The House, Part I. Haunting this house
Content warnings: Insecurities, ED, ... sad feelings in general. 4AM thoughts.
Content warnings: Insecurities, ED, ... sad feelings in general. 4AM thoughts.
I don’t know when it started and when it got worse but ever since I can remember, I’ve been haunting this house that is my body and my mind. I gave birth to a bully and have been feeding her ever since. I read somewhere to put yourself as a kid your lock screen on your phone to remember to speak kindly to yourself but that child has only known to put herself down so when I try to be nice it thinks I am lying through my teeth. I can’t even trust myself when I say good things.
Quiet
I’ve always been called the Quiet one. My classmates / ‘friends’ in school would wait for other friends to enter the room because conversations got boring if they started with me. I hated being called Quiet but that was what I was, there was no way around it. In one class, some guy was actually surprised to hear me speak. He said “I’ve never heard her voice before!” after turning around to look where the voice came from. I was invisible, and mostly I was fine with it.
It got better when I joined the theatre club where I was forced to come out of my shell, and when some of my peers there appreciated me telling them the plots of historical Korean shows I was watching every week. Outside of that club, though, I was a wallflower still. I admit that even though I am more social now, even in new environments, I am still a wallflower today. I still make sure I say the right thing, and that I give off a witty first impression. I ask many questions because people like to talk about themselves, which is in no way a criticism–I am curious about them anyway. I do what I do best: listen. And I hope for people to like me because I do it so well.
Body
When I was thirteen, the last time I visited Viet Nam with my family, one of my cousins that spent six weeks spending time with me, making jokes with me, taking me to all those arcades and shops, told me to come back only if I became skinny. He gifted me a DVD with some exercise lady working out on the screen, beaming, clapping, encouraging me to keep moving to get that fat off my body. To this day my parents don’t remember him say it but I still hear it word for word, replaying over in my head. I have struggled with losing weight all my life because of thyroid problems, and swinging between two eating disorders which have become a hellish cycle to be in. I don’t think I’ve been called Fat anywhere in Europe. But there would be other things: like this guy in school telling me I had a thick neck and he wished he had it since he was working out a lot to get one. I never wore shirts again that revealed the back of my neck or my shoulders. Even now I look in the mirror and try not to notice everything about myself, otherwise I’d spend days picking myself apart until there was no good spot left.
A dear friend of mine, Clementine, says this all the time: Your looks are not the most important thing about you. My head knows this is true, and I know when I meet other people, this is exactly what I think. So then why do I care so much about how I look like to other people? Maybe because in the past, people have only ever looked at me, and I never felt truly seen or known. Maybe that was also my own fault, keeping to the walls all the time, not opening up. How could people ever truly see me?
IIWII
I feel utterly naked and uncomfortable when I speak about myself. I know that I am the one person that sees me the most and knows me the best. I don’t like a lot of things about me, and even when I appreciate some parts of me, it’s never a nice a feeling to meet with the things about myself that I don’t like or agree with. It’s like I’m in a relationship with someone whom I want to change but know I can’t. I believe in myself, to some extent. But I know myself too well to know that I have my limits.
Maybe I am just something that I will never truly accept or understand. Maybe I will never be able to say what my therapist said, “It is what it is”, and mean it with my chest. Because most of the times, it is what it is but I don’t want it that way. It upsets me I can’t seem to accept things and move on. It upsets me that I cling onto things, people, situations, moments, memories. It’s not a great feeling to feel stuck in a loop. And a lot of things in life require patience, which oftentimes I lack. Maybe I’ve had my heart broken so times in different ways that the time it takes to put it all back together just takes too long for me to muster any more patience.
I want to be numb and say it is what it is.
But at times, when I am already numb, then I can’t say it.
I promise, Part II will take a positive turn. Life’s a journey, no matter if you’re sixteen or twenty-six.
instagram / spotify / tumblr / diary tumblr