2022 was the year of faffing about and just taking stock of where I was. It was me being grateful to be alive and counting each day as a bonus day. It was me marveling at being not dead. I was moved to tears at times at how incredible the vista outside my window was.
I should be dead. This is something that I am always cognizant of. Fifty years was my alloted time on this earth, and I cheated death. I feel quite scandalous about it. Not scandalous, exactly, but like I got away with something. Which I did. I mean, I’m alive. I shouldn’t be. That’s the very epitome of getting away with something.
This is the year that I integrate that knowledge into my every day life. I really have an obstacle in my brain against talking about it because it’s just so bizarre. In addition, there really isn’t a lesson to be learned from it. I mean, there is for me. It’s to enjoy life and to truly internalize that it can end at any moment.
For anyone else, though, what can they take from my experience? This is frustrating because I have learned valuable lessons. Lessons I would like to impart to others. The biggest one being that your body is a wonderland, even though I dislike John Mayer. In America, women are made to feel their bodies are trash from a very early age. Americans worship at the altar of thinness for women, but it’s a very sparse range of thinness that is acceptable. Too thin and murmurs of eating disorder can be heard. But just a few pounds overweight or even ‘normal’ weight, and the person is excoriated. Woman.
I have watched a lot of YouTube content creators. A lot. The women are, to a T, thin and gorgeous. Well, that’s not completely true. If they are not white, there is a bit more variety (though, usually it’s skinnier if they are Asian. I am from two cultures that demand women waste away to nothing). White women, though, have to be skinny. But with boobs. And look very feminine.
Men, on the other hand, are allowed to be pretty much any shape, size, and pulchritude. I’m not talking about nonbinary/genderfluid people because, let’s face it, there aren’t that many high profile people who are not male or female.
I would be considered female or at least female-presenting. I am tired. It’s not on my list of things to care about. I am hoping to continue that in the new year. I don’t really relate to being a woman, but I don’t NOT relate to it, either. I would say that I feel closer to women than to men in general and we have shared experiences. On the other hand, I find women can be the worst when it comes to oppressing women, too. Something about upholding the patriarchy and being the ‘good’ woman.
It’s always a precarious position, though, because it’s so easy to be toppled from the top of that particularly rickety mountain. I wvas the cool girl in college as I hung out with the guys. I disdained the girly girls and laughed at them along with my bros. But, in the back of my mind, there was always the knowledge that I could be knocked off that mountain at any minute.
Back to the new year. I wrote a bit about it in the last post about it, so let’s continue. I want to red more books next year. Physical books, not my Kindle. I used to be a voracious reader. I still am, but not of actual books. It’s been a while since I’ve read fiction on the regular, and I miss it.
I want to finish my memoir. The problem is that much of it is about the major dysfunction in my family, which I’m not sure I want to lay out while my parents are still alive. Not out of respect for them, mind, but because I just don’t want to deal with it.
I know that if they found out what I truly think about them and our family, it would just rile them up. Plus,, it would provoke a whole string of defensiveness that I don’t want to deal with.
That’s selfish of me, I’ll admit. But, really, my motto when it comes to my family is to have as little to do with them as possible. It’s like an open wound that keeps festering. In the new year, it’s probably time for me to deal with the psychological trauma.
It’s funny. I looked for a trauma group after leaving the hospital. I thought Icould do with a bit of support for what I had gone through. However, I could not finde one. I have talked to the difficulty of finding a trauma group for my particular medical crisis. Plus, I realized that I didn’t really need a group to deal with that–but to deal with the family issuess.
I need therapy for it. The last time I was in therapy, my therapist and I worked on family issues. My mom did not like it at all. She tried to say that in Taiwanese culture, family is most important and my therapist was pushing us apart. First of all, family being important does not mean that the individuals do not matter at all. My mother’s interpretation of ‘but faaaamily’ is that her needs are the most important. Hers and my father’s. Secondly, her mourning over our relationship falls fallow because she’s not willing to actually change anything about the way she behaves to improve the situation.
That’s the part that kills me. She claims she wants to be close, but she expects me to be the one to adapt to what she wants. She doesn’t like anything about me as a person, nor does she understand me. At all. Which would be fine if she weren’t so pseudo-sorrowful about not being close. If she could just say, “Hey, we are two very different people. And that’s OK”, then we could probably get along alright. But, no. I’m suppose to be a little mini-her, which will never happen. EVER.
I wish I could let go of my bitterness, but I just can’t. It’s the one thing since my medical crisis that has gotten dramatically worse. It’s because I realize, fully realize, that my parents are both raging narcissists who don’t care about me as a person. They can’t because it’s not in them, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.
I’ve tried explaining that they love the concept of me as their daughter, or rather, the concept of having a daughter, but they do not love the actual (still) living and breathing Minna. They hate that I’m not married, don’t have children, am fat, am areligious, bisexual, and write filth. They hae that I do Taiji, especially the weapons. Or I should say my mother does. My father doesn’t really have any thoughts on this beacuse he just ignores it all. Except the lack of religion. That bothers him because it bothers my mother, and she probably whines about it to him. The latter would be disturbing his comfort, which he cannot have, of course.
It’s tempting to think if I had just done what my mother wanted, she would love me, but that’s not true. She spent 15 years trying to get me pregnant, but she does not want anything to do with my brother’s children. Other than to write them emails about how they should go to college. As my brother has said more than once, she decided to move thousands of miles away from her grandchildren after bothering him to have them (and his wife at the time).
In other words, nothing would be good enough for her. She had an idea in her head as to what life should be, and she was not going to let reality get in the way. Nothing can live up to that, obviously, so she was bound to be disappointed.
In 2023, I am going to strive not to care so much. I’ve been finding it difficult, but it’s not impoossible. I just have to believe.