Chapter 87

I don’t think it’s just me. Have you seen the news lately? It seems like the world is always ending and we’re all just living through one nightmare to the next. Outrage almost seems to be the norm these days. Though I can’t say for certain that I wasn’t tilted prior to this new media landscape. 

I think I grew up with stars in my eyes. I never got really that angry nor really upset about all the bullshit my mom and dad had done to me. However, as I got older and learned the value of money and time, I think I realized that the world really had a lot of things to be angry about. 

While it’s unclear exactly when it happened. I don’t think it’s something you can track either. I got angry but I was never violent. You can definitely tell the signs though. My cynical ways are pretty indicative of that. 

I often worry if maybe that was just a me issue. I mean, by all metrics, I’m doing fine in life. I have a girlfriend, a decent career on the come up and aren’t in mountainous amounts of debt. I seemingly had it all. Yet why do I feel this way? Why am I always angry? Isn’t what I have enough?

A psychologist here may tell you that there was something to do with my parents and they screwed up during your childhood. To that end, I mean…no sh*t. It’s honestly a miracle how I didn’t screw things up in school and end up where I did. But that thought isn’t without merit. Some days, I find myself incredibly angry with my mom. She has a mind that is impossible to sway and honestly, it’s frustrating. How do you control someone who has authority over your family assets? 

I’ve thought about cutting ties with mom a while back. Mom honestly didn’t have that great of a relationship with me. We valued each other’s success and to some ends, it did work. I mean, I have a career going now right? However, it wasn’t sustainable. I mean, what happens when you are successful? What then? Would you still want to be around each other? What happens after I pay back my mom all the money I owe her for my upbringing and education. What then? 

I, once upon a time, tuned into Hollywood and really tried my best to observe the dynamics they portray in the single mother household with a son. It was very different from what I have with mom. Now, there’s quite a lot of differences, as you may imagine. There’s also quite a lot of cultural tones here and there as well but the main difference? I think it’s quite simple. It’s friendship.

That’s right. I think when you boil it down to its core. It’s just that whenever you see a single mother household in a Hollywood Blockbuster, it’s always in a positive light. The core element is usually something that’s akin to a message of “while they may not have much, they have enough with each other.” I mean, even surrogate mothers and adoptive sons work this way. Just look at Spiderman! To that end, I think Hollywood pointed something important. When you’re in a single mother household, you should consider being friends with the other person. If you’re not, who else are you going to turn to? This is especially true if you’re considered a marginalized population like a single woman with a child. 

So what does it mean to be a friend to your parents? It’s simple. You go to them with your troubles, you go to them when you’re down and you go to them when you have issues in life. Most importantly, you should want to go to them. They should feel like your bedrock. I don’t think I’ve ever had this with my mom. She was never a good friend to me. In fact, she was more like a prison warden than anything. Mix this with the fact that she always demanded success in me instead of happiness and what you get is a very bad relationship. 

What happens after you’re successful? Well…you look back and realize that yes, it was necessary. However, you really don’t want to be friends with the person who pushed you here. They only served as the nagging voice who told you to do this and that. Now, we already talked about that though in the past in the chapter about Asian parents, so how about we talk about something along the same context? What happens to the kid? 

In my case, since my mom clearly stated all of the monetary things in our life and often trauma dumped a whole bunch of mishandlings of money to me about our family, you tend to grow up with no bedrock. You also grow up with a lot of anxiety about money and by extension, failure. 

In terms of soul searching, I think this insight is one of those solutions that are in plain sight. I knew this. But I didn’t really think that I had an issue with failure this strong. Though I suppose this was pretty evident when I felt something similar in my second year of optometry school. I couldn’t handle failure. It made me feel like I’ve lost control and as someone who did not grow up with a bedrock, that’s a frightening outcome.

My end of day conclusion to all of this? I didn’t really have a bedrock and that made me feel terrible. In the past, I held off the feeling of anxiety from not having a bedrock by being relatively successful. However, I never really had a support system specifically made to handle failure. I was, in reality, held together with sticks and duct tape. I’ve always had brushes with the highest of the highest like when I was doing cello in high school but I never really had brushes with the lowest of the low.    

I know this isn’t a complete answer to why I broke down so horribly mentally after failing my second course in my life. It’s only part of the equation. I had more puzzle pieces now though. Another clue was solved! Insight gained. I never failed so thoroughly before in my life. Even in second year.

I never failed in my planning, my cramming and my ability to be self aware enough to know that I’ve put myself out of my own best interests. I failed at managing myself. I think this was my biggest problem with this failure. I didn’t take care of myself. And as someone who was raised to understand that there was no one else there but me to take care of myself, I felt completely lost. 

Journaling has been good to me. It’s just a practice of doing something, I know, I know. But it really has. It gave me insight. But it wasn’t done yet. There was one last connection all my thoughts, when written down, were going to point to. 

Being unable to take care of myself. Not being a good guardian to my own life. Who does that sound like? 

My last insight before I decided to go back to cramming for my supplement? I came to realize that not taking care of myself made me just like Mom. Turns out, that was one of my biggest fears in life. 

When my mom was raising me, all of her trauma dumping and all of her guilt tripping ways of making me do things has instilled upon me a very bad image of her. She wasn’t perfect, while I do try and look at the positives on how we’re doing financially and generally in life, I still had this unconscious association of my mom as something I would never want to become. 

Like I said, in Hollywood, single mothers have to be good to their kids because in a household of so little, you don’t have anyone else. You should, at least, like each other. What happens if you don’t stay friends?

Chances are, your bond might just snap.