Me and my parents

It was at that moment that I realized I’ve never grown out of the trauma my family had given me. When my dad told my dentist that she should remove me from the group chat and only discuss the treatment plan with him without the presence of “children” — his 19-year-old daughter whom he sent to Peru and Saudi Arabia alone when his wife forgot to book her a hotel room — I found myself sitting through the same sensations I once felt when I was 13. I remember sitting at the dinner table terrified that my parents might — I knew they will — scream at me for not positioning my back straight when eating or when the straps on my backpack aren’t of equal length.

When my mom told me that I’d be traveling back to her hometown with her on a Tuesday I never agreed with I was sent right back to times and times of despair I’ve felt as a kid hoping that my mom would do something different and save me out of this mayhem she created with her own hand but she simply won’t. Childhood was not a fever dream but a cluster of unwanted nightmares overlapping each other. I was dreaming inside a dream and fearing that dream at the same time.

My sense of self detaches from me and seeks to establish itself back from scratch using pieces of my identity my mom had given me. I don’t have a choice to prefer one over another. If it’s a good one I’d end up fearing to lose it while if it’s a bad one I’d end up becoming it. All of a sudden my sense of safety becomes the projection of my mom’s worst fear and occasionally a tool to make her feel less guilty.

I had barely ever doubted if my mom truly loved me. I knew she did or somehow did as much as she could but she couldn’t do enough. I knew my dad loved me to the extent he was given when I was born yet he refused to develop it any further. Effort was such a sensitive topic in my family. Had I done anything wrong it would be due to my lack of efforts. Had I done anything right it would be due to my parents’ persistence in raising me despite my nature as a dumb kid. They had tireless reluctance to pay any attention to what I need and want and yet the second I achieve anything it’s the result of their hard work.

Where did the hard work go? What was it and where did it occur? I doubted myself as an ungrateful child for never being able to observe their sacrifices for me, the sacrifices they long claimed that I owe of them. Yet now I realize that to see what’s not there is a psychotic behavior to imagine things up in my mind and add on to the layers of hallucinations already built up by my negligent mom and anguish dad.

I learned pain and fear before I had a chance to learn happiness and safety. I honestly can’t remember the last time I felt a sense of security and comfort without the fear that it would disappear in thin air, or if I am now in debts for things I never asked that serves purposes I never meant to pursue. When I threw myself to other people of my own age as an extremely unhealthy mean to obtain attachment that was not seeded in my family I found myself staring into an abyss of emptiness and pure void. The purity in this void is so unsatisfying but not unsettling.

Here I am writing in another language to process things I never had time to even properly react to but was blamed to not coming up with an adequate response. I’ve normalized the pain I’ve felt over the years as trials and errors that put my resilience and volition to test all o realize later that I never had a chance to build these volition properly in the first place. Every time I recall getting scolded at for rushing carelessly with my relentless impatience I sense the irony in this double standard, or in other words, complete lack of standards on their part and a world of standards built by my misbehaviors and normalized with my good ones.

Was there any good pieces of memory from my childhood? Surely. Why do I not remember them? Unfortunately humans — or just me — usually account the quality of an event by the end of it instead of the climax. For any piece of happiness that I shared with my younger self I lost all of it at the end. My parents had made sure to return my dopamine level to its norm before the taste of happiness completely fades from my mouth. How innocent I was to assume that this indeed built a fortified mechanism in me to process hard things — hard things I was never supposed to encounter to begin with.

I was trained my whole life to fight the battles I never should find myself in while dodging all bits of happiness and comfort in front of me. This could’ve been effective had I developed a dull mind lacking discipline in my academics — per chance that’s how my parents saw me.

What an irony for both of them excelling tremendously in their respective field yet failing exhaustively to identify evidence aligning an uncomfortable fact they are rather reluctant to admit. I had a sense from a younger age that I was the “dump” my parents needed to process their anger and tiredness from work. I thought they were so scared to see me as competent and so excited to find any flaws in me as they can now justify their unreasonable lashing out as reasonable for reasons hardly established by any reality.

My sense of self disappeared — or never existed — when I looked to my parents for safety and love, ironically something every child should biologically and morally do (up to debate), and when I realized that my parents never saw me as who I am but rather an opportunistic embodiment of their worst negativity. Did they love me as a daughter or loved the opportunities I presented them to have another source to process things? Maybe you never needed a daughter to begin with and just needed therapy. I feel sorry for every person I’ve projected my insecurities towards due to my own unprocessed pain. Some may say I should accept my parents in this same analogy but — I was a kid and they were my parents.

The worst thing I’ve done to myself is to take pride in surviving unbearable trauma that I normalized as an essential part of my life. The worst thing I’ve done to others is to assume others outside of my parents should be held accountable for all that I’ve went through.

I heard Virginia Woolf once said that writing things down makes your pain go away — that’s an exaggeration surely and an assumption that she’s actually said it — I believe in it deeply for that the only hope I’ve had growing up in such distress is in knowing that I had my pen and paper (keyboard and screen) to listen to my unspoken fear and resolve them into a mirror of validation that only I had access to. I didn’t have a strong sense of boundary — just a healthy one.