Blog

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.

More photos. There’s a habit in my family where we like to rehearse tragedy. Because we have to be the best at everything, we have to be the best when it comes to that as well.

Sometimes I feel like you have to be the prototype of something that wasn’t so healthy before you can become the healthy one.

Old family photos seem to conjure up some special feelings in people, and just like everyone else they conjure up special feelings for me. I don’t know anything about the second photo because it was way before I was born. I’d suspect it was some time in 1951 or 1952, and the child in it (apart from, obviously, my grandparents) is my eldest aunt. At this point they should be in Beijing (Peking), although it doesn’t really look like it in the picture, because it looks as if they could still be in Shaanxi (the base) or in Hebei, where their eldest son and this aunt’s eldest brother was born. I like this picture a lot because it is a time when I would not have known my grandparents at all, because they look so young and so fresh, like the adults — rather than the old people — that I had gotten to know. I always thought that was a tremendous tragedy, because once the people you love the most in the world were declining when you are getting to know them, it seemed like such a waste.

I am the one in the yellow jumper in the first photo. I really like the fashions and furniture of the 1980s era in China, because everything seems so simple, except I guess it wasn’t all that simple beneath the façade. What strikes me about this family portrait though is how beautiful my mum is, who is behind me. She’s looking down from the camera, and she is wearing make-up, which though isn’t rare in 1980s China (this would have been 1987 or ’88, before her husband moved to the United Kingdom and before she left), it does suggest their middle class roots.

I like my grandpa’s shorts in the third photo. The photo is dated 1963, which would have made my father (second from the left) 13 years old. I like how my grandfather, who was probably in his fifties, is wearing shorts, and has such thin legs.

It is hard to write this and go through all of it, including my grandfather’s legs, when I remember again with anger at all the things that were done to me.

Now that I look at it, it’s as if being rebellious is and was a good trait.

It’s often seen that rebellion or some such should be silenced, but there is something that is much more real. I stopped using my sexuality and other methods of coping when I realised it was a trauma response. I didn’t really understand much that was going on as it was going on inside me, but I did realise that something had shifted.

What was it that had shifted?

I guess it was when I realised that sadness was so over-rated. I had dwelled in sadness for so much of my life. My grandmother had become a totem, a lightning rod where I could dissipate all the sadness. I had made her a couple to my sadness. But what she gave me was something astounding: it was her example of kindness that had been illustrated over time.

All of her ex-colleagues whom I had met when they were alive told me of her kindness. One old man got his promotion because of my grandmother, and another was given a flower at her time of greatest need. These are the people who remembered her and told me about this afterwards, when they were old men and women. Her kindness was a feature, not a bug.

And for that, I feel, I can forgive her and my family for any of the mistakes that they have made with me.

I realised yesterday that all of the projects I had done was a way to find mattering. With the podcast, I was definitely trying to reach an audience where it felt like I mattered. Sometimes I hate that this blog is basically all about starting with my childhood, and what seems like the burden that I bear.

I would never say that it is actually a blessing or some kind of curse. In one way it has been a blessing because I believe that if you write down your own exploitation [sic] then it is better.

I don’t remember when happiness was described to me as boring, but it could be when I grew up in a house that valued sensation-seeking above all else. It was as if too much pleasure was on the menu, a refusal to curb appetites. I don’t know where this came from, whether it came from what was known as scarcity mentality back in the days of the various movements that my family had gone through. But what hid behind this dissatisfaction also seemed to be a tight disregard for the self. The need for everything to be together, and held together, all the time.

The family moves like a monolith, and I had always hated having my fate decided for me. I think that was the primary reason I was rebelling, because even though going abroad had always been the “amazing” thing presented to me “because I would have more options”, I myself never had a say in this, not as a child, and not as a teen. It was the force behind so much of my rebellion, later in life, because of the double-edged sword of not having options, while at the same time being torn from the people I had loved.

It was this helplessness that I think had gotten the best part of me. I think I always wanted to be in control of something because of this, of things in general, I couldn’t and wouldn’t relax into that helplessness – not because it was devastating, but because it was sort-of a numb emotion, an empty void. It really is no emotion at all, when you think about it.

If it was never my decision, what if I had chosen to stay? Did anyone ever give me that choice?

Something I never thought I would say, that all of this research led me to believe that my grandma is actually toxic. It also means getting away from all the toxic things that I have been taught. The more work I had done on myself the more I am happy to step away.

Even though there had been a real sense of compassion, and care-giving.

Because it hurt just as much when I realised the double-edged sword of what she was saying: When she told me that my parents had left me (can’t remember which post), she was also hinting at the fact that they had left me with her.

You have an instinct to keep fighting for those who aren’t fighting for you. This tells me that you have experienced a deep rejection, a primal hurt, and that it caused your body so much pain that you will do basically anything to avoid feeling that way again. You got burned once by a hot stove, and you don’t want to touch it again. You want to avoid being left behind, to avoid pain. The problem is, life comes with a lot of rejection. 

From Refinery29.

I feel like this primal rejection has always existed for me.

Always being attracted to unavailable men (and women) is a no-brainer for me. In fact I have to actively find a way to be attracted to safe people. There are often cues for me to be attracted to people who are not safe, as if they are the only option for me, really. I seemed to be only attracted to conditional love, and for a long time I had absolutely no idea what unconditional love was. I didn’t know what it looked, what its nose ears and mouth were.

It took a lot of work later on in life to figure out how to love myself, and I had to accomplish that as an adult just by herself. I don’t believe that if it wasn’t accomplished in childhood then it cannot be accomplished during adulthood, even if that was once what I believed. But with the good fortune of meeting so many people leading me down so many paths, I realised that that having a broken childhood doesn’t mean I don’t get a full adulthood.

Stop being enabled.

I realised that all this time my parents were enabling me. I wonder what kinds of cultural effects this has.

I also realised today that I’ve lived out of a suitcase for all of my life – something my therapist noticed of course.

My parents, rather than giving me strict ideals and principles, seem to enable a kind of helplessness that was borne from the things that they hadn’t done well. They weren’t really there for me, body and spirit. Growing up I had been constantly jealous of the people who had their parents with them, mentally physically and spiritually. But as I’m grown older I’ve also realised some important things, which is that not everyone had been loved the way that they ought to be loved. That for them as well there has been so many pieces that had been missing. In fact in my family it seemed that narcissistic traits were particularly strong.

And it produced in me a need to please people at all times. This is especially true when I am surrounded by people of both cultures, because then I have to do double the amount of people-pleasing that a normal people-pleaser would do. I could people-please within two cultures, and even though it was double the amount of work, it was psychologically draining.

And it comes from the lack of stability or at least not having had it in my childhood. But it was terrible the way that people also took advantage of this inherent lack of stability that I had had, and had always had. Because my life is inherently stable, and I’m able to admit that.

But the people-pleasing two different sets of people is weird.