When I was in my naughts, I hated life. My childhood was shit, and I thought I was shit. When I was seven, I realized I was going to die one day. That was also when I realized I wanted to die. Or rather, I did not want to be alive. That is a difference with a distinction. I did not want to die; I was afraid of death. But I hated being alive and did not realize this was not normal. I thought all kids hated getting up each day and realizing that they were still alive.
Why did I hate life so much? I couldn’t honestly tell you. Well, I colud tell you some of the reasons, but I don’t know how it started. I don’t remember most of my early years, probably because I suppressed them. So my realization of death and that I wish I were dead are two of my earliest memories, sadly. I have no happy memories of my childhood, aged 0-10. I would never want to go back again. I did not fit in at school at all as the child of two immigrants who really did not want to be in America. Or at least my father didn’t. He was Taiwanese through and through, and he only stayed, I think, beacuse of me and my brother. He left to go back to Taiwan when I graduated from college, and quite honestly, I’m surprised he waited that long.
I was also seven when my mother put me on my first diet and gave me a lifelong body dysmorphia issues. We’re Taiwanese (American), and she gained twenty pounds when she came to America. She blamed butter pecan ice cream, and she obsessed with losing ‘five pounds’ for decades. She yo-yoed up and down, and she made me feel like absolute shit because I was thick to begin with and then was chunky in my childhood. I looked at pics form my childhood through my teens. I was chubby, yes, but I wasn’t the grotesque hellbeast she heavily implied I was.
My preteen and teen years were just as bad, if not worse than my naughts. My mother made me her confidante when I was eleven and dumped all her emotions onto me, making me her therapist. This was about her marital problems and all the things wrong with my father. Don’t get me wrong. He was and is a shithead of the first order. He’s a narcissist who only thinks about himself, and he’s a raging sexist to boot. Like, he doesn’t like anyone, but he really doesn’t think much about women in general*. Their only purpose is to fluff his ego (and maybe other areas) and make him feel good. They are NPCs in his game, nameless ones to boot.
He had affairs and didn’t even bother covering them up. That’s what my mother cried to me about. I don’t remember if she actually mentioned the affairs, but she would go on and on about how he didn’t come home on time (midnight was when he often came home), how he didn’t call, and how he said it was none of her business where he was. At eleven, I didn’t know anything about relationships, but I knew she was miserable. I also knew my father was a selfish jerk, though I didn’t know the term narcissist when I was eleven. I just knew my father was mean and made my mom cry. He was never home, and when he was, he showed no interest in me at all.
I told her to divorce him. Yes, when I was eleven. She told me all the reasons she couldn’t–mostly related to culture. Which, fine. She got to make that choice (though I tohught it was a terrible one. I still do), but then she needed to STFU about him. She had no right to dump that shit on me in the first place, not when I was a child, but especially not if she was going to reject my advice.
Think about it, though. I was eleven, and I begged my mother to divorce him. Kids rarely wanted their parents to divorce, but it was the only solution I had for her. Even at that age, I knew my father wasn’t going to change. I knew that he shouldn’t be married, and I knew he most definitely should not have had children. He had no capacity to look at anything outside himself from any point of view other than his own. He had nothing positive to say to me or about me. I can’t remember him going to any of my activities when I was in school. He rarely talked to me (which, by the way, I was more than fine with) except to yell at me for doing something wrong or cirticize me for not being the child he thought I should be.
I remember when I was fifteen or so and hadn’t yet had a boyfriend. I was painfully self-conscious about it, but I didn’t talk about it with my parents. I knew better than to talk to either of them about anything. My father said to me out of the blue, “This is how you get a boyfriend. You have to raise your voice an octave or two, allow him to beat you in a game, and ask him to tech you something.” I looked at him for several long seconds and said if that was what I needed to do to get a boyfriend, I would rather be single for the rest of my life. I still stand by that! I don’t want to have to make myself less to get a life partner. That would make me the opposite of happy.
Both my parents had very rigid ideas of how boys and girls should act, and they were not pleased with me because I did not fit into that mold. If they could have returned me as defective, they would have. My mother’s obsession with weight never faltered, and while I have changed my own viewpoint on weight and worth, it’s still has linegering effects on me.
It’s not completely her fault, obviously. I live in a country that still, in the year of our grumpiness, 2023, thinks a size zero is the ideal size for a woman. Yes, there has been pushback, but it’s still the default to believe that the smaller a woman is, the better. When I was in my thirties, I hoped that women would allow to come in various sizes, shapes, and colors. Both skin and maekup (or lack thereof). Naively, I thought that by the time the new millennium rolled over, we would be celebrating the natural look more.
Nope.
Fashion is more popular than ever and it’s a thriving business on YouTube. If you’re a content creator who does fashion/makeup, you’re golden. Which, fine. I can appreciate the art, but I just have no interest in either personally. In part because I have a body that is not appreciated in fashion and a face that does not like being touched. At all.
When I first went to college, I decided to completely change myself. I went on a crash diet and exercised for eight hours a day. I lost 40 pounds in 2 months, which embarked me officially on eating disorder road. This is getting long, so I’m going to wrap it up. I realize I’m still in my teens, but that’s how it goes.
*This was way before nonbinary, genderqueer, agender, and more ever entered the collective consciousness.