I cannot help but feel like I have wasted my entire life, and I will continue to waste the rest of it. I carry so much fear, resentment, guilt and shame that I can hardly keep up the facade of a normal functioning person. How did I come to be this way? This thought consumes me day and night.
Simply, my parents raised me to be this way. More specifically, my father. My father always had to disparage people whenever he had the chance. With my brother, he would make comments about how my brother’s achievements were substandard and inadequate because traditionally a man is valued based on what he can produce. With me, while he also belittled my achievements, they were not his focus. His focus was my appearance. I had every single bit of me repeatedly pointed out and mocked. I was divided up and judged as if me as a whole was worth nothing. Am I just making excuses at this point? Perhaps I can provide the answer to that question in the stories I'm about to share.
You see, ever since I was a child I was given this all encompassing message that I was born perfect, and all I had to do for the rest of my life was to not mess up that perfection.
When I was a baby, I developed a habit of sucking my thumb because a babysitter my parents hired once neglected to feed me for an entire day. This habit caused my front teeth to extend out more than my other teeth which was only partially fixed with braces. At some point in elementary school, my father started to tell me how beautiful my teeth used to be. They were so straight and perfect but then I started sucking my thumb and now I have horse teeth or washboard teeth. It didn't help that my upper gums can be seen when I smile and laugh. I eventually broke the habit of sucking my thumb by wrapping cloth around my right hand for a week. I even went to school with my makeshift cast and wrote terribly with my left hand. Kicking the habit didn't stop the comments and it didn’t stop the blame because I didn’t kick it sooner.
Around the same time, I naturally had very pale skin, black hair, and red lips which quite resembled a certain Disney princess so my parents would call me "Snow White" as a term of endearment. When I was in 3rd or 4th grade, my mother took me to visit Thailand for the first time in my life where I guess I was a little too carefree and played in the sun too long. I came back to the States extremely tanned, almost to the point of unrecognizability, and that's when my parents started to call me "Snow Black" instead. Even after my skin eventually lightened back to its normal shade, that name would still come up from time to time.
When I was in middle school, I wanted to try dying my hair. The trend for many Asian girls at the time was to dye their hair red or reddish brown. Afterward, my father started commenting how my hair used to be so shiny and beautiful when I was younger. He would claim that dying it made it dull. He said that my hair used to catch the light and there would be a circle around the top of my head like a halo but that doesn't happen anymore. Even after I let all of my natural hair grow out, that light never came back. Yet another thing I ruined I suppose.
I also started to draw more in earnest around this time so a bump was developing on the middle finger of my right hand where the pencil would rest. Between sucking my thumb and now this bump, I was told that my left hand was far prettier than my right hand. I started thinking that my right hand, along with different parts of my body were ugly and that it was somehow my fault.
This was the pattern. I would be told some part of me used to be the best and now it’s not — Over and over and over — From my forehead, to the shape of my eyes, to the bridge of my nose, to the shape of my mouth, to the veins in my hands, to the thickness of my thighs, all of it was flawed and only getting worse. My whole life became an exercise of extreme caution and anxiety.
I am so utterly afraid to further damage what was once “perfect.”
While all of these examples revolve around my appearance and made me very self-conscious, the general message received reached far deeper than my skin. Do not do anything to mess things up anymore. Period. Do not take risks. Do not step out of line. Do not make mistakes. Mistakes will follow me forever and my biggest priority is to make as few as possible. The only way is down. I just have to slow the descent.
Maybe these ever-present comments were always made in jest. Maybe they were just trying to be helpful in some way or fashion. Whatever the reason, whatever the justification, all they did was surround my very being in a cage — a very special cage where there is no door and the bars are made of shame.