Month: August 2022

“Just about when you’re going to have her you lose her.”

I always felt like my grandma was going to do whatever she wanted to do.

Sometimes I wish I was completely unremarkable, that I just have some kind of normal life and existence, but it seems like that is patently untrue, and that my desire to be unremarkable is not going to come to fruition. It’s almost the acceptance of this lack of normality that has shaped my life, and that has made me realise that what most people want is not what I want.

Every time when I like someone (and they like me) I think about how they can’t possibly like me back. As an adult I’ve had to have all the reminders scattered throughout my life to remind me of something different. That I am lovable.

I feel like I’ve just recovered from my birthday. There was some dramatic news.

As it were.

What was it that made it obvious for me that I had to always chase my own happiness no matter what?

I realised something this morning, which is that I fly in and out of cultures, where I have this chameleon effect, which I have always had. But it is only recently that I’ve started to document it.

“The streets are paved with gold”, but when my parents arrived they realised that they would be the people who had to pave the streets. But then I decided to return to the country where I was born.

I have some invisible inner scars.

I had completely not known how to trust; and how people were able to trust.

And my grandparents, they are the ones who taught me how to trust.

Even now, I’m not always 100% sure I know how to do it. I go days without trusting much, and trusting someone, albeit a small amount, is like stringing together the bulbs in a fairy light.

I came across an interesting point this week. I had try to buy some athletic shorts off a second-hand app, and the host asked if I could accept the shorts because it had xiāci, which is an interesting word for ‘flaw’, the first character, xia, means the spots on jade. [redacted].

Sadness is almost like an aphrodisiac. The more we indulge in it the more addictive it becomes.

I realised that I had abandoned so many parts of myself because I was told that that was what I needed to do.

What were the forces that asked me to abandon those parts of myself? What inspired me to abandon those parts of myself?

The only answer I have is because those feelings and emotions were not allowed in the metaphysical and theoretical house that I had built in myself with the help of other people around me as I grew up. It was more that they shut out these parts of me for me and made sure that I also wouldn’t be able to see them, or have them as I grew up.

The things that were not allowed included a bunch of things: Mostly, they were related to feeling my emotions. And why didn’t the adults in my life want me to feel those emotions of mine? All the things that I was allowed to feel seemed to be dependent on external achievements, or dependent on some external sort of self, which seemed to be the only area that I was allowed to develop.

So it feels as if I had to keep a lot of stuff truly hidden. Things like being kind or being nice to myself, or allowing the part of me that can play and find things to play flourish. There were these internal characteristics that became irrelevant, which are in some ways a compass to happiness. There were qualities that I didn’t have in myself, which remained dormant for a very long time. In fact, I didn’t know that they existed.

I was taught to drag a carcass of a body around. Those seven years with my grandparents saved my life.

Sometimes unkindness can last a lifetime, sometimes not.

It almost always felt like if I had control over the pain, or was the one who was doing it to myself, then no one else was essentially doing it to me.

And choosing to inflict pain on myself – now that became an art. I don’t know if it were to replace the pain I had experienced at the hands of my family, but that is certainly one explanation for it. If you’re used to pain, it can seem like you can never get enough of it. For some people this can be subconscious, in that they feel as if they have to keep repeating this pain upon themselves, but for others, I guess such as me, I’ve decided to become more liberated from the pain.

I discovered this over the weekend, that there were many kind people who helped me along the way, and I often wondered by it was that I gravitated towards them. Was it some kind of interest in spirituality or something similar of that kind that had come from me? But then over the weekend I had a revelation, which is what if I was the person who attracted the kind people to me, because they saw that I needed it?

I was in so much trouble. I might not have known it but the people around me did, and I don’t really know why they helped me, except that I was a person who needed help. And I wasn’t really available to be helped. But it was obviously apparent to other people that I needed to be helped.

I needed a path away from my problems, a lot of them stemming from a broken past. And I thought that running around broken was just what people did, that it was just what I did. Then things changed when I found a therapist, someone who could look me in the eye and stand what and who I was. It was so that I didn’t have to escape my problems, or believe that I could not be loved. And that’s when I understood how everything was linked to the broken past.

And the best part about it was that I didn’t really feel the need to fix it. I realised one absolute truth which is that so much cannot be fixed, and I’m fine with that, which means that that’s what I realised actually helped. If I’m able to understand that things cannot be fixed, then I wouldn’t even need to try to fix them, which feels like the best part.

Not making sure that it is something I have to fix, and that makes it a terrific thing.

What I also realised was what an impact my mother had, and I myself thought that sadness was something that I could not take. And it also developed a ‘saviour complex’ within myself, because of her way of making sure that I was her saviour. And so I was for so many years, I gladly accepted that role. But I didn’t want to play it for life.

I remember growing up, if something had gone wrong I would analyse and make it all my fault. Then I would try to correct it, which is what I had been told to do.

The letter is a letter from Guangdong, from a “sister” of my grandma’s. When she returned from Malaya to Guangdong in the 1930s (and this is why I characterise myself as an island girl), she went back to her parents’ home-town.