I cared too much., and now I care about no one at all.
I had the best conversation with a friend the other day. We talked about how Chinese kids- if they dropped the ball in any way, were seen as selfish. So you didn’t come home for one of the seven holidays in the year where the family are supposed to gather? You’re selfish! You didn’t have a child for us? You’re selfish! You don’t want to take care of my toxic behaviour for the rest of your life? You’re selfish! You’re selfish if you don’t run yourself ragged running after everyone’s needs, which then breeds the type of person that runs after everyone else’s needs. In some ways the original family are the ones who eroded my self-esteem the most. It made for the perfect storm of self-hate and destructive behaviour. So now I’ve just cultivated a personality of “just good enough.”
Then they gave me this British identity, and all the things that that entailed. And now that I live in China, I have to work extra hard to keep the identity intact, or at least to try to ‘preserve’ it.
But doesn’t it make me hate the other culture, that other part of me? How do I reconcile the two? The values of the two will never align, so what if?
One of the generational traumas that I think I must have experienced growing up would have been the trauma passed to me by my grandparents, just by their being so concerned about me.