I was talking to one of my uncles about our toxic extended family.
He was having a panic attack because he had an interaction with one of them and he was telling me what happened.
In one of his texts to me, he said, “They always made me feel unloved and excluded, like I wasn’t good enough to be with them.”
How many times have I asked that to myself? How many times have you?
How many times after somebody ghosted us or left have we asked ourselves, “Why was I not good enough?”
How come that’s our automatic reaction to a relationship that went sour. Why is all the fault suddenly on us?
This is a question I’ve asked myself countless amount of times. Because I do put so much on myself.
And as someone who thinks that question so much, I don’t know where this answer came from but I responded to his text like this, “Maybe it wasn’t even that you weren’t good enough for them. Maybe you weren’t complicit enough to be a part of them. Maybe you weren’t mean enough to be like them. Maybe you weren’t as conceited as them, and they felt that. Kind-hearted people cannot mix well with people like that.”
I have no idea where this answer came from because I will still ask myself “Why was I not good enough?” in response to a sour relationship. I guess it was the mature part of my brain answering for me because I knew deep down that there was nothing I could have done in situations where a relationship was out of my control. Sometimes people ghosted me or the relationship just didn’t work out. I don’t think it had anything with me but with the other person.
I remember having a conversation with one of my childhood friends a couple of years ago. We don’t talk anymore, she ghosted me. I never actually looked at our last conversation because I thought I would find the reason why she doesn’t talk to me anymore. I thought there would be evidence of what I did to her.
I had even convinced my brain that it was there. To my surprise, I finally opened that conversation and found nothing. I found no reason for her to do the things she did. I had actually texted her and asked if she was mad at me because I had sent something to her and she didn’t respond. She then ignored the texts I would send to our group chat so I thought she was mad at me. I apologized and said if there was anything wrong that I did, she should let me know. That ended up being our last conversation.
In that last conversation, she didn’t respond with the same warmth and ease that she used to. It’s like I wasn’t talking to her. I think she had already decided to ghost me at this point. But on my end, there was nothing I did to her. I’m not sure why we don’t talk anymore.
What was it that I did to my childhood friend that made her ghost me after years of friendship? There was no answer. There was no reasoning from my point of view. Maybe she just ghosted me to ghost me. Maybe she wanted to forget the past.
Maybe all of the ones who left thought I was annoying, quiet, upsetting, etc. But to deem everything to whether I was good enough or not, is unfair.
Of course, not everyone is going to like me but the right people will. And whether they leave or stay in my life does not justify my worth.
Nobody justifies your worth except you. Nobody deems if you’re good enough except you.
I got close to one of my friends in our senior year of high school. But I had actually known her since we were kids. I’m not sure if we’re actually related, but someone in our families is probably distantly related.
So I see her at family events and stuff, I know her family and she knows mine. We weren’t close as kids but we became close when we had the same friends in high school.
Recently, her great-aunt passed away and my dad was planning to go to the viewing and I went too to pay my respects to her and support my friend.
My friend was happy I came and I’m also friends with her cousin. When the service was over, I was talking to her cousin and her boyfriend sat next to her. My friend and her brother came around to where we were talking.
I was joking saying that my friend told me we should go to the gym to find boyfriends. And her cousin was saying, “If I find out you guys are going to the gym without me, I’m fighting.” Then when my friend and her brother came by, they all started talking about going out to eat later on and going to see a movie tomorrow.
I felt really left out and jealous because I wish I had cousins like that. My friend had the support of her cousins around her and that’s something I envy.
My friend is so lucky to have a hoard of cousins that are her age. All of my cousins are 10 years older than me and they’re technically my aunts/uncles and my mom is their cousin. Then the cousins that were my age and I was close to all moved away.
I wish I had a village like hers to just hang out with on the weekends or to have a support system when bad things happen. When my grandparents passed away, my friends were there for me. But they had no idea the impact my grandparents had on me and they couldn’t be there for me the same way my extended family should have been there.
We used to be close with my extended family, but then all these things happened and they shut us out of the family. My extended family gives me pain more than support.
My friends really got so lucky with the family she has. She grew up with her cousins. They’re her village. When someone passes away, they’re all on that stage with her, giving a tribute during the funeral. Or they’re all going out to dinner to spend time together. They’re sitting in the stands during each other’s graduations and they never have to worry about no one coming to their graduation.
How lucky do you have to be to get that kind of love in your life without wondering what it’s like to not have it?
The mind can be so overwhelming that it can turn your friends into enemies.
It can twist words and make them into bullets.
It can overthink subtlety in the form of eye contact and facial expressions.
You can be so focused on the big picture that you don’t notice the small things that are keeping you around.
It’s so easy to focus on the one negative thing that happened other than the hundreds of positive things that also happened. It would be like a Youtuber who can only remember the one negative comment on their video and not the plethora of positive comments with a bunch of upvotes.
It’s so easy to see what you don’t have and not what you do.
It’s so easy to slip into those dark clouds than look at the forest for the trees.
It’s so easy for this one organ to take control of your life. It’s so easy to let the experiences of the past haunt how you live your life.
You want to listen to that voice that “knows better.” You want to listen to the failure and the sadness.
You want to prevent any hurt.
You want to be more careful.
But taking all the extra precautions is worse because you let your mind live for you. You let it determine how you live your life.
Sometimes the mind knows better, but other times, it prevents you from being the person you want to be.
No, I didn’t know what this word meant either until a couple of months ago.
If you have never been love-bombed, consider yourself lucky. It is such a confusing and overwhelming feeling. It’s just weird all around.
Anyway if you don’t know what love-bombing is, here is a definition from a Reddit post that wasn’t really confusing as the other definitions might be: “Love bombing means to literally bomb you with love and affection beyond what is normal for a new relationship.”
I think this is my very first storytime since I’ve returned to my blog! Let’s have a small drum roll and then begin!
So I have this cousin, I’m not sure if we’re actually related or if we’re the Indian version of related where everyone is your family if they know your parents. This cousin and her parents live in a state that’s 3 hours away from us so we don’t see each other often.
The first time I met her, I was around 10, I think. We went on a beach trip with other relatives and Indian church members. She’s about 8-9 years older than me. So while I was 10, she was a teenager. Which are very different spectrums. We hung out on that trip together because I wasn’t really close to the other kids my age. On this trip, I just remember her saying, “It’s boring being around all these old people.” And she would curse a lot. I remember being shocked because I wasn’t used to cursing and I also wasn’t used to people saying that Indian uncles and aunts are boring. But that’s pretty much all I thought at the time, I don’t remember anything else that happened.
Fast forward to when I was 22, I went to their house for an Indian holiday. I hadn’t spoken to or seen her in these years because she had gone back to India to finish her education. Then she came back to get a job and settle down with her parents here.
I went to their house when it was the end of summer. It was a long weekend because it was Labor Day the upcoming Monday and we went to their house on that Saturday weekend. When we went to their house, we were running late to go to their church, so my dad and I quickly got changed at their house. When she saw me she said, she was happy I came because she was going to be bored with all the adults talking. This hasn’t changed from when she was a teenager. But she was really nice and took me to her room where I changed and she told me I looked really pretty.
I drove to the church in her car while her parents, my dad and some uncles all drove in the car we came in. While I was in her car, we had a nice conversation. Which is sometimes hard with my other cousins.
But the first weird thing happened. I also told my therapist this and she thought it was weird too. When we sat down in the church, the first thing she said was, “I never had a sister before.” It’s also important to note that she’s an only child.
This immediately weirded me out because we had one conversation in the car. I barely know her, this is the first time I’ve seen her in years and she’s already grouping me in to be her sister? Anyway, I kind of just stared at her and nodded my head after she said that, then listened to the church service. One weird thing isn’t going to affect me.
The rest of the day went good, despite the weird thing. I also found out that she’s not close to her immediate cousin. By immediate, I mean her mom’s brother’s daughter. They actually immigrated to this state because her mom’s brother lived here and they were the first point of contact. Apparently, they used to be close but aren’t anymore, they don’t even talk to each other. This is important because I feel like a lot of the time she was replacing that relationship she had with her cousin with me. I don’t blame her for that because I was kind of doing the same thing.
The rest of the day, we ate. We didn’t do much because she was studying for an exam she had and so I napped in her room while she studied. Then she and I went to the park near her house with her mom. It was so beautiful because there was a vast river with boats going by. I found it hard to believe she lived so close by.
The problem with that trip was that we came with an uncle who had plans the next day, so this trip was a one-day thing. We wouldn’t spend the night there. This bothered my cousin, her mom, and me. We wanted to spend more time together but we just couldn’t. They were pissed off about this and I think a lot of their anger rubbed off on me. Because while we were in the car saying goodbye to them, I was just utterly pissed off at my dad and didn’t say anything to him. It made me that mad. But also I think I would have been a little pissed off either way that we were arriving and leaving the same day.
There was another thing when we were leaving, my cousin yelled, “I love you!” to me. Maybe this isn’t as weird because, in our culture, we immediately treat anyone like family. But I see “I love you” as more of a, you get to know the person and then you eventually say it. But I understand where she’s coming from. Also, it was kind of odd cause in our culture, we don’t normally say “I love you.”
But that was the day and I was happy to make a connection with her. We got each other’s phone numbers and I was happy (a little pissed because of the one-day trip) but all-in-all it was a good day. But there was this feeling in me where I felt like I was jumping into this relationship relatively fast. I even journaled about that feeling. And I journaled that I didn’t care that things were moving fast because she seemed like she cared and loved me, was that really harmful? I was also just reeling from saying goodbye to a close relationship I had with another cousin because we’re not as close as we used to be for several reasons. So I thought maybe this was a gift from God. That for a relationship I said goodbye to, I got this new one with another cousin and it’s perfect.
Well… was I wrong. Those small weird things were going to turn into a wildfire.
Let me not get ahead of the story too much. So we had each other’s numbers and it was honestly really nice to have her during a time when all of my friendships were kind of being tested. All my friends were doing their own thing and I was in my last year of University, so we were all busy. I honestly was really alone during this period in my life. I had lost a lot of relationships including my best friend, and I was in a trying time of life. Having her was super nice. But I would talk to her through the busyness and I appreciated that she would find time to talk to me.
Whether it was on my commute home or in between classes, it was nice to have someone to talk to. She and I would always talk about how boring our lives are cause nothing is happening. Weird things still happened. For example, when we would talk on the phone and there would be an awkward silence, she would try to push me to talk more and would say “And then what?” when I wouldn’t have more to say. That would bother me because I felt like I needed to have an exciting story to tell her to “entertain” her. One thing I appreciate in my friendships is that when awkward silences happen, we don’t try to force ourselves to fill them cause silence isn’t a bad thing!
It’s also important to mention that she’s freshly married but her husband is still in India. So she’s also bored without her husband and I was just trying to get through the last year of university, so not much was happening with me.
But sometimes I felt like I was boring her on the phone since I didn’t have any interesting story to tell. It also felt like my life only seemed interesting to her if I had a boyfriend. She constantly asked me, “Do you have a boyfriend yet? Are you looking? Why don’t you have one?” whenever I talked to her. But you know, at least she was sharing her day with me, that’s the one thing I held onto despite all the weird stuff.
But then the weird stuff would get louder. The boyfriend questions never stopped. I even tried to tell her a story about how my classmate was pissing me off and her response would be, “That’s all? I thought it was something serious.” And she would belittle my stories like that. Sure, I’m not getting in fights or anything but these are stories that still affect me. Then it was the fact that she kept pressing for stories from me and kept interrupting awkward silences, and I just kept quiet because the stories I shared with her weren’t entertaining for her so I wouldn’t tell her.
Another “I never had a sister before” instance occurs when I’m driving home and I’m on the phone with her. We’ve been talking for a couple of months but she’s telling me that she wants to move states. She tells me that she wants to move where I am, only because of me. No other reason. That’s of course a completely overwhelming feeling. We haven’t known each other that long and she’s already talking about moving here for me! We still don’t even know each other that well at this point. It was just too much but I again, left it on a back burner.
She did come to visit with her parents a couple of months after I first got to know her, in October of that same year. They were here for the weekend. Honestly, it was fun. She got close to my brother as well as me. I could see he appreciated it too because we’re not close with our immediate cousins. She would ask him about his life and his relationships (of course). But it was a good visit.
The phone calls continued while we were in different states. But sometimes she was insistent. Sometimes she’ll call me and I tell her I’m busy. She’ll send me texts saying, “Where are you? Pick up the phone. Why aren’t you picking up.” Sometimes, if I don’t pick up the call, she’ll immediately call my brother or dad asking where I am. By immediately, I mean literally a minute or two after she can’t reach me. Her excuse would be that she was just making sure I was okay. This was so so so so uncomfortable for me. I told her to stop doing it and I think she listened.
My graduation was coming up in a few months, in May. My dad isn’t the best at remembering details and he wanted me to be a doctor, so I was delaying telling him.
She said she wanted to come to my graduation. I didn’t think this was weird even though it’s still been a couple of months since we’ve known each other. I was just appreciative that she wanted to come. I didn’t have any friends or family, outside of my dad, mom, and brother that I was going to invite. So I was just really grateful that she even wanted to come.
But she did cross a boundary where she told my dad that I was graduating before I could tell him. She said she was sorry she was just excited to say it. I was upset because imagine not knowing about your daughter’s own graduation date before a cousin. It was my fault for delaying to tell him but also it wasn’t her place to tell my dad. She knew that I was going to tell him.
So she was going to come for my graduation. However, she found out that she had a testing study session on the day of my graduation and didn’t have time to come. I was disappointed but I understood. I was happy to spend my graduation with my family.
She visited us the next time she was free a few weeks after my graduation, in July. I was having a really bad asthma attack when she came. I was okay and at home, but I was having shortness of breath.
Have you noticed the overall theme of “boredom” in this post? She can’t really handle boredom and she’ll explicitly state when she’s bored.
While she was at our house, I don’t think I was certain she was going to visit. She would always say that she’s coming to visit one weekend but something comes up so she can’t. She didn’t even text me the night before that she was coming, she did tell my dad. So I didn’t really plan anything. On top of my shortness of breath, it wasn’t the best weekend to visit.
One of my pet peeves is when people rush me. The day they came I hadn’t taken a shower so I washed my hair and everything. Her and her mom were hungry so they set up the dining table with food. I told them I was going to shower and so they ate before me. But while I was drying my hair, they would constantly yell at me to hurry up, hurry up, we’ve been calling you! I didn’t appreciate that.
This visit was bad because, like I said, I didn’t plan anything and she was complaining a lot that she was bored and I didn’t know what we could do on such short notice. I tried asking her what she wanted to do but she would just reply with, “This is your state, I don’t know what we can do here.” Or she would tell me she wants to go to a concert but I wouldn’t even know how to go to a concert all of a sudden on a whim. Keep in mind, I still have shortness of breath so I didn’t even really want to do anything exerting.
Anyway, she kept asking and asking, what should we do? And I was just quiet for like 30 seconds and she got pissed and said, “You know what if it’s always going to be like this, I’m not visiting you again.” I kind of laughed at that because I thought she was being sarcastic but then she was like, “No I’m serious.” So I just kind of sat silently because if she wanted to do something so bad, she could think of something. I’m fine with anything and yet she was kind of putting it all on me. Not only that, but she’s saying she’s not going to come at all if I can’t decide on a plan. Anyway, this visit wasn’t that good. But it wasn’t bad either. I don’t remember anything significant happening after that.
Then a couple of months later in November, she was supposed to come here for a holiday. She said she was coming but she didn’t. She didn’t text me that she wasn’t coming and I was excited to see her. Now, if you know me, I’m not really a texter. I don’t text all the time every day. I’m a very casual texter. I also forget to reply because I’ll look at a message and then forget about it. Or I’ll reply later if I’m busy. All of my friends know this and they don’t force me to reply faster. If it’s an urgent text then I will reply quickly.
Well, she texted me after she was supposed to come in November but didn’t. She texted me about a month later. She told me she was sick. Now whenever I text her back, she’ll immediately call me. I think I read her message in the morning then I went to a coffee shop with my friend that day. I also completely forgot about her message until it was like 9:00pm that day. I was still with my friend at the coffee shop and I didn’t want her to call me at that time when I was busy. So I told myself I would be sure to reply to her text the next day. It was only one day.
I texted her apologizing and telling her I saw her message and forgot to respond. She texted me back saying, “If I was important to you, you would have taken my text as a priority.” She continued her message saying some other stuff but that was the gist of it. I feel like she’s putting so much weight on us. I mean the first day I ever saw her again, she said, “I never had a sister before.” She immediately crowned me as her sister. Throughout this relationship, she has mentioned that her immediate cousin doesn’t do the stuff that I do. She wishes she had the relationship she has with me with her immediate cousin. And I think a lot of the time she was replacing those feelings instead of confronting them. And I also think that I wanted her to be like the cousin I was close to as well that I don’t talk to anymore. I kept comparing the two and I also never confronted those feelings.
I didn’t really know it was love bombing until her most recent visit. She visited this past February for a program my dad conducted. Again, I was excited for her to come.
That whole day was bad. I was overwhelmed and overstimulated the whole day. She and her mom were rushing me in instances where I didn’t even have to be rushed. She was also being kind of clingy. Then during the program, she had gotten food but I hadn’t yet. So she took me to where the line was, my brother was in line too. She told my brother, “Can you take care of her while she’s in the line getting food?” My brother and I were both completely weirded out because she really doesn’t have to tell my brother to take care of me, he’s been doing it since I was a baby because he’s the one who’s actually my sibling. Then she noticed our weird reactions and she her attitude immediately changed and she was like, “Are you guys mad at me?” And I said no. She let it go.
One of my friends was also at the program. I introduced her to my cousin. Later that day, my cousin asked me what my friend thinks of her. I told her “My friend thinks you’re nice.” My cousin asks me, “Did you tell her we’re friends?” I thought this was a weird question because I see her as a cousin, so I said “No.” Her mood instantly changed and her smile dropped. She looked so disappointed in me and she asked, “Why not?” And I was so confused and shocked by how drastically her mood changed.
Later that day, she went with her parents to an uncle’s house and I was taking a nap because I really needed one after that day. I slowly wake up to a bunch of calls and texts from her asking me if I’m okay, if I want to come to where they are, and other messages. I’m like no I’m fine. She called me and asked if she wanted her dad to bring me and I said no I’m fine. Then she eventually ends up going back to our house so she can spend time with me.
While she’s at my house, my mom walks by while my cousin and I are talking. My cousin says to my mom, “Do you know how much I love and adore your daughter?” And my mom’s like, “Yes of course, I love her too.” My cousin said, “I know, you’re her mom. But I love her.” My mom didn’t really know what to say, I didn’t really either. We went out for a drive and when we came back, she again said to my mom, “I adore your daughter.” I was like… okay you can chill out about it a little bit. Even at this point, we know each other at the surface level. Because any story I tell her about my life isn’t entertaining enough for her.
From day one, I felt that the relationship moved a little too fast. She screamed I love you at the end of that day. I always felt bad that I didn’t love her in the same way, I thought I would eventually get there someday. But this constant spew of affection just makes me uncomfortable. Not only that but calling my brother or dad if I don’t pick up the phone, guilting me for not having a solid plan to hang out with her, and consistently only asking me if I have a boyfriend.
This most recent visit she had asked me why I don’t have one. Like it was my doing! I’m sorry my world doesn’t revolve around having a boyfriend.
I only realized it was love bombing when she said the stuff she said to my mom. It just made me uncomfortable and it also made my mom uncomfortable. The day after she left, I felt crappy and depleted the whole day and I couldn’t explain it. That’s when, I don’t know how, I suddenly came upon this idea of love bombing. I looked at the signs and realized it was this relationship.
She would shower me with gifts, she complimented me, the affection was always there, she called and texted all the time, she wanted my attention even if I was busy, and she told me what I wanted to hear. There would be times after interacting with her that I felt drained because I just couldn’t give her the same energy back.
My therapist told me, that you can’t just expect someone to immediately jump into a relationship, you have to slowly grow a relationship. My cousin didn’t give me any time for us to grow. It was always all or nothing with her and if I didn’t bring that energy, she would get upset with me.
So that is my story time with love-bombing. It is definitely not a recommended experience. If I knew what love-bombing was before experiencing it, I would have been like, “Well what’s so bad about it?” It is such an exhausting experience. Then when you can’t give them the same energy back, there’s the whiplash of their moods changing. And the guilt that you might be a horrible person because you don’t feel the same love. Have you ever been love-bombed?
I talked about a couple of weeks ago how I am a hopeful person, no matter what circumstance I’m in.
Well, I’ve realized that while I’m writing I tend to always offer a hopeful twist at the ending. It doesn’t even mean to happen. I could be talking about the worst I’ve ever felt but then something in me still writes hope at the end of the post.
Maybe it’s the curse of this blog. I feel like being hopeful is just ingrained in me when I’m writing blogs. I don’t feel forced to be hopeful but my posts just don’t feel complete unless I have a hopeful silver lining. I just keep writing and the hope just happens.
And it’s such a twist from my regular life sometimes because I don’t feel hopeful all the time.
It’s kind of like this blog is a silver lining and I think I understand why I wanted to come back to this blog while I’ve been feeling down. It’s like my safe house. As I slowly started writing more posts again, I felt like this was a safe place to run to after something happened.
It feels like the hope I put into these posts is also starting to give me hope again in real life.
Sometimes I get mad at myself for believing in hope too much because it can let you down. But I can’t be mad if this blog is helping me see the rainbows of life again.
A lot of the time, when I didn’t have a therapist, I would use other means for my mind’s problems. But the one thing I would do the most? Repression.
I would repress the past away because that was my only solution.
And if there was anything I can take away from life is this: You cannot run away from your past.
I mean repression can be great in the moment. You want to forget the bad things and only focus on the good. But it does more harm than good when you realize those bad things are the ones haunting you as you move further past them. It’s leeching on your back, hitching a ride. It’s residing in your closet, behind the laundry bag. It’s in your tone, it’s in your responses, it’s you. It becomes a part of you because you never resolved it.
There was something specific that happened that made me write this post, the past visited me.
A couple of years back, I visited my parents’ hometown. I know how my family acts, I know their expectations and stereotypes, I know it all. But sometimes a mental breakdown just wants to happen.
I won’t say in detail what happened. But this is a trigger warning for anybody who might be suffering from eating disorders. I never had an eating disorders but comments were made about my body while I was growing up that definitely influenced how I look and feel about my body today. Even though I am no the same size I was as a child, things can still hurt me and trigger that time in my life.
Well, while I was in my parents’ hometown something they said triggered me. And I don’t know what it was, maybe because I was fully grown at that age and the fact that they still use these words to get me, just broke me. I had a mental breakdown in front of 5 family members, 4 of them were aunts/uncles. But I know more than 5 people know of what happened because they probably told a multitude of other family members about it. Because if anything, these people love to gossip and talk about other people’s problems so they don’t have to think of their own.
Anyway, I try to run away from that memory as best as I can. Because everyone in that scenario said words that just made the mental breakdown worse. People of my culture know nothing about mental health and think mental disorders are, again, just another thing to gossip about. They either laughed at me or yelled at me in that scenario. They didn’t even feel bad about how they made me feel. The were embarrassed that I was feeling that way.
I was 19 at the time and I didn’t have a therapist. I was across the country, away from home. My friends weren’t there, the people I had who I would have vented it about to. I was basically alone with these adults who probably had similar trauma as me but learned to keep quiet about it. They learned that trauma was just a way of life.
So with no one seemingly on my side, with no way out of this situation with a certified profession, with a week left to stay in my parents’ hometown, I did the only thing I could. I repressed. Because I couldn’t accept that all the things that happened, happened.
So I just pretended it didn’t exist. Great idea, right? Nope!
Because all those memories, that past, revisited me this past weekend.
I was visiting my uncle (my dad’s brother) in the hospital because he’s been having some digestion issues. When we were visiting him, a different uncle called him on the phone (I’ll say uncle #2 for less confusion), and he put uncle #2 on speakerphone. Uncle 2 was present at the time all those years back when I had my mental breakdown. We were actually visiting uncle #2’s house and staying there for the weekend when it happened.
My uncle told uncle #2 that my dad was there and then my dad told uncle #2 I was also there. And you know whenever someone calls from your parents’ hometown and they know you’re in the room, you’re forced to talk to them. So uncle #2 said he wanted to talk to me and I awkwardly talked to him with short responses.
He asked if I was going to revisit him sometime and I got a pang of fear because I was really hoping he wouldn’t mention what happened all those years ago. Especially on speakerphone when everyone else can hear. Because like I said before, these people love to gossip and mention things that affected you negatively.
I don’t think he knew he was on speaker phone because when I gave the phone back to my uncle, uncle #2 immediately started talking/venting to my uncle about me. He started saying “She’s shy, isn’t she?” And my uncle looked over at me, trying to craft a good response with, “No, she’ll talk.” Then uncle #2 immediately started to vent about my mental breakdown, and of course, I knew that he would because they had nothing better to talk about. My dad started to talk over uncle #2 by talking about something else because I think my dad and my uncle knew that if I hear that story it would make me sad. Again, I don’t think uncle #2 knew he was on speakerphone.
That stuff was 5 years ago. Yet, people will bring up these topics like they just happened. They are the ones keeping the past alive and well. Once you do something, you can’t take it back, and they are the ones to prove that because they are the ones who will keep talking about it! Like sure, let’s not focus on how you reacted poorly in that scenario, let’s just focus on what I did. The worst thing is that our generation is taught to not talk back to these people even though they could be saying the most vile things on earth (and yes I’ve experienced worse).
Anyway, when he mentioned my mental breakdown of so long ago, the past I repressed, the memory immediately took over my body. The tears were already starting to well in my eyes. Even though my uncle was trying to comfort me with a funny story of how his son reacted to a similar situation, I still felt the effects of the past.
It’s because I repressed it. It was bound to haunt me because I never accepted that past. It was bound to break me, uncle #2 was bound to get me at my worst, and he did.
This is why repression is not the best route. It might be in the moment if you know you’re going to get help later on.
And even though 5 years passed, it’s like the pain of who I used to be haunted me in the present.
I don’t want these memories to haunt me anymore. I don’t want the people of my past to have power anymore. I don’t want to give them that power. I wish I was born into a generation a little later on, so maybe therapy and mental health could be more talked about. But of course, I have to be a part of the generation to change the old ways and break the mold of generational trauma.
I choose to not let their opinions of me, their stories of me, dictate my life. I don’t want my mental health to be drowned in the noise. If I can do anything to help myself and to be a better person, I will take it. Even if they never stop saying things about me, at least I know I will do all I can for myself so that these people are nothing but white noise.
I hope that one day if the past visits me again, I can immediately shut the door before it has a moment to come in.
As a kid, you want to be older than you seem. You want independence and freedom. As a teenager, it’s the same thing but add in the hormones. Your parents can’t seem to let up and you can’t seem to make them understand that you need to live your life.
At these ages, it feels like you’re never gonna get any older. Time seems to freeze. The independent days are so so far away. You count the days til you’re 16, 18, 21, but they never seem to come.
But then the days come and before you know it the days that never seem to arrive, have all passed by a long time ago.
As an adult, you realize age is as fickle as time. Your age, something that was so precious, in the palm of your hand, no longer is. The age landmarks all pass by and the only landmarks left are the decade landmarks of 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s.
Suddenly the voices that told you, “Never grow up,” are out of your control. The time you wanted, the age you wanted to beis suddenly here.
As an adult, you want some of that time back. You no longer wish to be older than you are. You wish you had that time back to just be a kid. You wish you could have held your parents’ hands a little longer. You wish all you had to worry about was hanging out with your friends because you’ll never see them as often as you did back then! You wish it was still your parent’s responsibility to wake you up, and you didn’t have to rely on an alarm. You wish you could spend every day on the playground again. You wish you didn’t have to worry about how much money something costs. (It’s funny when I was typing independent a few sentences up, my finger actually typed “independebt” and… relatable) You wish the future wasn’t here, where you have to figure our what you wanna be and what you are.
As an adult, you don’t want time to go by so quickly, but it does. But how would we have known that this is what growing up consists of?
With independence and freedom, comes responsibility. It brings adult feelings that we never experienced as a kid. It brings a place of life we never would have known to do with as a kid.
It’s sad. With as much as we know now, we can never go back to the childhood innocence that we knew. We had it good. But we also always wished to be in a place that we weren’t. We wished to be older.
If adulthood gives us anything, it gives us gratitude for appreciating the age we are, for the moment we are living in now, and for the time we have lived and are living.
With adulthood, we can please our childhood hearts. We can go on those vacations, buy those things we couldn’t as a kid, and still love our childhood selves. Plus we have better means of confronting our problems, like therapy.
Even if adulthood comes with more responsibility, we still have our childhood heart to nurture in the best way possible with the means that adulthood can give us.
The great thing about having a blog is that you can revisit your past and see the stories you used to be in.
When I was younger, I had a great memory. I could tell you every interaction I had with my crush. That was really where most of my memorization energy went, because it was so important!
As I’m getting older, my memory is not as great as it used to be. I can even forget something while I’m doing it.
There’s this whole “blueberry muffin” fiasco which is monumental when thinking about my horrible memory. So my friend was at my house before classes started. We each ate a muffin and I didn’t finish mine so I put it in the fridge. When I got back to my room, I had no recollection of putting it in the fridge and I asked her, “Where did I put my muffin?” We both laughed because she said I put it in the fridge. But I had no memory of it! Even though I just did it.
So it’s great having so many memories of who I was in high school on this blog. One of the reasons I wanted to start writing again is because I needed the reminder that I met the hurdles and jumped through them before. And I’m gonna do it again this time around.
It’s crazy thinking about the past. Because there are memories I thought I would remember forever. There are things that haunted me I always thought I would hold onto. Then I read about something I experienced in 2016 and I’m like, “Wait that happened? When? Did I make that up?” Then it will slowly come back to me and I’m like “Oh yeah!”
Now that I’m so far from these memories, most of them are hilarious to think about. But for some memories, I get sad. Sad, because I had to go through it. Also, it was probably a moment where I was so hopeless, so I’m sad that I felt that way.
I wish there were times where we could break the laws of physics and time travel (this post took a turn). But I wish I could time travel just a little bit so I could visit my past self, give her a hug, and tell her everything will be okay. Things might not turn out how you want them to but it’ll work out and you’ll be fine.
But just knowing that there is probably a future version of myself, or there will be a future version of myself who will want to do the same thing with me right now. She would want to visit the person I am in this moment, give me a hug and tell me everything will be okay.
It’s comforting to know future me will someday read these posts, laugh at the memories (or lack of memories), and feel sentimental about who I used to be.
hopelesslystrong 