Month: May 2022

There had been too many nasty surprises in my upbringing and past. I can count so many of them.

Sometimes I feel as if I have a lot of choice, and at other times I feel as if I have none at all. It’s a shame that I had to be someone who went through so much already so early in her life. And as a result of that I had to learn to self-soothe. But even the self-soothing didn’t help, because I ended up just needing more and more sensation as well as more and more stimulation.

And because of that usedness to over-stimulation, I chose to be heartbroken again and again, not just because it was something that I was familiar with, but because I thought it was something I had to choose. Because of the way I was passed around like a football between different relatives, even though ostensibly I had parents, I chose to be treated this way in real life as well. I was just in survival mode, but my version of survival mode was to choose what was familiar to me.

I had to remember myself that that darkness wasn’t real. And I had to get rid of the toxic people in my life, but it was only done slowly. And I had no idea what I was doing when I was doing it. I mostly attracted toxic people in the early stages of my life, but I think that was because I was one, too.

I don’t really know how I stopped this pattern, except that I stopped it. It wasn’t really a force of will or anything, it just naturally stopped. I also stopped being ultra competitive, which I think was part of it. I think when you are taught a scarcity model of life, it’s what makes you competitive.

I never really understood competition, except I was raised with it, in some ways it’s in my DNA. I was taught what exceptionalism was, because my family, and therefore by extension me, were exceptional. And we’re also exceptionally guilty, because we were raised on very little self-esteem, which seems counter-intuitive to the exceptionalism. But I have found lately that the reason people acted that way was from a sense of low self-esteem, because it was from a feeling of not feeling good enough. When you don’t feel good enough, it can affect everything, including the way you act with others. You are always trying to please other people, and trying hard to get them to like you, when in fact there’s no point of doing this.

I didn’t really understand why I was reaching for all of these toxic traits, but I do know I also had another one, and that was perfectionism. It was perfectionistic to have grown up in the family that I did. And that perfectionism was wielded like a weapon above us all. And I clung to this perfectionism because I didn’t have anything else. When people hear my story, they think about what a sad one it is, and to a very large extent that is true.

But I realised something about my grandparents, and especially my grandma. It seems that she has routinely gotten me, and her children, used to abuse.

Been thinking a lot about adoption lately. Especially this line, which I read in an interview with the actor Simu Liu, from Legends of Shang-Chi and my favourite show, Kim’s Convenience.

This clearly resonates with me because, as my friend Mengfei Chen had told me before, about the idea of “leftover children”, the masses of kids who were left over to be raised by their grandparents, in China, while their parents were not there. And then when these children are re-united with their real parents, it feels as if they are being adopted.

I once had a therapist who told me that what I was experiencing and or suffering was a kind-of adoption, or she had put it, a kind-of being in fostered. But now I also see it as being a kind-of adoption, as well. How does it feel when you’ve been adopted by your own parents, and can you ever find it in your heart to forgive them? And what does that forgiveness look like? But it makes sense that I was (and am? I don’t know anymore) the most lost one.

The thing I understood the most about adoption was that you were being negged your whole life.

The biggest neg of my life

Yesterday I realised what the biggest neg of my life is. It was the one I had from my grandma. On some level I think my grandmother must know about this. It’s not so much of a fear that I have, but more of something I am afraid of on an intuitive level – or it was something that was made clear to me when I was I was abandoned.

I don’t understand why she brought up this point, to be frank. It had been hard my whole life not to feel like a charity case. And yet somehow internally I did feel like a charity case my whole life, and it affected my behaviour because I would let other people treat me this way. It didn’t help that I didn’t see myself represented anywhere when I was growing up in the UK. I think that’s why I looked to (albeit cool) other Asian cultures that had more representation at the time, such as Japanese culture.

So, with a lack of representation, shabby parents, and my own self-esteem issues things piled on top of each other, and eventually things became too much. It really showed itself because I was so interested in abusive people, male and female. I’ve often wondered about this particular interest of mine, in being collected by bad people. I think it reflects a much earlier sense of being abandoned and wanting that closure with newer people that I meet, so that I can finally close that chapter in my life.

I’ve had quite a few near misses in my life with abusive people, so much so that I have mistaken people who were safe to be unsafe. I would say that has been a pattern in my life. So sometimes I’ve had to let people go too soon, because I thought they were unsafe. All of this is from growing up with very unsafe people, which meant that there was and is a lot I could not trust. Of course there are children whose parents were nice to them, but I wasn’t one of these people.

I was one of those teenagers who didn’t believe in Love, letting their emo spirits soar.

I remember when I first started to date Western men because it was what I was used to. Then from the first time I had a white boyfriend my family started to undermine that.

My dad was the golden boy in my family. He was loved just as he was. In my mind I always thought that my closeness to my father would manifest itself. It never did.

My mother always had emotional problems, so much so that she wasn’t able to function in real life. The impression I always got from her was that she could not hold down a job, or anything like that, because her emotions always got in the way. I have tried to not be like this in my adult life. But everything she said I had to take with a pinch of salt.

I feel like this Korean drama, which describes women at 39 years-old, described my life before 36.

As summer approached, I started to understand what Beijing had meant to me all the Summers that I was here. It was protection, and it was Home. I remember taking all the English literature books from my studies at Durham back to the home in Dongdan, Beijing to read over the summers, of which I accomplished very little.

Dongdan was always the refuge I took from parents who were unstable in their behaviour and unsteady in their affection. It was like going from the Garden of Eden to a Hell-like existence, and then back again.

I used to envy other people the steadiness they had in their lives, because I never felt like I had any in mine.

Knowing the difference between real happiness and fake

I feel like in Confucian cultures a lot of what looks like real happiness is actually fake happiness.

The first thing I know about insecurity is that the people who feel it need to find an object who is beneath them. It seems that without this object the person with the insecurity cannot function.

I don’t know how people get this way.

And they cannot get judged. And I think that is the root of their sadness, as well. And they are afraid of people who are authentically themselves. Those who are not afraid of those who are authentic are probably not insecure or sad. I didn’t understand this for at least the first twenty-five years of my life.

As I shed the layers of myself over the last seven years or so, I’ve had to let a lot of the bad stuff die.

I feel like when you feel like you don’t feel good enough you feel the need to tear others down, and you cannot be happy for another’s happiness. And another facet would be the inability to let things go, as you hold on to them so tightly the other end is about to burst, or will burst.

And overachieving was part of it. I didn’t realise that the elitism was so serious, and that it was a sign of real low self-esteem. And always expecting the worst, and the inability to wish others well.

And the most terrifying prospect of all is loss of love.

I have a really fat aunt. She’s really fat. And I think it’s perfectionism that made her fat – I know this sounds stupid. And I think perfectionism made me a cool kid – even though that sounds incredibly stupid to say. I wonder if cool people never like themselves much, because that’s why they have a need to be so cool. I always looked down on a bunch of people who I thought was uncool during my university years, for their clean-cut and clear image.

But now I also see that that fat is a kind-of armor. But I also had that armor for so many years. And armor was a way to put oneself second. Or it is a way to put oneself second, still.

Forgetting that You Were Loved

So Irretrievably Broken

That’s when I realised I had to slough off some of these layers to become myself again, or maybe even myself for the first time. And in some weird (or great) way I’ve felt more like myself than ever before. Which is funny because of the giant shadow that my grandmother casts over me. And I don’t really know if I can ever come out from under that shadow.

There seems to be one way out, however. I had such terrible anxiety before at losing my grandmother, and I had to overcome that anxiety, with help. In some ways I had to wipe the past clean, but that is a privilege that not everyone enjoys or can enjoy: There are often too many entanglements and too much obligation and politeness for most people to do so or want to do so. But I think it was actually a blessing in disguise. Sometimes the things that we’re supposed to talk about don’t get spoken about. It took all my strength not to run away from things. And also to realise that sometimes loyalty is bullshit. I think I woke up to my life.

One of the loyalties; family. I hav several, or had several. There was my grandmother and grandfather’s family here in Beijing, my grandmother’s family in British-owned Malaya, and my parents, then there were what was essentially my adoptive British family in the U.K.

I don’t know if having this many loyalties was good for me, because it split me up and took me in different directions. But it also meant that I had many loyalties, and many sides to please, in an ever-shifting parade of family members. Arguably this made me a great people-pleaser (of which I was) but also a beautiful lizard who could shift into whatever pattern it was required of me at the time, and of the time that it is required. It has been a beautiful blessing for my work, and indeed, social life, but a terrible blow to the rest of my life.