It was as if I had been programmed this way

She was always kind

And the best way to receive love is to give love. She probably knew this because she had abandoned her family in Malaya, So often our parents’ love is conditional, based on getting the right grades or having the right attitude. But my grandparents’ love was always unconditional. To them it was as if I had no faults, none that they could see anyway, or if they saw it, they were able to go beyond it for some reason. But my grandparents had made this huge sacrifice because they *literally stopped seeing me for years* so that I could have a foreign education. With my parents (in the early years), and with others, it could feel like that love – the most expansive thing – really could feel like a prison. And yet love should never feel like this, it should never feel like a prison, it should feel more like a cave, one where you can go inside to explore, but that also has a possible exit on the other side. My family has always told elaborate stories, and they have many, many sacred cows. And I wasn’t allowed to break them as a child, and a younger adult. But something happened just before I turned 30, and that was to break these taboos and these ideas, I didn’t want to be imprisoned there. I figured that I would rather be out there, enduring the storms and the pain, than deal with what was traditionally the other pain– guilt, which is the most powerful and immense weapon in the world, and the definition that they had of what “Home” was. We also had artifacts lying around as if they were never forgotten, never to be lost. It was as if I had been programmed this way, this characteristically ungenerous nature that existed within us. To the extent that I felt guilty for doing everything, and anything, for taking any time to myself, for having any kind of self-expression.