Empty Your Cup 1: Starting Steps
I am compelled to start this little series of just my own observations, really just to get them out and maybe help people along the way. Why is it called Empty Your Cup?
“A bowl is most useful when it’s empty,” is a famous quote by Laozi (though paraphrased to its generic one).
In this case, I need anyone who takes the time to read this, either from curiosity or I’ve piqued your interest, to “empty your cup.” The cup I’m talking about is you. There’s a lot of information in everyone’s head: facts, preconceptions, doubts, and beliefs. If you try to learn something when you already have the idea of it in your head, it gets in the way, simple as that. If the preconceptions, facts, doubts, and belief are the tea in your cup, how can you get more tea? How can you get new tea if your tea is old or tastes bad? You empty it. So to start off this little journey we can have together, empty your cup!
Speaking of, let me ask you this: how many of those preconceptions, facts, doubts, and beliefs in your head do you think are actually yours? The thing is, living life with other people is like walking around with a cup constantly. And people tend to pour their tea into your cup without even realizing it.
I’m from a dysfunctional family. A lot of people are, more than everyone would care to admit. Society has poured into our cups, telling us that there is a standard we need to strive towards. And people follow that standard because we worry about our appearances. Not just the visual, but how we hold ourselves. How we act. How we think. Unknowingly, though we all praise unique-ness, praise love, praise honesty, praise individuality, we only pay lip service to those qualities. Humans are social creatures and in this, we are flawed, because we tend to mirror others. That’s not a bad thing. It sounds like it is, but it’s in our nature. Anyone reading this, remember those quirks that a new friend had that you adopted into your own? The inside jokes? Those are all an example of how we mirror others. It’s why people tend to have friends with the same values and thoughts as theirs.
And everyone pours their tea into other people’s cups. It’s natural. Every time you say something to someone, whether it’s a fact or a personal belief or just gossip, you’re giving them some of your tea. This is how we learn to grow as people, but lately, it seems, it’s causing us, humans as a whole, to stagnate. There is a lot of suffering on Earth. Not just physical, but also mental and spiritual. We, as a people, are all hurting.
“Hurt people hurt people.”
This is a common quote (I’m not sure who coined it originally) that I feel many people don’t seem to really understand. Everyone understands the concept of the quote, but don’t apply it to everything. It affects everyone. Serial killers often have tragic, pain-filled childhoods. They were hurt, over and over. They were hurt, so deeply, that they became tired of being the victim. Of being “prey.” So they decided to become the predator and rejected their humanity. The thing is, everyone in this world is capable of such cruelty. We like to think that we’re better than that. That no matter what, we wouldn’t stoop to that level.
That is a lie we all tell ourselves. Everyone has a breaking point. No one is infallible. But that doesn’t mean we’re all inherently bad. We aren’t. Just because we are capable of such cruelty doesn’t mean we are cruel. It’s the choice of being kind regardless of your hurt that makes someone a good person.
That’s easier said than done. I, like many people, have been hurt. My mother all my life, was very paranoid, concerned with safety above all else, never gave praise, but loved my sister and me deeply. She loved us but was hurt herself, so she clung tightly and caused the rift between us.
I remember asking her for help. I didn’t find joy in things anymore. I wanted to see a psychiatrist. But she said, “It’s just a phase.”
I had told her my truth. I had asked for help. And she, with just four small words, shattered me that day. Parents often don’t think of how their words can affect their children. It’s one of the most awful, saddest things. How the people who brought you into this world, hurt in their own hearts, pour their hurt into your cup as a child. After that, I stopped ever telling ANYONE about how I really felt because, to me, she had told me that I didn’t matter. That wasn’t what she was trying to say, I know, but that rejection, by someone who claimed they loved me, told me I wasn’t important.
It was three years later, when I was fifteen, that I tried to kill myself. A whole bottle of my father’s Coumadin. For those who don’t know, Coumadin is a blood-thinner. Overdosing on blood-thinners meant I should have started bleeding out internally. But I didn’t. I took the whole bottle on Wednesday and by Friday I felt completely numb. I had failed. The only thing I had wanted then was to die.
My father and mother knocked on my bedroom door. Dad asked me if I had taken them, while my mother said I had just flushed it down the toilet. For attention. I remember staring at them with contempt. They had ignored the signs. Ignored my cry for help. And they dared to cry for me. They came to my door first. It was a slap in the face.
My dad and I went to the hospital. I was transferred to a teen-specific mental institution. Even then, I didn’t heal. I just played the part. A lot of people in this world do the same. Someone poured into your cup. And you were taught that you didn’t matter. That you weren’t worthy. That you weren’t loved. And I am tired of that for everyone. It took my mother dying, in 2018, to even start to heal.
At first, I only really forgave her because there was no closure to gain anymore. What good is feeling resentment towards someone long gone? When having to move, we went through everything we had. It was only then that I really learned how much she loved me. How much she loved my sister. She kept everything we had ever done. There are still so many boxes full of old school projects and photographs. But she never knew how to communicate that with us.
It was also then I learned her story. I had lived with her my whole life, yet I never knew her. I knew about her. My mother was a Filipino. Born from her mother and an abusive drunk father. Her mother kicked the bastard out but was left with her eight (of those who survived) children. My grandmother was never there for any of them because she worked all day just to feed them. My mom was forced to grow up fast, as many poor kids tend to have to. She started working at only eight years old.
At eighteen, she became pen-pals with my father. At twenty-one, they married. She thought she had escaped the hardships of her old life to go to America, the land of the free. America, where it was safe. They had my sister only a year later (consummation on the wedding night ya’ll, I did the math) and even though life was exactly perfect, it was good. A classic piggy-bank to start off my sister’s college funds.
But America isn’t perfect either. Burglars broke in and one of the things that were taken was that piggy-bank. But not just that. The sense of safety. The American dream was shattered for her that day. And she held onto that hurt and passed it on to me and my sister unintentionally.
This is what it means by hurt people hurt people. Because we like to take it to the extremes, but when you’re hurt, you even hurt the people you love. You don’t realize it, no one ever does.
My mother poured her bitterness, sadness, and anger into my cup. And I drank and drank and drank until I convinced myself I liked the taste. I stopped letting other people pour into my cup because I was afraid it would become even worse. That it would hurt more to try a new tea. It was easier to become comfortable in my suffering than to escape it.
That only prolonged my suffering. It wasn’t easy to empty my cup. There was more hurt and more pain, but it was so worth it. All my life, I had lived according to other people’s beliefs. All the awful things I thought of myself, weren’t really mine. They were others. They were the ads, that told me I had to look a certain way to be beautiful. They were the people, that told me I was too loud or too much. They were my parents, that told me I had to hold myself a certain way. They were society, who wanted me to conform to their ideas.
It’s when you learn to recognize the influence of everything you partake in that you can learn to decide what actually matters to you. Not everyone’s tea is bitter or wrong, but it’s only when you realize it’s happening that you can start to choose the ideas and thoughts you WANT to keep. The ones that fill you with joy and love, not negativity.
There is no such thing as being unworthy. As being unlovable. As being unimportant. Even if you truly think you’re an awful person, you can come back. You can always come back. Everyone is a work-in-progress. We get caught up in comparing ourselves to each other when we shouldn’t. To grow as a person, you do it yourself. Other people can only guide you or hinder you. But you have to be the one to take those starting steps.