“You have not been through that much of shit in your life”
Oh really? I haven’t? What would you know, when you didn’t take the time to get to know me but rather passed your judgement based on what you knew about me for a period of time. I don’t really talk about my past in detail because its not…
Sigh. I rarely use that word - sigh - in my posts but that is all I feel like doing after reading this. Sigh - because it feels like a literary weight has been lifted off my chest; someone has said the words I never could. Sigh - because this hits too damn close to home, even if the exact details aren’t the same. And finally, Sigh - because this feels like a permission from Someone or divine intervention, letting me know that it is okay to feel what I feel and it is okay to write what I need to say.
I will deny that I have had more life experience than most, because I do not know what you have been through. And I could tell it as it is, but that would require lots of old-wound reopening. So I’ll simply let flow the parts that need to get out. The day after my dad moved out, I had school. In other words, I had to be a happy and studious and normal 9-year-old. I couldn’t talk about it to anyone because no one had told me it was okay to do so (even if I knew it myself), and besides I did not know how to broach the topic. It’s not exactly recess topic of the day material, ya? And so I pretended everything was fine. For a good damn six years.
The first person I told was my first boyfriend when I was 15. I told him over SMS. It was awkward and weird, but that’s 15-year-olds for you. The next person I told were my good friends, a year later, and also seven years after my parents split. I played down my feelings, telling them there was nothing to worry about and that I was okay. Because the one thing I cannot deal with is pity. You can be angry at me for keeping it from you, or you can break up with me, or you can choose to be indifferent; I will get over it. But the minute I smell a whiff of pity and sympathy, I close up for good. Eventually my friends learnt to play along with me, believing that I was fine. That was what I needed. “Fake it till you make it” was a mantra I used to live by.
I didn’t let boys have their way with me though. I still believed in love, even if I stopped believing in marriage. You could say I became a little too idealistic. I wanted so badly to prove that love still existed, if at all, and so I went looking for it in all the wrong places. I threw all my attention into getting boy A to like me and if that failed, no matter - the alphabet has 25 more letters. Eventually I got bored though, so I put all my effort into studying. Books never let me down, unlike people. (Although that does not seem to hold as true, the higher up you go in the academic ladder.)
I spent the next 13 years of my life (and counting) wondering if I would ever manage to have a happy family or if the gene for self-destruction runs in the family. I alternated from wondering if I would end up like my mother, or my father. I doubted that any boy who was with me truly loved me entirely. My commitment phobia grew and grew, and honestly I don’t know the size it is today, but it seems dormant for now. Eventually I managed to see the good sides (lol because I am an opportunist) in the split, and was okay with it. But you see, coming from a Chinese family, divorce was taboo. Plus, we are Christian. Oh dear God. (No pun intended.) All these stereotypes of a ‘perfect’ family made it ten thousand times more difficult to open up to anyone for the rest of my life, regardless of what it was I needed to open up about. The easy days were not so bad, but the rough days were mind-numbingly painful.
One week after it happened, my mom came home to me sobbing on the floor. I remember telling her I missed my dad (even if he lived only 15 minutes away). She put her arms around me and we cried together.
