Lately (*thanks everyone for your grief counseling suggestion!) I watched as my therapist cried as I told her the stories of my grandmother. To watch another human cry at your words is a wonderful, wonderful thing. And so I realised that I would look in every woman for a sign of her, to replicate that relationship that I had had with her. What she really gave me was that feeling of being an outsider, of being disenfranchised, of not being accepted, because as a Malaysian in China during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, and just being herself, she would have been ostracized. And I didn’t really get any of that when I was growing up, my family didn’t really provide a stable, safe home, but they did materially. I had been going way too fast in the past, so fast in fact I didn’t know what I had left behind. This was how it was taught to me, how to live life. I had to do so much for my family just to stay afloat, just so they would like me, and let me be a part of them. And how stabling it is to look ahead and just see death, which is the stage that I am at now. And I had to hold on to that Chinese side, in whatever way I could. I just wanted someone to be home when I got there. And this whole time I’ve had to balance the light and the dark that is within me, and in some ways, I feel as if my life stopped at seven.