I have more to say about my teenage years.
I really wish that I had known much earlier that my family was fucked up. That it wasn’t just cultural difference. Yes, my family is Taiwanese American (my parents are Taiwanese, full-stop), but it was also highyl dysfunctional. My parents never should have gotten married, and my mother had (and still has) very toxic ideas about family and what it means to be a woman.
I had untreated depression and anxiety. To be fair to my mother, she found me a therapist when I was fourteen or fifteen, but it was a man from the local uber-Christian college. He was pleasant enough, but he was not used to dealing with emo angst-ridden teenage girls. Who weren’t white. I was also bullied a lot in school for many reasons, including being Asian and fat. I would venture, though, the fact that I was just weird contributed to most of it. And I mostly got teased by girls, which can hurt way more. Boys are mean–girls are cruel.
The worst was a girl who picked on me every day in…I want to say chemistry. Not sure of the class. But she was just mean to me. For no reason. Except that I was a weirdo. I did not knwo how to fit in (my empathic skills did not help me out until I went to college), and I just stuck out like a sore thumb.
This girl (I still remember her name) would not let up. I tried to ignore her, but it did not work. One day, I had enough. When she teased me, I grabbed her hair (very short), yanked her head back, and calmly told her I would kill her if she did not leave me alone. Then I let go of her hair and stared down at my desk. She told me I was making a fool of myself, but there was fear in her voice for the first time. She left me alone after that. I felt horrible, and I never did that again. I took the wrong lesson from it; that violence was not the answer. I mean, it’s not, but that shouldn’t have been the sole lesson. What I should have noted was that sticking up for myself worked. Then I should have found ways to stick up for myself verbally. But, you know, I bet she learend a lesson as well–to not fuck with someone. And, yes, sometimes, might makes right.
It’s interesting. I was just reading a post on Ask A Manager. It’s a re-up of an old post about a woman who bit the office manager because he would not move and let her by. (There was much more to it. He was a bully, sexist, and physically intimidating.) She had done the ‘please excuse me’ dance with him several times, and he still would not move.
I remember being horrified the first time I read it, not only because of the biting, but because he seemed like a dick. Not only the alpha male bullshit of not letting her by, but because he retaliated by stomping on her feet and shoving her. Now, granted, someone bites you, you’re probably going to react. But that’s escalating it in my mind. She dropped the mug she was carrying and it shattered. He started picking up the pieces and she left.
The worst part, though, was the update. It just got worse from there, and she rationalized staying because she did not want a boring office job. People tried to tell her that there was a vast space between boring office job and biting your coworker (which, by the way, people in her office said was not a big deal). Honestly, it was one of the most depressing updates I’d read on the site, which is saying something. I hope with the re-up of the original post, the writer will write back in as it’s seven years later. I hope she’s in a different job and has several years of therapy under her belt.
The thing about abuse is that you learn the wrong lessons from it. You either develop bad coping skills or you just give up. That’s what happened in the letter I posted. Both, actually. She did try to get another job, but gave up after one interview didn’t net her a job. She listed all the horrifying things that were happening in her office, but then said she didn’t want to work somewhere where she would be bored.
When you stay in an abusive situation, your mind has to adapt to that. I see it with my mother. My father has dementia, but refuses to admit it. He’s been an abusive asshole all his life. And I mean from the moment I was aware of who he was. That was when I was roughly six or seven, so 45 years or so. He has zero empathy. None. He can’t fathom anyone thinking other than he does. Everything is a reflection on him, and if you can’t do anything for him, then you’re of no use to him.
My mother has coddled him this entire time. In the beginning, she fought with him about it (and still will from time to time), but she should have left him when I was a kid. As I told her repeatedly. Now, things are only getting worse, and she’s stuck. Instead of him changing, she’s changed to make it even easier for him to be the abusize asshole he is. She’ll even utter the classic line, “He’s sweet most of the time.” Well, yes. Because if he was relentlessly nasty, you wouldn’t have put up with it. Or maybe she would have, but much less likely.
Now, she has all the power, but she does not think she does. She says she can’t do this or that or the other thing because he’ll get mad. So? He literally cannot get through a day without her. In a just world, he would be afraid that she was mad at him (if he didn’t have dementia. That fucks up everything). But, it’s not a just world, and she has been warped by his abuse.
Here’s the weird thing. And, yes, I’m going off on a wild tangent because that’s how I roll. My father is rapidly going downhill. English is his third language so I can’t say if his thought process in his first language, Taiwanese, is as bad as it’s become in English. He does not use it on the regular–I think he only speaks it to my brother and me. ;
He’s reached the stage where he’s no longer making sense. He was talking about flying out here to visit, and I said gently that it would probably be really difficult for him to make the flight. It’s 24-hours total, including layovers, and when he flew back to Taiwan after my medical crisis, it was a bad trip for both him and my mother.
He said that we could see each other without flying. Um, that’s not going to happen. I said something like, yeah, we could do that because I know that you don’t argue with people who have dementia. It’s not worth it because they truly don’t understand what is real and what isn’t.
Later, my mother told me that my father said I told him he should not move here. She wanted to know why I said that. I told her I did not say that, and then I explained what we had actually talked about. I admit, I was a bit impatient with my mother because she’s a psychologist! She knows that people with dementia don’t have the best grip on reality.
But, it’s her maladaptive behavior. She can’t afford to think that my father is slowly losing himself to dementia. The last time we talked, she cired when she said that she had told him he had dementia. He got mad as she should have known that he would. She said she hadn’t given up hope that he would accept it and learn to live with it. I wanted to shake her because that’s just willful at this point. She said she hated lying to him, and I tried to get her to see that one, she wasn’t really lying to say that he was having memory loss and hearing loss because he was getting older and that it was an actual kidness to go with it and let him have his mind at ease.
This is running long and veered sharply in a diffirent direction than I expected to go. I’ll get back to my life through the decades at some point, even if it’s not in the next post. This has been an interesting exercise, remembering my past. Not completely terrible, but not great, either. The past is definitely best to be left in the past.