You Didn’t Get Here Alone
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about over this past year is independence/dependence, reliance, and how we get to the various points in our lives. Going through an intense childhood, I had to learn how to take care of myself for most things. The received a very specific kind of support growing up that left a lot to be desired. That support alone is more than a lot of people get, but it still left me largely alone and taking care of myself.
In studies about childhood adversity, something that psychologists are still trying to understand where resiliency comes from. And that’s something I’ve always wondered about-- what made me end up okay? What thing deep inside myself made this all work out? Was it just luck? Was there something else?
In moving to Asia, I have been thinking about doing things on my own, yet relying on so many people. When solo traveling, it’s the strangers who tell you where the bus stop is that help you. It’s the booking agent that let you change your reservation. It’s the people that cooked the food you bought. It’s the motorbike repair services that changed your battery. It’s so many people that made that moment in time possible. Having this outlook, I began to write about my life before I came here and the things that made those moments possible. Sometimes it was just luck or fate or whatever you want to call it. Sometimes, it was people who I am so lucky to have had looking out for me even when I didn’t know it. The calls from my best friends parent when things weren’t okay, the teachers in school who fostered a sense of creativity and exploration within myself, my friends who were there every single day just trying to pull each other through our roughest times.
In the West, we value independence so much and look down on dependence, when in reality we depend on people everyday to make our lives possible. We don’t grow our own good, and maybe it’s the illusion of independence that makes dehumanization of farmers so possible. We buy phones created by people across the world that we don’t care about. We are interconnected to exist, but claim independence and shun those who made our existence possible. In Asia and growing up in an Asian family, values of taking care of one another were emphasized as a part of our culture and duty. Here, I’ve met amazing a talented young people who have a lot of responsibility to take care of others and themselves. The things that need balance are independence and reliance. People should be able to depend on others, and acknowledging those relationships makes things better. But unfair reliance, expecting and giving nothing back, is unhealthy. There is so much more nuance to this idea in terms of aging, disability, and culture, but it’s something that I’ve been trying to unpack for a while. But one thing has become very clear to me over this year. I didn’t get here alone, and I can’t continue alone. I can depend on my friends and that’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t make me any less “independent” or less of a person. It allows me to acknowledge and respect the interconnectedness of my community.