Month: February 2019

Today

When I entered therapy it was for Fear. This is a note from January 30, 2018, from more than a year ago:

30.1.2018

Today was therapy. I have seen this therapist for two years. She’s Chinese and looks like my mum. Today she didn’t let me get away with any of my usual shit. She said I looked at her with “naïve” eyes, and that I wasn’t addressing anything she was saying. I knew myself also that I was avoiding everything that she was saying—that my mind was leaping about, unable to absorb anything, every five seconds. Just staying there, physically in the room, was difficult. Concentrating was difficult—I was planning dates, thinking back to dates, thinking about other things. Even now, when writing about it, I wanted to stop, and think about other things. The writing will not flow, it’s so slow. My therapist said something to me about the fact that I was stuck—that on this topic I was unable to go anywhere. If it was mapped out, it would look like this:                 stuck                    leaving                  sadness                        abandonment          grief      

Language

I had this thought: If we didn’t have the intentions of the parents of our youthful beings telling us, or labelling us, into what we are– a speaker of Chinese, for example– who would we actually be? How much does language shape identity, and how much of it is false/true?

In my example, sometimes I can get lost in the world of English. I forget that I can speak Chinese, and that that is a part of me, too. We contain multitudes has never had a more profound meaning, but it is in those moments when something is EXPECTED from you that things go awry. Because what happens then is that you’re forced to be a certain way, rather than are a certain way, and that comes out as inauthentic.

Anticipatory grief?

This is short, and brief, as I am on my way to the gym.

Yesterday during Lantern Festival there were talks of putting my granny into an old person’s home in Yanjiao, on the border between Beijing and Hebei province. It would close to her elder son’s place, and everyone is getting so tired looking after her.

This is a difficult act for everyone, not least because of the idea of failure when it comes to filial piety and love. I’m still processing it myself, but at the same time I feel like I’ve been ready for it all along. She’s a vibrant, social, extraverted person, and I know what that feels like, because I am one, too.

There are other cadres at this place, and she’s always had that wonderful ability to make friends, enlist others, and be herself. This might be some sort of fantasy speaking, a mind’s rationalization, but if we could all see this as the next challenge and obstacle to overcome– the obstacle is the path– it could have so many benefits. A lot of her friends are already in homes and she talks to my aunt about checking them out.

Where will her extraordinary life go? Now I’m really rambling (signs of a lack of acceptance, probably. But I’m getting there)

Mum and dad

Over the Chinese New Year, Year of the Boar, my mum made an expected but also unexpected visit to my house on Beach Street. Just before she arrived I had three panic attacks, and I didn’t even know that she was coming over. She had my address — but we have been estranged for about three or four years, or maybe longer.

Then there’s my dad. I think I have a closer relationship to him, or at least that’s what my therapist told me. So it’s harder, more difficult. It means that my relationship is more complicated– so at the same time as being okay with being estranged from him, too (yes, BOTH parents), I want to please him and at the same time the people in my life who remind me of them I am closer to, and want to be close to.

In other words, I don’t want to lose them as much, even though what he did to me is probably just as bad as what my mum did to me. So, who’s the parent that I’m closer to? My dad. But whose love do I crave more? Probably my mum, since I don’t feel like I ever had it.