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.