I have a niece who is beautiful, creative, sensitive, kindhearted, and intelligent. I’ve said she’s like me, but the 2.0 version because she’s been encouraged to cultivate her artistic talents and has been doing so ever since she was little. She just graduated from Perpich Arts High School, and I couldn’t be prouder of her. I’ve recently stopped saying she’s Minna 2.0, however, because she’s her own person and deserves to be treated as such. Additionally, I don’t have many fond memories of Minna 2.0*, so I don’t want to insult her with the comparison. In fact, I don’t like to think of the past mes at all, in part because I feel absolutely no connection with them.
Minna 1.0 was a fat, anxious, nervous, moody, withdrawn child. Even though I grew out of it to a certain extent, I was a loner throughout school. I don’t remember much of my pre-college years, but what I do fills me with sadness. Little snippets of me playing by myself or eating by myself or other kids making fun of me are mostly what I remember. I was a voracious reader, in part because I love escaping into fantastical worlds that were nothing like this one. Even when heartbreaking events occurred, there was some comfort in that they weren’t happening to me. I loved the adventures of Laura in the Little House on the Prairie series, Pippi Longstocking and how weird and independent she was, A Wrinkle in Time, Lois Lowry, and almost anything else I could get my hands on. Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, and Trixie Belden were all high on my list of must-reads. My love for mysteries started at an early age. I also read a lot to get away from the tension in my house and because I didn’t have any friends.
I’ve been a weirdo since I was very young. I always felt as if everyone else was given a manual on how to exist in the real world, and I never got mine. I was a foreigner in a strange land with no map to guide me. I watched some of the typical TV shows of the time, such as Love Boat, Fantasy Island, and Scooby Doo, but I never really cared for them. When I was in school, every moment was fraught with anxiety. I didn’t know how to act, and I was Asian, besides. I never had a chance to fit into suburban Minnesota.
Fast-forward to my teenage years. Still a freak. Still a loner. Still nervous as hell about anything and everything. Only, now I had a hideous perm because curly hair was in, and I even wore a powder blue sweater for my senior picture. I was convinced that I was a grotesque, hideous, unlovable blob, even though I had a steady boyfriend my junior and senior year. I looked at a picture of me from back then, and I wasn’t fat. Sturdy and hardy, yes, but not obese as I thought I was. I did cringe at my feathered hair, and eye shadow that did nothing for me, but I didn’t look nearly as bad as I thought I did back then. I was severely depressed by this time, and I had a hard time caring about anything other than how miserable I was. I clearly remember one day in high school in my English class in which the teacher was absent for a length of time. I wrote a bunch of suicidal poems on the blackboard, and then was furious when someone else erased it. Looking back now, I can admit that it was weird and creepy, but it was also very much a cry for help. I felt as if I was drowning in my own misery, and no one cared. Rationally, how the hell were my classmates supposed to know what to do with someone like me? Emotionally, however, it drove me further into despair.
After I graduated from high school, I broke up with my boyfriend and eschewed going to college in California with him. I decided to go to St. Olaf, a local Lutheran college, instead. Since it was a new start, I remade myself the summer before. I went on a diet, lost 40 pounds in two months, and became anorexic in the process. By the time I enrolled in St. Olaf, I was a new woman–or so I thought. I may have had a different outside, but my insides were just as fucked up as they’d always been. Because I couldn’t keep up my insane workout regime, I tried to cut out even more food. I would skip breakfast,** eat a bowl of oyster crackers*** for lunch, and another for dinner. I only got three-and-a-half hours of sleep a night, so by the time midnight rolled around, I was ravenous. I’d raid the vending machines for a half-dozen bags of snacks, snarf them down, then feel horribly guilty for doing so. That’s when I became bulimic, even though I didn’t think of myself as such because I only threw up once or twice a week.
My college years would have been great, if I weren’t consumed with anxiety, depression, and an overriding sense of loneliness. I was much more popular than I had been in high school, but I still felt like an alien. It’s weird because from the outside, I probably seemed like the typical college person. Not enough sleep, lots of socializing, hours at the Libe, attending events, and going to classes, of course. The one thing I didn’t do was drink. I’ve never cared for it; I’m allergic to alcohol; I don’t like being out of control. Other than that, though, I was a typical college-goer, but in my head, I was still not fit for human consumption. I’m what you call a functioning mentally-ill person. I may not be high-functioning, but I can wear a mask like nobody’s business. Even when I was in the pits of depression, I could fake a smile that fooled most people. The days when I couldn’t muster up the energy to even smile, I hid myself as much as I could so I wouldn’t burden others.
I met the real love of my life in college, and we started as best friends. I loved him with an intensity of a thousand suns. He was my first lover, and it’s still among my fondest memories. When he broke up with me, it devastated me, and to some extent, he’s still the standard by which I judge other lovers. I’m not saying it’s healthy or a good thing, but I can’t deny it’s true. I didn’t realize it until my last therapist pointed it out, but once she did, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’d had other lovers since then, but he was still the gold standard. Of course, I had idolized him in my mind because I was emotionally immature at the time, and he was everything I wanted my life to be. I thought if he loved me, that meant I was worthy of being alive. When he dumped me for the third and last time, I equated it with me not having meaning. I couldn’t understand it at the time because I thought I was such a cool girlfriend. I didn’t care if he went drinking with the boys. I didn’t demand that he spend every minute with me. I wasn’t high maintenance, or so I thought. In retrospect, I realized that I wasn’t a good girlfriend in many ways. I was emotionally dependent on him–I even called him my rock. I needed him to be steady because I was so unstable. Consequently, he wasn’t allowed to express his emotions because I couldn’t handle it.
It’s hard for me to look back at that Minna and not cringe. She was so needy and clingy, even if she didn’t express it explicitly. She was an empty vessel, and she was desperately seeking someone, anyone to fill that void. I feel as if she had endless tentacles that were continuously grasping for hapless prey. I know I’m separating from her, but I don’t like to admit that she was me at one point in my life. My last therapist asked me if I could be at all empathetic to her, and after trying for an hour, I was able to find some compassion for how scared she felt all the time. I had experienced a lot of trauma as a child, and it’s not surprising that the first time I really fell in love, I would try to suck all the life out of it. Or, to put it less negatively, it’s not a surprise that I wanted to envelop myself in it.
I would like to say that I’m past all that, but I’m not. I’m still very much all-or-nothing when it comes to love, which is one reason I’m not in a relationship. I don’t like who I am when I’m with someone, and that’s all on me. I think I’m better now than I used to be, but I still tend to hyper-focus on my partner to the detriment of myself. I know it’s partly my OCD tendencies and my codependency issues, but I think it’s also part of my PTSD. It’s a hypervigilance thing in that I’m always looking for something to go wrong, including love. Unfortunately, I’ve chosen partners who’ve only reinforced that feeling, as each of them has found a reason to dump me. Intellectually, I know it’s because I subconsciously choose people who are ill-suited for me, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling like shit once they dump me. On an even baser level, I’m attracted to people I can’t have. Gay men, straight women, married people, or people who just aren’t interested in me. It’s been that way since I was in elementary school when I had a crush on a boy for six years. We were friends, but he never showed any interest in me. This unerring ability to crush out on the worst possible person was something I used to pride myself on in a perverse way.
Even though I can feel some compassion towards the younger me, I have a hard time accepting that she WAS me at one point. Even though I have some of the same traits I did back then, I feel like a completely different person. I know it’s partly my BPD traits that I have a hard time associating with something I find so distasteful, but I wonder if it’s more than that. I’m not sure. Even after all the head-shrinking I’ve had, I can’t quite figure out why I am so detached from my former self. Maybe after I integrate further, I’ll finally figure it out. Until then, I’ll just think of the former me as a young, scared, frightened girl who never really knew love. That makes me feel protective of her, which is as good as I can get right now.
*I feel as if I’m on Minna 4.0 at least.
**I’ve never been a big breakfast fan in the first place, and I’m still not.
***To this day, I can’t eat oyster crackers.