I have a broken mind. This has been true since I was a kid. Or rather, I’ve always been different. I loved to read and always had my nose in a book. I devoured them rapidly, moving from one to the next the second I was done with the first. A part of the reason why was because I hated life with every fiber of my being. I can’t remember a time when I thought it was a good thing to be alive and is it nature? Is it nurture? I don’t know. Or, more to the point, it’s a complex mixture of both. By my mother’s account, I was a happy and cheerful toddler–though she is an unreliable narrator. She looks at things in the past through rose-colored glasses, mostly so she doesn’t have to deal with the negative ramifications that linger.
I am pretty sure this is one of her coping mechanisms in dealing with my father because he’s pretty unrelentingly negative. I also know that her childhood wasn’t the happiest and that she never felt like she was loved by her mother. Who, by the way, was a real piece of work. Probably shouldn’t have been a mother, but it was expected of women of her generation and culture (Taiwanese). She definitely favored her sons over her daughters and for whatever reason, my mother was her least-favorite.
All that is to say that my mother came into parenting with some faulty ideas as to what it takes to be a parent and what it meant to be a parent. More specifically, a mother. I also think one of the reasons she decided to have children was to have someone to love her unquestioningly, which was destined to fail. You don’t have kids for what they can do for you–ideally, that is. Many people do, much to their own detriment.
Ever since I can remember, I was not happy in my own skin. My mom made dresses for me, which is so not my jam. I like a long flowy skirt and I wore a dress now and again in my twenties, but it never felt right. It wasn’t a gender thing, but a sensory thing. I hate clothing and try to wear as little as possible. Dresses generally cover more than other clothing and is restrictive to boot. I liked to climb trees when I was a kid–which was also something that I was told I shouldn’t do as a girl–and that’s really hard to do in a dress. I was considered a tomboy and frowned upon for being, well, too much.
My bestie, Kat, recently told me she wished I had been able to grow up in the current environment of a certain segment of the population embracing gender fluidity. I wish I had, too, because I think it would have helped me accept myself more at an earlier age. As it was, I had a complex relationship with gender. I have never felt like a woman and what’s more, I have actively hated my body for so long. Being told I’m fat and unacceptable as a woman constantly and consistently for all of my life has taken a toll on me.
Side Note: I was reading an old post on Ask A Manager about an abusive boss situation. A commenter noted to the OP (original poster) that she should be careful not to let it affect her self-esteem. A regular commenter said she didn’t understand why someone would feel less about herself because of an abusive boss because SHE wouldn’t. To note, this woman is, shall we say, not the most in touch with her emotions. Or rather, someone who was less emotional than most people. Her question was a genuine ‘why would someone feel this way?’, but some people took offense because it read like disdain. Even knowing the commenter, it read that way. (She’s a thoughtful commenter in general.) There was very much a whiff of ‘just don’t let someone get to you’ which is frustrating to hear when you’re in the middle of that kind of shit.
What I would say is that if you have a high level of confidence in general as this woman did, then it’s easier to brush aside a constant stream of negativity about your worth. I would add if you’re someone who doesn’t put much stock in interpersonal relationships in general or emotions in general. But, it does chip away at you, even if you have self-confidence as others noted. I mean, that’s the very basic idea of torture, for fuck’s sake. If you can believe your body and mind would break eventually under relentless pressure, why not the same about someone’s self-esteem?
Anyway, it’s much harder to battle back if you’ve never had the foundation in the first place. From as young as I can remember, I’ve been made to feel like I’m less than for a plethora of reasons. They could be as small as not liking much of popular culture–or not knowing it when I was younger–and as big as not doing my womanly duty of having children. I talk often about seeing myself in the negative–more about what I’m not than what I am. My mother sees me as a rejection of her whole being and while she’s not completely wrong, she’s not entirely right, either. It wasn’t as if I looked at her and said, “I don’t want to be like that!” This is just who I am and I cannot help it if it’s the opposite of what she is.
That’s another problem. She wanted a mini-me when she had me. She wanted a daughter just like her and a daughter with whom she could be close because she had a very troubled relationship with her mother. Is our relationship better? Yeah, probably, but it’s mostly because I have accepted that we will never have a more prototypically ‘normal’ mother-daughter relationship. I love and care about her because she is the woman who has raised me. I know she loves me in her own way, but she doesn’t know me. What she knows, she doesn’t like. She thinks I’m a failure as a woman because I’m not married and don’t have children. She made that abundantly clear throughout my life and that can’t be glossed over and painted a different shade of red.
So now I’m supposed to say that I’m a woman and proclaim my pronouns as she/her? Nah, fam. It don’t work like that. After a lifetime of being told I don’t fit the label–I no longer want it. I will admit that’s part of my ‘fuck you’ attitude–which some would label contrary. But I see it more as I’m done. I lay down that burden and no longer want to fight about what it means to be a woman or if I’m one or not. I’m old. I’m tired. I’d rather not even think about it. I have solidarity for women because that’s what I’m perceived as and what I’ve experienced (mostly in discrimination) in my life, but it’s not a word that means much to me any longer. After decades of being told I don’t act/look/think like a woman, I’ve just accepted it. This happened about five years ago when I just got tired. I didn’t want to think about it any longer and just be…well, me.
I say my brain is broken, but what I really mean is that it doesn’t work in the ‘normal’ way. So much of my self-identity is based on hobbling together an identity that is barely held together by duct tape, spit, and blood. There is no coherent throughline to my identity and I think it’s because I’ve struggled with it all my life. In the last few years, I’ve been trying to accept that I’m just a hodgepodge of ideas, thoughts, and personalities without feeling bad about it. It’s not easy, but–and you knew I was going to get to this point–I have taiji to thank for getting me even this far.
Someone in the RKG group asked about what helped people dealing with depression and anxiety, so of course I had to mention taiji. I don’t want to be that person, but it really has changed my life. Not in a Hollywood ending sort of way, but in increments so tiny in the beginning, it took years to see that they even happened. It was probably seven or eight years after I first started that I was able to say with definitiveness that taiji had a positive effect on me. It was a struggle to keep with it until I started the weapons. then, with my beloved sword in hand, it was a little easier. I told myself to practice five minutes a day and that’s where it stayed for years. Then ten minutes. Then maybe twelve. I never added minutes–I added things I wanted to do. Now, it’s between forty-five minutes and an hour, half of which is practicing weapons.
When I lift the double sabers in the air, my heart skips a beat and I smile. Internally, maybe, but it’s a smile, nonetheless. My heart is singing the entire time and as I wrote in the last post, it’s the only time I know joy. It has literally changed my life and I am not one to say that lightly. Is that a part of my broken mind? Maybe, but I don’t care. It’s what’s breathing life into me right now and I’ll take it.