrases before, but between bad pinyin, bad Chinese and uncertain English translations of colloquialisms, today is my lucky day. I finally understand the scope of your vitriol. I wonder, did it matter that I didn’t understand what most of your curses meant? I knew they were really bad words, evil words, and the sound of them hurt me. The fact that Dad was shocked by them confirmed it. I am so frustrated that he wouldn’t tell me what they meant. I get it, he was trying to protect me, but what use is it to protect me from the definitions of things if the weight of them was already on my shoulders? Maybe this is where my need to label, to understand what meanings are and where they come from originates from.
It got so bad, that whenever you said kind words to me, they would hurt more than the bad ones. I can’t really put my finger on this emotion. It’s hard to verbalize, or even cognitively understand. I state this because I do want to say, for the record, that you did say kind words to me. It’s important for me to be fair. I think it helps to keep an objective point of view of my childhood. However, acknowledging the good parts, the moments of sweetness, feels like shit. Why? Well, first of all, it was really confusing. Most times, I didn’t know why I was being treated well, what I had done, how to replicate it. A lot was in front of other people, so I guess that makes sense, you were putting on a good front. But there were times when you really did seem to be happy to see me. I can remember a handful of times after school, when you might have missed me; occasional Saturday mornings where you made me a treat, and watched a movie with me. I remember feeling warm and good and full. The contrast is absolutely unreconcilable. I cannot understand it at all, and it makes my heart ache in a way that I don’t have the words to describe. The tenderness hurts so much more than the wickedness, Mom. Why did you have to be kind to me at all? No love is better than fleeting moments of love. It shows me that you were capable of it, which tells me that it was me. What did I do in those lovable moments? What did I do in the moments where your rage poured onto me and wanted me dead? What what what what what?!?!?!
I can make myself cry on cue. It’s a superpower I have. All I need to do is remember a lullaby you sang to me sometimes. It’s very sweet, and lovely and maternal. I think you had a nice singing voice, I can barely remember your voice, but I remember the song like it’s etched in my bones. In English, a rough translation, as I understand it, it goes:
You are mother’s precious jewel forever.
I remember crying quietly then, tears flowing down into my hair line, hot then cold, hitting the pillow. A thick sorrow fills me now, especially at the last line. The words I interpret as “loves you so much” also has a implication that means “loves you truly”. It feels like a confession, or an admittance, that you do, somehow, love me. And for reasons unknown, that fucking sucks. It burns my heart.
I think maybe this is a conflict because it threatens my identity as the abused and your identity as th abuser. As much as I want to be fair in my stance regarding my childhood, every time I think of a good memory, or a positive, I feel like a liar. I feel like I’ve misrepresented my experience, and that I can’t be trusted to provide a fair and unbiased view of my childhood. I feel like maybe I am that child that no one believed. I’ve worked so hard to fine tune my insights, that if my very integrity is questioned, it all falls apart. So many times, Dad told me, “You are just a child, you are overreacting.” Do you comprehend how fucking helpless that made me feel? That somehow, my chronological age distorts my comprehension of things that are happening to me, to my own body? “You have an overactive imagination... you misunderstood what she meant... it didn’t really happen like that....” And I begged him, I begged Dad to hear me, to do something, to save me, to take me away. Somehow, I felt shame when he didn’t. I felt myself disengaging, losing faith in my father’s ability to take care of me, to protect me. I stopped believing that he could change things, that things could change.
I used to believe in God, wholeheartedly. I was told that I could have a personal relationship with God, if I studied and prayed, and cultivated one. And so I tried, oh, I fucking tried so hard. I prayed all day, I tried to control my thoughts, to have clean, sinless thoughts, to only come to God as pure and good and righteous as I could. I thought faith was like a muscle I could build, control, and use. I believed in magic, that one with a truly virtuous heart would be chosen for a quest, and would be rewarded for their sacrifice, their loyalty. I thought I saw fairy circles, I thought the treasures I found in the woods were meant for me, a secret message, giving me strength to carry on. I believed and I prayed and I tried to make my faith everything. But they never came. Not the fairies, not a magical hero, and not God. Eventually, I saw holes in my beliefs. I saw that the only time anything changed was when I changed it. My final disengagement came when I asked for a sign, I begged him to keep me as his child, I begged to remain a believer. I looked into my faith, and I saw that if I believed so completely in God, I also had to believe in the possibility of no God. It gave me permission to doubt, to test my faith. I tested it out of existence.
I don’t know why God came up. I guess losing faith, even though it was my choice and my journey, somehow feels like a betrayal to me. Even though I did the doing, it feels like something was done to me. I guess it’s another avenue of powerlessness, and mad, pointless grabbing of control. I feel out of control, like I was lied to. I was told if I was good, and followed the rules, that I would be loved. I did those things. No one loved me. And when they did, it hurt. I’m so confused. I fucking hate this. Someone get me a decoder.
Whatever, I don’t know. Words of affirmation are my current love language.
My shrink Rhonda did something super interesting in our last session. I was struggling with some core issues. I’ve managed to identify that I have a fear of success, fear of failure, and a big fear of being average. What a lovely and unbearable place to be, eh? So I realized these things, but I had no idea what to do with them, how to navigate a web of mutual exclusivities. So, Rhonda had me distill the feelings behind these fears into one encompassing word for each. My word for fear of failure was DISAPPOINTMENT. My word for fear of being average was STANDARD, which Rhonda interpreted as the theory of acceptance and I agreed. My word for fear of success was HARM. All of these apparently falls under the umbrella of trust. A lot of my bullshit comes down to trust issues, and that makes sense. Everything I ever put trust in failed, including myself. Well, I guess that’s not really fair. I didn’t put trust in myself, I never even knew how to start.
So let’s start with DISAPPOINTMENT. I think if I were to point out the most poignant, multi-faceted and painful of all human emotions, disappointment would be it. That seems strange, doesn’t it? In the sphere of all the words we have in this weird language, words like MURDER, BETRAYAL, TORTURE, RAPE, GENOCIDE, why is it that DISSAPOINTMENT takes the cake? Well, it’s omnipresent. I think behind all those other awful words, there’s the feeling of disappointment. A sense of this isn’t what I was put on the earth to experience. A soft, sad sense of the unjust. There’s also a sense of helplessness. Adjacent feelings like anger, sorrow, offense have an active nature to them. Something uprooted what one was trying to DO. DIsppointment seems more passive, something was done to you, and no part of your spiritual or physical strength could have stopped it. I have a very early memory that really embodies this emotion for me. I had been given a bunch of helium filled balloons, and that gift made my whole world. I was so excited to bring them home, to have them in my space, to really possess something so colorfilled and alive. It was a windy day, and in the parking lot, the whole bouquet of balloons was ripped from my hands. My dad chased after them, and in the nature of a buoyant gas filled in a thin membrane, they seemed to magically elude him. He was within inches of them so many times, and each time, a freak gust ripped them further away. I cried into his shoulder as I watched them float tiny into the sun. At that moment, I learned that no power could bring them back. They were gone. They were mine, and then they were lost forever. Destroyed by the ephemeral nature of things, my heart was completely shattered in that one moment. This is the what I perceive as disappointment. I put so much stock into a stupid thing, and it went away before it was even mine. I wonder if this is where my obsession with the fight against entropy comes from. If it’s not strong and sturdy and lasting, I don’t want it.
Next up is fear of being average, or STANDARD. I spent a lot of my youth trying not to be like other girls. Boring story, meta in how in trying not to be part of the mainstream, you end up being just another stereotype. In my peer group, I was a total freak. When I hear about other people being outcasts, there’s always a group of kids that they were outcasts with. Not so much here. I was the bottom tier. When people thought they were at their worst, I was the person that made them feel better. I didn’t have a group of other losers to feel shitty about. I was alone. I was so completely fucking alone. If school was bad, home was worse. They didn’t hit me at school. Much. I was so weird. So ugly, so awkward, so stupid. I was even smelly, thanks to my mom’s rationing of bathing and clothes washing. The weird Chinese lunches, reaking of seaweed and looking like a damn alien didn’t help either. Bento boxes weren’t going to be cool for another 20 years. I could go a week without speaking to or being spoken to. As I got older, this status of being the ultimate pariah evolved into being super punk rock. I mean total anti-establishment, anti- status, fuck your opinion type of punk rock. Thank god for punk. I spent my teenage years trying to shock, using the foulest language, wearing the ugliest clothing, getting as drunk and high as I physically could, trying to convince myself that life was bullshit, so I was going to fuck it up. I hated pink, I hated “girl things”, I hated squares, and I hated being that “good Asian girl”. My manifesto was shock, I was terrified of being derivative. It was exhausting. It still is.
The most ironic point of my life, how I am perceived as an adult. They think I’m smart, they think I’m fast and capable. They think I’m pretty and charismatic. They think I’m exciting and unique and interesting. I’m the most stupid and ugly person I’ve ever come across. The sight of my own face use to hurt my eyeballs with how completely grotesque it was. It got to the point where I’d avoid my reflection so much that I wouldn’t recognize myself in photos, or realize that the being in the mirror was me. This may explain the body dysmorphia. I am also so completely stupid that I am amazed every time I get into a vehicle that they let me operate one of these things. The things that make me smart are obsessions. I can’t not do them. The skills that I have are from eons of furious practice. The things that come naturally to others, like how to operate their meat suit, make it do things, are the things I struggle fully with. I am trying with all my might, just to speak in a way that seems natural, human and meaningful. Sometimes, the amount of concentration it takes to follow a conversation gets too large for me and I stop understanding English. What the fuck. How the fuck?! I’ll be watching TV, lowest common denominator type shit, and the words cease to be words and are just sounds with no meaning. This happens in daily speech, where I’ll have to “rewind” the moment, and try to decipher the sounds using context and tone. I’m constantly asking my boyfriend, “What did they just say?” I’m foreign in my own native tongue. Numbers, spatial reasoning skills, the cardinal directions, just forget it. Trying to calculate 360 degrees versus 180, 200% versus 100%, it’s near impossible. And this is such basic shit, it might as well be innate. So simple, that it’s harder to verbalize than it is to do. So yeah, if someone places any speck of responsibility my way, there’s a really good chance that I will absolutely screw it up. Even giving it so much effort I feel turned inside out, I will miss a directive or protocol, and despite every ounce of strength I have, it goes tits up. So how can I try for anything, there’s so much at stake? If my job is serving fries, and I screw it up, okay, someone gets shitty fries. If my job is in healthcare, and I screw it up, someone DIES. Hell yea, I’m afraid of success. Not for me, but for the people I might do harm to. It’s amazing, because I’m often seen as a leader, a self starter, and I often end up as a promotable person. If they only knew... I can barely operate my cell phone, you want me to MAKE SURE YOUR OFFSPRING STAYS ALIVE?! Fuck no. I’m amazed when I remember to feed myself and understand what time means.
Another thing that my shrink wanted me to explore was how I feel about getting my Masters Degree. Truth is, I’m not very proud of that degree. It’s not so much that I ended up not doing much with it, but that I was giving a great opportunity, and I didn’t give it my all. I guess it’s worthwhile to say that I didn’t really want to go in the first place. I had finished college, and had stuck around my college town for a while. I had two jobs, and it was really nice being around my friends, doing art and projects, and yeah, partying a lot, without actual schooling getting in the way. My dad put his foot down, and said that if I didn’t get myself into graduate school, he’d get me into graduate school. He was going to have me go to school for educational administration. What the fuck! So I could be a dean or a principle?! I never once in my life considered doing that, and I abhor kids. And administration. It never occurred to me that he couldn’t actually make me go to graduate school, or would even have access to the records that would make my application a successful one. So I applied: MA in English to every school that didn’t require a GRE. I got into one school, Chicago State University, a historically Black college on the south side of Chicago. This premise is rife with problems. One can see what happened in undergrad. My parents forced me into a second rate college, because it was what was suppose to happen. I had not one red clue with what I wanted to major in, and ended up with mediocre grades and a half hearted education. I did discover passions, interests, hobbies, and a feel for how I wanted my life to go, but that had nothing to do with school, and everything to do with living a semi-free life. And now, we were going to repeat the experiment with graduate school. Also, I’m not Black, and I had no clue that the school I was going to was. Not only did I get in, I was awarded an assistantship, that paid for my tuition and even provided me with a stipend, in exchange for 20 hours a week working in the school. I never applied for the assistantship. I think someone might have mixed up application forms.
I did well, grades wise. I got straight A’s, all 2 years, graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA. But I didn’t deserve those grades. I was working 3 jobs, commuting over 2 hours a day to get to school and back, and my focus was as it always was: making a family out of friends, partying, and art. These things sound great together, but at the end of the day, I was trying to drink my way out of a broken engagement, then a failed relationship with one of my best friends. I was lonely, angry, sick, broke as hell, homesick for my college town, aimless, and anti-establishment in a truly meta way. I hated everything, and there was a hole in my heart. School was quite often at the bottom of a very long, very inebriated list. It just so happens, I’m good at writing, I’m really good at academic bullshit, and I read fast. I pretty much half-assed every assignment that didn’t organically catch my interest, which was most. I didn’t deserve half those high marks I got. Like in college, I blew off or blustered my way through most projects. The course load also was not challenging to me, and the most students were far behind me, academically. This is not to say that I am very bright, or a good student. I just happened to be better than most of them. My last A was for my thesis advisement class, where I pretty much plagiarized my own work. I only got that grade because I was selling my professor drugs, giving him cigarettes, and letting him abuse my position as his assistant. I washed the man’s dirty moldy dishes, for fucks sake. It reminds me of how I passed a math class in college, I sold my professor drugs and messed around with the TA. I guess part of secondary education is to teach you that there is more than one way to skin a cat, or how to get to the bottom line no matter what, but it always felt a little dirty to me. It feels like my matriculation is the funny montage part of a shitty comedy movie, some coming to age trash. The worst part of this whole thing, is that this is a small inner city college, set in a problematic urban area. I repeat, it was historically Black. This school wasn’t for me. I feel like I took an opportunity away from someone, that I cheapened the very spirit of that institution. I came to school hung over, did non-curricular activities, did NOT my best work, and received an ill-gotten degree, with a perfect GPA, only to fuck right off back to the rich, white suburban town that I lived in. I didn’t have to spend my free time breathing in stale, polluted air, walking through dangerous projects, fending for myself. I got to go home to a well lit, tree lined neighborhood, drink craft beer and port wine, and listen to my hipster friends play the banjo and hand drum on my front porch. It’s absolutely laughable.
Now, I can say that I love the poetry that comes out of the Black tradition, and that I learned a lot about myself and my writing from grad school, and that it sharpened my socio-ethnic world view, and none of that is a lie. I can say that I worked really hard during those years, and that I did complete the task at hand, and that is also true. At the end of the day, I didn’t give it my all, and worst of all, I felt like phony through the whole thing. Maybe because it wasn’t my idea, it wasn’t my passion. I got something that I didn’t ask for, and didn’t deserve. Now I get these accolades, like, “Oh wow, you have a Masters Degree, smart girl.” Or, “Oh, you are dedicated to your craft”, or worst yet, “Oh, African American literature, that’s so different.” I wear a mantle that I didn’t earn, and I am defined by these genre-bending qualities, and my background is so interesting and diverse, and it’s all such bullshit. I have words to use against the colonializers, words that I understand, that are so relevant and woke. I am the ultimate colonizer. I took from marginalized peoples what wasn’t mine, and I wear it like stripes of honor. I am like a white girl, hiding in a yellow coat, a thief of Black tradition. I am a fucking fraud, and I am ashamed of myself.
Why do I feel like shit after talking to my dad? Long conversation full of triggers? Bad. Short innocuous conversation full of politeness? Bad. I feel guilty about not ever calling. I feel guilty that I really don’t want to talk. I feel badly that his world is so small. I feel guilty that I don’t get involved. I feel guilty about being an outsider. I feel guilty that I don’t care. But I do care, but I don’t. I’m afraid. The weight of being their caretaker, their prisoner, looms. It is inherent in every conversation. My parents don’t bring comfort, I need comfort after dealing with them. They make me feel so alone. I’ve always been alone in this, this fear. He used to be my lifeline. He let me down. Now I feel like I let them down. What a sad, stupid life this turned out to be.
Words to sum up this: Guilt. Bad. Resentment. Grief. Shame.
Last night, the thought of being a woman came up in my mind. I’ve written about this before, couple years ago, on this very blog. Exploring the idea of what a woman is, and if I am one. I’ve spent my whole life calling myself a girl, and thinking of myself as a girl. I’ve identified who women in my life are (you, and Mandy) and looked at the qualifications of what made y’all women, and how I stack up. Last night it occurred to me, that I am so very full grown, that I’m about to turn the corner of adult. If I am not a woman yet, well, I’m going to seem really goofy, really soon. Imagine a 45 year old, taking calcium supplements, saying, “Oh hi, I’m Ruth, I’m a girl.” Weird, and so creepy. I watched a video yesterday, a hair salon owner telling a racist client that her behavior was unacceptable, and to get out of her place of business. The owner was somewhere in her twenties, but man. She was so self assured, there was no question, no conflict between the side of her that is meant to give a service, and the side of her that is a human being. She spoke clearly, and had total conviction, even though she was obviously upset by the interaction. I thought, “Now that is a woman. That is someone who knows what her right is.” That person is not me. I take my roles seriously, and they have no bend to them. I know if the situation was mine, I would have bungled it up. I would have negotiated with myself, and I would have lost. What good are principles if you lack the strength of character to uphold them? I can rationalize this all day. I can say that in my occupation, it is hardwired in me to please my client, to take the hits, to smile through anything. I can say it’s not my fight, that I represent a company, and that my opinions can’t be voiced due to that association. And I would’ve be wrong about any of it. But the truth is that I have no spine, that I am a chronic people pleaser. Even if I were to take up the mantle of radical honesty, to speak my mind no matter what, I’d fuck that up too. Because things are absolute with me, I wouldn’t know the difference between screaming at an enemy versus screaming about my messed up coffee order. It would be all or nothing. This quality makes me feel diminutive, this makes me feel like a girl.
I was foraging in the woods yesterday, and I watched my brain automatically identify plants that six months ago, I didn’t know. I read the land, the trees, the flora and fauna like a book. I felt like I had cracked a code and now I knew how to weld a part of the natural world that most don’t. I did this through tedious, painstaking work. I felt absolutely confident in my identification skills. I felt like a woman then, a wild woman, surrounded by tools and armed with the knowledge to use them. I felt right in the world, a small moment of belonging. Very nearly a sense of righteousness in the silence.
I think of you as a woman, because you were a mother, and ran your household like a motherfucker. You were punishing, and your word was law.
I think of Mandy as a woman because she takes no shit, and she doesn’t care if she snubs people in her convictions.
I think of myself as a girl because I am uncertain, the rules of the world seldom make sense to me, and I feel small in it.
I guess my definition of woman is boundaries and a steadfastness.
I wish my definition of woman was kinder, more accepting. I wish there was room for me in that definition. I hope I find the woman inside me.
