My family has made me miserable my entire life. From the time when I was child. I think this is what makes me a writer.
Today, nobody can do to me what my family has done, so I have a very high tolerance for pain and misfortune.
Negging: the negging thing came to mind when a friend of mine was talking about it in the context of his father-in-law, who was negging his daughter, and had negged his wife since she was a child. This made me think deeply about the act of “negging” in my own family’s life. So what is negging? Wikipedia defines negging in this way:
I guess it has been a while since I seriously dated, but this PUA stuff is such a big cultural phenomenon now that it’s ubiquitous with dating. A lot of my single girlfriends seem to be in a perpetual limbo of this kind of world. There seems to be so many different kinds of negging, weirdly, I’ve been negged about my race. I feel like almost every interaction undermines who I am as an Asian woman. It often comes in the form of a “but” at the end of a sentence. If I am explaining my heritage, or not even explaining my heritage, but just saying something interesting or general, I always get a “But.” This _but_ is really interesting to me, because it suggests that the interlocutor (the person asking the question), expects me to always _explain something according to my heritage_.
I find statements like these to be negging because they are. I find that living in an environment that is full of negging to be an experience like no other. It’s abuse. And if it’s carried on for a long time it can be chronic.
And I remember being in the United Kingdom for the longest time, having this kind-of negging about my race, and essentially, about me. I never really felt like I truly fit in for that reason. Being there felt like I was being constantly negged, but I was too young to feel it then. As I turned thirty though, and living in the society that I am currently living in, things became different for me. I realised that being an older woman in this culture, at thirty, meant that I had no value anymore. Any attempt to make myself look or seem more pretty or hotter would also have the opposite effect, because it would just look to people as if I’m trying hard. Everywhere I turn, I get negged by the culture.
And yet, I wonder with the accumulation of all of these micro-aggressions, slut-shaming, and other things that have happened in my life that seem both the same as it had always happened, and different as it was happening, whether I have become immune to it somehow.
This isn’t really related to finding a family of one’s own, but it’s too long to continue.
I’m sure I’ll come back to this topic (because it’s the only one).
