Tag: keeper of the truth | A Banana Peeled

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I hold these truths to be self-evident (part five)

Posted on August 3, 2025 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I’m back to talk more about honesty, lying, having a bad memory, and how I deal with it. Here is my post from yesterday in which I talk about why I hammer out what I remember all the time.

I did it before my medical crisis because of how everyone else in my family deep-sixed experiences left and right. After my medical crisis, I accepted that my memory was markedly worse than it had been before my medical crisis. It was a trade-off I was more than wililng to make because I got more life out of it.

I don’t know if it’s just that or if it’s that and getting older, but my memory keeps getting worse. Fortunately, I can now do simple math in my head again (I could not do it for about a year after my medical crisis), and I no longer forget random words except extremely rarely. But I will completely forget things I would never have forgotten in the past. I have to make notes to myself that I would not have had to make in the past. I don’t like it, but I’ve resigned myself to it.

One thing that really jolted me, though, was when my brother and I had a shared Nelson Mandela moment. We both remembered doing something, and doing it in a very specific way. It turned out to not be true (we had irrefutable proof), and it made me realize that my memory was shakier than ever.

That’s part of the reason that I hold on to my truths as tightly as I can. I know that I’m losing a lot every day, but there are things that I need to keep myself centered.

No matter how much I lie to other people (either directly or by omission), I remain true to myself. I read something once about emotional honesty, which is different than actual honesty. Not to say that you can freely lie whenever you want as long as you can justify it to yourself, but that if a little lie or omission can smooth things out, why not?

I rarely outright lie about things, but I will dance around it. I mentioned in previous posts that I will not rarely speak up when people call me ‘she’ because it doesn’t really matter to me, but I will not call myself ‘she’. I have done it on accident, but I try to avoid personal pronouns for myself as much as possible.

I don’t mind being called ‘them’, but I don’t identify with it. So if someone uses it for me, and they have, I won’t respond. It’s like when I tried to go by a shortened version of my middle name as a kid beaause I did not like my first name growing up. My fifth grade teacher was a prince among men, so he would call me by it–and I would not respond because I had forgotten I had switched my name.

More about gaslighting in my family

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

In my last post, I was talking about my mother and how she lies/deep-sixes uncomfortable/bad memories. The biggest example I have is from the last time she was here, and it has stuck in my mind as to how it brightly highlighted how my mother’s mind worked.

I was in the living room on my laptop when my mather came racing in the room, crying. My father was hot on her heels and screaming at her. He was accusing her of stealing his money, which was one of his recurring themes in his dementia. He lived in poverty when he was a kid, and my parents didn’t have much money when they f irst married. Like, really scrimping and saving, in addition to them sending money back home to my father’s family (but not my mother’s for sexist reasons).

Side note: my father has been weird about his money all his life. For the most part, he was stingy as he pinched a penny hard. It’s understandable, but he took it to extremes. And in very disaparate, disconnected ways. I have mused about it before, but he was very penny wise, pound foolish. He would gripe about two kiwis costing a dollar when he came to visit (apparently, it’s cheaper in Taiwan), but then he will spend a hundred dollars on a water pick for his teeth (this was decades ago).

Which, I get. We all have the things we will splurge on. For me, it was my last desktop (the computer I’m writing on right now). But at least I’m aware of my weak points. My father isn’t and never has.

Now that he’s in his dementia, I have to pretty much let it go. Let what go? The resentment, the expectations (as minimal as they were to begin with), and any hope for an authentic relationship. I mean, to be honest, I did not have the last at all with my father–ever. At least since I was in my twenties. Instead, I have to practice taking my father as he is, which is where Taiji really helps out. It teaches me to be in the moment and just be.

Anyway. The fight. My father was shouting at my mother, and I unwisely put myself between them. Literally and metamophorically. Sometime in my thirties or forties, I looked at my father and realized that he could not hurt me physically. Emotionally, yes, but not physically. That helped psychologically in a way I can’t completely explain.

I stood between my father and my mother, and outshouted my father. I’m not proud of it, but it is, as the kids say, what it is. Sometimes you have to outbully a bully, and in that moment, he was bullying my mom. Again, it was about money and how she was stealing from him. Or maybe it was about his driver’s license and how we refused to give it to him. That latter was true, by the way. There was no way he should be driving, but he was very stubborn about it. My mother allowed him to beat her down (metaphorically) until she let him drive to Cubs for instance. She argued that it was so close, but it really doesn’t matter. That’s a spurious argument, but she could not say no to him.