Tag: sadness | The World According to MEH

And Bad Mistakes, I’ve Made a Few

Posted on February 6, 2010 by admin • 9 Comments

I am incredibly sad right now.

I had to throw that out there because it’s the prevailing feeling I have. Well, along with the emotional fatigue, that is.

I can’t stop thinking about how my family is falling apart. And, right or wrong, I can’t help thinking it’s all my fault. Oh, I know it’s folly because there has not been more than an illusion of an intact family for a very long time. I have a self-selecting memory (for the negative, unfortunately), but I would be hard-pressed to remember fondly many warm family memories.

When I look back on the trip to Taiwan, I see that it’s a perfect microcosm of the family dynamics in general. I really didn’t want to go because I wasn’t sure how I would react to my father after the flashbacks.

No. I have to be honest. I did not want to go at all. As I have mentioned, my family does not work well at the best of times. Family vacations are always filled with tension, snapping, bickering, and differing ideas of what we should do. It’s rare that the four of us are in the same place at one time, and quite frankly, it’s better that way. My parents have been after my brother and me for years to go visit them in Taiwan. I finally gave in because my brother said that he and my niece would go.

Anyway, even if I hadn’t been dealing with the flashbacks, I still would have had a difficult time because I feel like I have to completely remove my personality when I’m around my family. I don’t swear; I don’t talk about sex; I don’t discuss politics or religion; I try very hard not to offer my opinion on anything. Considering that I got laughed at by my brother and his neighbor for commenting that I take my cats to the vet every year, I really don’t have much to say.

Worst Daughter in the World

Posted on December 25, 2009 by admin • 4 Comments

My parents called tonight. I considered not answering, but I decided to bite the bullet and be a woman about it. I picked up when I heard my mom’s voice. She immediately started saying how she and my father are so excited about us going (my bro, my niece, and me). Then she paused and asked what she asks me every time, “So, are you excited?”

Excited? Sure, if by excited you mean I can’t breathe and I feel like I’m going to pass out from terror. I’m that kind of excited. Then she asked if I was going to bring a hard copy of her book, and I said, “No.” They have print shops there. I am not going to lug around an almost-three hundred page manuscript halfway around the world. She was saying how she would have to go to the shop and get it printed…yes, well, that’s exactly what I would have to do, in addition to lugging it halfway around the world. She was pulling the helpless trick again, and I did not react well.

I am afraid I snapped at her. My tightly-controlled emotions are not-so-tightly controlled, it seems. I have always had more difficulty not exploding at my family. They know just the right buttons to push because, as people have pointed out to me, they are the ones who installed the buttons in the first place.

Then, we talk about the snow we are getting here. She frets about the planes being delayed and such. She frets about us missing our connection. I said there isn’t much we can do about it, and she said, “You only have ten days! We don’t want to cut short a minute with you.”

Guilt. Heavy guilt.

The Sound of Sadness

Posted on October 21, 2009 by admin • 15 Comments

I had my therapy appointment this morning. I was telling her about my sense of shame and disgust over my relationship in Thailand. She asked me why I felt shame, and I launched into a laundry list of reasons. I realized that what happened to me in my childhood and in Thailand shaped my future relationships, I said. I equated love with pain. I felt broken by it.

She let me ramble on for a few minutes before gently interrupting me. She said, “You say you feel ashamed, and yet, you’re giving me abstract reasons why you feel that way. How about something concrete?” I made a joke, but inside, I was scrambling. I didn’t know what she meant, exactly. Or, more to the point, I didn’t want to go there. I stammered, hemmed, and hawed. She finally said, “Why don’t you tell me what happened in Thailand?”

Taking a deep breath, I did. I started telling her pretty much what I wrote in my blog entry about that relationship. I recited it as if I’d told the story a million times before, rushing through it because I was anxious to be done with it.

At one point, she stopped me and asked what I was feeling. I said shame and disgust without any hesitation. After a moment of thought, I said haltingly, “Sadness.” She asked me why I felt sadness. I couldn’t explain it to her, though I was in tears. She said she felt sad because that girl in the hotel had such cognitive dissonance, she could make herself believe that she could go to a hotel and not have the things that normally happen in a hotel happen to her.

I’m not expressing it well. I had told her about how I knew about date rape. I knew that I shouldn’t have gone with him. I knew I knew I knew. And yet, because of my loneliness, because of my desperation to be loved, because of my fucked-up childhood and my fucked-up notion of love, marriage, and sex, I denied what I knew to be true.

The Breaking

Posted on July 20, 2009 by admin • 18 Comments

Under the cover of the night, I bow my head slightly. I feel as if the weight of the world is on my shoulder, and I want desperately to let it push me to the depths of my despair.

The sorrow. Endless reservoirs of tears stored in the hidden crevices of my soul. I trace the scars on my arm, slightly faded over time, but never far from my mind. I no longer hide them, though I don’t flaunt them either. I am not proud of them, per se, but I refuse to be ashamed.

Ashamed. I am, though. Not of my scars, but of me. Revisiting old memories is like picking at a scab, opening a wound to let it bleed freely once again.

The redness of blood fascinates me. It’s so rich and vibrant. How can it come from such an arid place? A thin smear of blood on otherwise white skin. How I miss it, sometimes, the release that comes with the bloodletting. In another lifetime, it was my friend, my comfort, my lifeblood. Ironic, that. Spilling my blood is one of the things that kept me alive.

My heart is full. It’s aching with the exquisite agony that used to tear my soul apart on a daily basis. I hug my arms around my body, trying to feel something, anything, other than the dull, aching, thud of hopelessness as it thumps gently against my ribs. It used to grip me with such a fierce intensity, I feared that I would crumble and give in, because at my very heart, I am so very weak.

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