My aunt from the UK has returned to China.
I was thinking today that my grandma is really bad at saying goodbye. She would give you all kinds of things as you’re leaving, as if preventing you from leaving. And they pour that inability to say goodbye on to you, really making it feel like generations of trauma, all layered into one and poured down on to me.
It was as if my family had all of these expectations that they folded into one giant heap and then piled it on to some innocent person, usually their descendant. And these expectations are weird, because in a normal situation they normally wouldn’t be there — or, they shouldn’t be there. But to force this stuff on to a child is preposterous, and unfair.
And yet our stories shape who we are and who we become, for better or worse. I don’t ever want someone else to feel like I did, which is to be an object that could easily be thrown away, or not be appreciated or valued. It’s something I’m fighting back against in my adulthood.
I feel like there are so many people who were treated badly in their childhoods, or had bad things done to them. And one of the things that I’ve learned is not to be selfish in that way to others, and in some ways to be of service to others, instead of burdening them, which is something that I have been done to and have felt. With all the caregivers who were supposed to care for me as I was growing up and when I was a young child, I didn’t really feel that ounce of love and attention that I think as a child you were supposed to feel, and as a result you grow up trying your hardest to please others, to check in with what they think, and to do things their way. But it was the way that I grew up, and in some ways having so many relatives made me feel disposable, which is odd, because I had so many relatives.
It takes a lot of work to understand what it is like to be truly listened to. Because it’s an act of choice, not just something that happens overnight. But not being listened to can also be a great thing, because it makes you have to figure out later what it means to be loved by someone, and love can come in different forms.
And a lot of this comes from the realisation of the overwhelming love that my family had for me.