#(my art) has to be perfect it has to be irreproachable in every way to make up for it

[witherbythesword]

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[helenbeligirl]

Some thoughts on home and the trauma of not fitting

I found an excerpt of an article that talked about writing and perfectionism, but when I clicked on the link to read more, it wasn’t there anymore. This sucked because the excerpt looked so much like it had been cut out of something that I knew would destroy me with the pain of relatability. I knew I had to read it.

Things on the Internet don’t get lost forever. I hopped onto Wayback Machine and started to read it (TW: suicide), but I got too quickly distracted by the thought of computer illiteracy, and how for some people, reaching that dead link would’ve been the end of their search. 

Then I thought about my mother, and how she keeps asking me to teach her “word processing” in her words. As a writer who is constantly glued to her computer, Microsoft Word and I have been close friends for a decade. I know my way around it better than I know my way around most other applications. It shouldn’t be too hard for me to teach my mom how to do things like copy, paste, and work around the thing in general.

In theory, it shouldn’t be hard. But when has theory ever worked in practice?

___

My mother needs people with patience around her. People with endless reserves, of patience, of unyielding cheer. I have neither. I rarely taking stock of the present and trying to leapfrog into the future. When I’m unhappy, which is most of the time, I’m listless, I don’t really smile, I don’t really speak. At home, the depression is permanent.

Teaching my mother how to use Microsoft Word would be akin to her teaching me maths - a disaster. One of us will inevitably get annoyed with something and both of us will spark and explode. It’s not that the act of teaching itself is so grating that we can’t help but ignite in fury, but the very essence of our interactions are steeped with pain. The slightest hint of conflict zaps us back - I’m a kindergartener with unmanaged trauma, and she’s a single mom, shouldering the burden of her own grief as well as my own. There is no stepping stone, no middle ground, no reprieve from that. Every single time we disagree, that’s what we become. Avoiding fights is just easier.

I haven’t bothered to teach her how to use Word in all the years she’s been asking. I can’t do it. Best get someone else to.

___

Trauma runs so deep sometimes you can barely recognise it for what it is. 

A friend of mine shared a piece of art on Instagram the other day. I clicked through to the account because I loved the piece and the sudden wave of upset I felt at seeing her face was almost remarkable. 

I don’t know the artist. I do know her sister, who was blatantly bigoted to an old friend, who in turn was so grating on me that I had to eventually take several steps back. I do know her brother-in-law, who I was in proximity to during a very difficult time of my life. I do know her brother-in-law’s friend, who’s so steeped in his own cynicism and trauma that even being in his presence is excruciating to me.

I don’t know the artist. But she is surrounded by my trauma. As is my mother. As is the whole concept of home.

___

Very often, I find it hard to explain why I cannot entertain the idea of going home and why it feels like it’s a horrendous last resort. Some explanations are much easier to give than others, but those are explanations that cannot be given to everybody. There are those who have heard it and understand it, and I appreciate them to bits.

An easier one to give is this. When I am home, I lose my ability to dream. I spend my energy trying to survive, trying to stay alive. Every calorie goes to breathing, to sitting upright, to attempting to function. There is none left for higher aspirations. 

It’s easy to say that I can just get busy, occupy myself, be around people. What is dreaming but a fool’s errand. Surely it’s better to keep rooted and live practically. But keeping busy will only give me new things to do to survive. It will not stop the weight of my trauma from burying me where I stand.

___

I’m friends with a lot of workaholics. That is not an admiration or a boast, it is mere statement of fact. 

Most of the ones in Malaysia seem to be striving to a higher ideal, spanning their wings and taking gargantuan leaps. The ones back home, maybe not so. In a sense, yes, they are also sprinting towards their dreams, but there is a sense that they are sprinting away from something else just as fast.

There is a family friend, a fitness instructor. He lives, breathes, eats fitness and he’s always training for something or the other. Flies out of the country every couple of months. Watching his life is exhilarating and exhausting. He never seems to slow down. It’s inspiring, but sometimes, I can’t help but wonder what he’s running from. Is it the same thing as me? Are we all running from the same pain? 

Is my individual trauma a collective one after all?

___

The trauma of not fitting in is not so easily to articulate to people who find home in the place you find pain.

I once shared a story about feeling sad about feeling foreign at home. Many of my foreign friends who identified with the feeling of being alienated wrote in with messages of support. My best friends, who’d borne full witness to the way people gawk, comment, harass, and otherwise blithely alienate me whenever I’m home, sent all their love. Some others still wrote in with empathy, sympathy, and some degree of understanding.

My family only tried to find justification in the opposite. But this is your home. But not everyone is like this. But this - but that - but --

It was like my story was a recreation of my own life. Where I should have found alienation, I found love, total acceptance, understanding, and support. 

Where I should have found acceptance, I found dissonance.

___

The quote from the article that caught my eye had been this:

‘I don’t know what’s going to come out of me,’ I told her. ‘It has to be perfect. It has to be irreproachable in every way.’

‘Why?’ she said.

‘To make up for it,’ I said. ‘To make up for the fact that it’s me.’

When you are mixed race in a homogenous country and you don’t fit in, you want to ‘make up’ for the deficiency of your difference, for the way you stick out, for how you don’t belong. I wanted desperately to ‘make up for the fact that it’s me’. But the fact of the matter was, I didn’t feel like I had a place to be. With my mother, there was only the grief of the loss of my father. Outside was only alienation and harassment. With my friends, sure, there was plenty of love, plenty of acceptance, but it wasn’t till very recently that it has felt like everything’s clicked back to place properly with them. My best friends no longer make microaggressions that I used to be too afraid of calling them out on. They do not perpetuate the tiny things that make that sense of unbelonging feel so awful. They are my pillars, my soulmates, and they have my back completely. 

But ‘home’ for me truly is away from it. I am never more at peace than when I’m in a plane taking off from the airport and I can see the islands drifting away, like a memory that’s out of sight, out of mind. Home for me is where people know me as I am and nothing changes. Home for me is where people accept my story as is and let me speak.

Home for me is where I have the courage to speak, because I know I will be heard, but more importantly - I know I will be listened to. 

And when someone’s listening... maybe I can start unpacking that insurmountable suitcase and start to lighten my load.

[interstellar-kai-blog]

Self esteem - Raffles

A couple of days ago, my family and I ended up babysitting my 3 year old cousin. Decked in a baby blue dress and a matching pseudo-pearl necklace, the irresistibly adorable little girl pranced into the house and waved at me. “P-ween-cess,” she mumbled happily, pointing to the Snow White plastered on the front of her dress, a shy smile on her face.

“Aww… Meimei so pretty,” I responded.

Her face lit up.

“Meimei p-wee-ty,” she repeated proudly, her happy eyes filled with that simple belief.

The sheer conviction of her statement made me think: Just when do we stop believing in ourselves like that?

Self-esteem is a touchy subject-especially for girls, as research has shown.Which girl hasn’t honestly felt, or at very least heard, the barrage of “I’m ugly” denunciations? While a disproportionate focus seems to be placed on the contributions of external factors in constructing our self-image, ultimately, one questions how much less significant individual mindset is. Overly disparaging peers and the pernicious media are, indisputably, important factors, but is our biggest critic in fact ourselves?

It is highly improbable, given the sheer ubiquity of these issues, that every single person who has ever felt bad about him or herself did so only as a consequence of a caustic comment. For every condemnation, we do receive a fair share of encouraging words from family and friends – yet, a single “you’re fat” results in a crushing blow while “that’s pretty,” is met with scepticism, perhaps from a mixture of humility and habit. Beyond leaving us the tendency to look only at the bad, overt modesty sometimes translates into negating any compliment altogether.

And in the Rafflesian context, this mental self-flagellation extends beyond appearances.

The issue of intelligence is one that touches the hearts of all Rafflesians. By virtue of the simple fact that one bears the label, there are expectations, societal and personal, of a certain level of intellectual competency. Alas, what exactly this level may be is nebulous at best, and the yardstick by which it is measured is as equally subjective. There is a blurred line between being exam smart, which an entrance to the Rafflesian family would presuppose, and being intelligent in terms of learning fast. It is difficult to judge which is more helpful than the other in our society. However, what it does mean, is that even within our little bubbled sphere, there will be inevitable differences in the way people address things – and the amount of effort needed to digest concepts. Intellectual giftedness may not always equate to good results. But being exam smart probably requires a certain amount of effort to sustain those stellar grades, the easiest available measure of this dubious intellectual standard.

If one isn’t amongst the gifted few breezing school with little effort, it is easy to doubt one’s self-worth. One of the very assumptions of being a Rafflesian is rendered invalid, and part of one’s identity becomes compromised. Feelings of inadequacy are a natural result.

We need to put things in perspective.

In our not altogether avoidable obsession with not being left behind, we are occasionally blind to the nuances associated with “being intelligent”. Is the measure that matters to us really the one on a piece of paper? And what more of different types of intelligences, such as the obvious Science-Arts distinction, the more subtle musical intelligences, social intelligences, even athletic intelligence? Ball-sense and being able to coordinate hand-eye movement is not something gifted to all, as many of us can easily vouch for. What does being intelligent really mean?

And, the equally big question: To be considered “good” in something, do we have to be better than everyone else?

Judging our self-worth in relation to others means that to be things like passion are neglected. Aptitude is the only thing left valued. We strive to become as close to perfect as we can get, and in every single facet of life. But for every person that you can draw better than, someone else can play the piano better than you.

Where does it end?

“Great expectations” are an irreproachable ideal – one that motivates us to strive for excellence to the very best of our ability. The problem arises when “excellence” becomes synonymous with “perfection”, because while both are admirable, only one is achievable.

Humans are inherently flawed – we all have our deficiencies, and short of being the lucky few that (appear to) have everything just gifted to them, there is absolutely nothing we can do. It is one thing to know this, but a totally different one to believe it – the latter requires something we might not have in moments short of an epiphany. Instead of telling everyone the cliches that “everyone is beautiful”, or “everyone is gifted”, the truth is, those are lies.

We have blemishes. You probably aren’t the prettiest girl around, or, if you are, you might not the one with the most A’s. There is going to be something wrong with you. But if everyone could be so flawless, we’d all be indistinguishable moulded robots marching through life’s factories. We should embrace imperfection, because without it, we wouldn’t be who we were.

Taking a piece of advice from the 3 year old girl as she tried to drape her undersized necklace over my head, “you’re boo-ti-full”.

Well, beautiful enough.