I cannot believe how fast this year has sped by. It seems like just yesterday I was standing on the edge of the Taroko Gorge and contemplating jumping off. I had escaped death there many years ago, and I thought maybe it was my fate to die there.
As I looked down, I was aware of how fat, hot, and miserable I was. It was the first time our family had been together in years, and it was not on my home turf. I wanted to end it all.
Somehow, I managed to not kill myself on that trip. I survived, though barely. My parents sent me ‘this is everything that’s wrong with you’ emails that nearly broke me. This was in March of this year, and I sank into a depth of despair. Why the fuck was I alive? How the hell could I ever make my family proud of me?
This took up much of my therapy sessions early in the year. At some point, though, I just snapped. Or rather, my despair snapped. As my therapist pointed out many months later, going to Taiwan, however hard it had been, was the event that triggered many of the changes I made in this last year. I realized that all the hiding of my true self I did around my family wasn’t enough–they were never going to be happy with the fake me, so I might as well let the real me come out to play. It wasn’t a conscious decision–I just couldn’t pretend any more.
It was actually a relief to realize that the fake-me wasn’t good enough, and I could toss her away. (Like it’s that easy. Yeah, right). Even if the real me isn’t good enough for my family, I haven’t lost anything, anyway. And, it’s easier, if scarier, to be the real me than to be the fake me.
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