Depression

I am pretty sure I am in a depression.

I cry about once a day, when I come home from work, late at night. I watch videos until 3am to numb myself, then I get up right before work. I spend $9 and take a cab to work almost everyday, because I am always running late and there isn’t enough coffee to wake me up, nor enough makeup to cover my sad face.

I am agitated at work, and my co-workers notice it. Thank God I have a few close ones who don’t judge.

I have ended all conversations with my family, because I am slowly trying to realize how not to get myself emotionally abused. My mother is thrusting her needs onto me, by demanding that I become happy. I am too distrustful of my dad to communicate with him without feeling like I will get manipulated.

I am realizing what a emotionally abusive household I grew up in, and how much damage it has done to me.

But I think realization and acceptance are the first steps toward any recovery.

I am growing up

In the beginning of this year, I prayed that I would be able to finally like someone and feel excited to see someone, I secretly vowed that I wouldn’t care about the outcome, that I just wanted my boring life to have some spice.

Sure enough the gods answered my call and I started to like a boy, one who would not be able give me an outcome. So as quickly as the emotional flair attacked me from beyond, it ended, and I was left to feel cheated, lied to, and used.

And I collapsed. I started to wonder how I could possibly get this upset over a nothing, and how I could have fell dependent on someone (or some experience) that should not have defined me in the first place.

Then, it was as if I collapsed, overnight, with all my emotional love sucked out of me. I abandoned all my good habits in life, and felt scared, lonely and empty, especially during the weekends when I didn’t work. I cried once a day, and spent every free moment of my life glued to a television show, because I couldn’t bare sitting down and taking a hard look at my nonexistent, embarrassingly empty life.

Then, I found this, and a lot of my irrational fears and outbursts of tears clicked. The reason why I have been struggling to hard in life – having trouble forming relationships and staying happy, is all because I have been emotionally abused.

I am seeking help and trying to find a way to get over hating my parents. I am trying to remember and in turn, trying to put that behind me. There is a long road ahead of me but I am finally (!) growing up.

Update.

Here’s the news that pretty much sums up my life: I got dumped, then I got promoted. About 2 years ago, I got dumped, then I found an amazing job. It seems that my effort in work inevitably pays off, and my effort in life just knocks me down.

I’m going into therapy, to figure out if this is my parents fault.

But meanwhile, I’m going to spend less time thinking about how to look for love, and more time just living.

When I was 16 years old, I was sitting on a train traveling back to a small province in China for the first time since I left it 4 years ago. I was 16, I had barely started to speak English, and I was returning home. The landscape gradually turned from vegetation to sand, and my heart swelled as I realize that home is approaching, with grandmother and aunt and cousin eagerly waiting at the platform. I didn’t know what home was, only what home was not. Home has become a memory. Memory has become my home.

I am 26 now. Ten years have passed since I began to have an inkling of how interesting, how messed-up, how painful and how difficult my life has really become since embarking on the journey to America. Sometimes, well, most of the time, I have a hard time figuring out which part of me feels the pain of growing up in America, which part of me feels the pain of emotional abuse from my parents, and which part of me just feels the pain of growing up.

The memories of that past no longer affects me, but it has shaped me into the person I am today: detached, somewhat superficial, insecure, unaware of what’s expected, and certainly easily prayed upon.

I have liked someone, because I trusted him. And he ended up not liking me, and told me so. I am sad, now, and depressed. What is wrong with me, I ask myself, that made me not worthy for him to like, that I am somehow not good enough for him to get over his ex-girlfriend for. Or perhaps it wasn’t the ex-girlfriend at all, nor was it any other choice involved. That it was the pure fact that I am not likable. I am just not likable, like what my parents have always told me all those years growing up.

I take 2 steps forward, see some rays of hope. And then I take five steps backward and completely collapse in the darkness.

I don’t know what to say

Today, a boy told me he doesn’t want me to be his girlfriend, after months of trying to hang out with me, sleeping over at my apartment. His excuse to all that behavior was, “I was clueless.”

Life has gotten so pointless, I really don’t know what to say anymore.

Remember when I said I’m going to take all the risks hoping I’d get up a better person after I fall down? Well, I was secretly hoping I wouldn’t fall… now that I did, it really, really hurts.

falling

I’m going to get brave this year.

I’m going to tell every boy I have ever liked, that I have liked them.

I am going to take a lot of risks. And hope that when I fall, I get up a better, stronger person.

Vacation

Hanging out with him is like going on vacation. I forget about work, about the future, about the stress.

Hanging out with him is better than going on vacation. My mind stops running at the speed of light; my mind stops running, what a wonderful feeling.

I sit there, next to him, without a trace of worry about the world, and just be still. Silence become the most interesting music.

And so I want to sit there with him all day long, the world could collapse and I would not have cared.

But alas, back to reality – the reality of complexity and insecurity and future.

2011

2010 has been good to me. I got a new job, and made over $100,000 this year, including bonuses and unemployment paychecks.

I use to deny that my happiness depends on jobs and money, and use to strive to make my life happy through the people I love. But I no longer do, because I have come to realize that I am somewhat defined and prized by my career. It doesn’t have to be a high-paying career, but it must be one where I feel challenged, masochistically challenged and feeling as if I am contributing and growing through the pain, the fear, the pressure, and the triumph.

It is incredibly important to me that I have a purpose in life, long-term or short, that guides me to produce or to learn. I am happier than I have ever been in New York City, precisely because I am being challenged at work like I’ve never been challenged before. This alone gives me incredible gratitude to 2010, the year I finally jumped from a job to a career path.

I also moved to a new city, and my alcoholic problems is showing signs of uncontrollable damage. I am admitting to it, finally, after committing to the dozens of mistakes that are now not only hurting myself, but hurting others. I think I am using it to temporarily forget. I no longer need to do that.

The last 2 weeks of 2010 were the most dramatic and epitomizing – I learned that like my father, I tend to meddle in other people’s business, and also like him, I never put my best interests first. I learned that I am easily manipulated, emotionally immature, and most of the time just absent-minded. I am becoming the people I disliked, and not following the footsteps of those I loved.

2011 is going to be a great year for me, I know it because I will make sure of it. I will love myself and put myself first. I will finish what I promised myself to do, and excel without feeling inadequate in my contributions. I will know my worth, and fight for what I want to get. I will be disciplined in exercise. I will be brave enough to love and brave enough to hate. I will be myself, and know myself in the best way I can. I will take care of myself. And here’s what I’ll do to make sure that happens:

1. I’m going to see a cognitive psychologist
2. I’m going to start going to the gym
3. I’m going to hire a maid (yes, I have not done that yet)
4. I’m going to save a lot of money
5. I’m going to study the GMAT
6. I’m going to start dating
7. I’m going to buy a desk and stop fucking around on my bed
8. I’m going to read a lot more books
9. I’m going to travel and reconnect myself with friends
10. I’m going to start a business with my mom by myself, because everybody else is not trust-worthy

Disaster Week

I like a guy, who might be gay. And a wonderful guy likes me, but I’m pushing him away. I got drunk in a room full of people I’m not suppose get drunk from, and they all got pissed at me.

I probably have many more problems I should tell a shrink instead. Like – when my parents came to visit during thanksgiving, I almost lost control when I realized how fake my dad is the entire time, how I couldn’t stand him, but couldn’t hate him because he installed all the shelves I couldn’t install onto my wall when he couldn’t say all the things he wanted to say.

Then my mom called me and cried, and I cried, for 3 hours. She told me she calls me because she worries I’m still sad over my life, and I tell her she is really calling me because she couldn’t get over stuff herself. But really – we are both calling each other because we have too many secrets we couldn’t possibly share with anyone else.

I’m getting a maid

I admire women who work hard for other people and create a home others depend on. They are tireless and selfless, people like my mother who held a stressful full time job but still cooked dinner every night, and people like my [good] grandmother who literally worked herself sick and almost died.

I’m not sure if I could ever be like them, and if I didn’t have to be like them, suffering and working so hard most of their lives, whether I should consider myself fortunate, or just lonely? And why is it that every time I envision a “good woman,” she is never one to sit in luxury and content?

Which is why I held out from getting a maid for the longest time even though I don’t have the time or the will to scrub my toilet every month and keep my cloth off of the ground. I’m not saying good women must do chores, but as a woman, I’d like to be able to do that. But I’m getting a maid starting next week. Maybe this really isn’t a woman thing, but just habits. And I have bad habits when it comes to keeping the house clean. And that’s okay – I don’t have to be perfect, I need to remember that.

These days I am reminded that I am a lot like my dad, whom I have lost respect to and certainly don’t
want be compared to. He is weak, and completely powerless when he faces his family and their abusive relationships. He is a coward and couldn’t say the truth even as it stares at him in the eyes. He doesn’t have a mind of his own even though he’s educated. He isn’t naturally a bully (like his brother), but he is weak and insecure and though he doesn’t bully others, he bullies my mother and I to get his frustrations out.

He does not represent the kind of man I’d ever, ever want to marry. In fact, he’s the reason I don’t ever, ever want to marry. And I hate him. I hate the fact that he mindlessly helps others and pretends to be the most generous person in front of other people, all to win approvals because his mother never cared about him, a fact he’s not willing to admit but everyone sees. Then, at home, he drives me and my mom crazy to ease his own psychological problems.

Anyways. I’m hiring a maid because that’s something I said I’d never do. But I’m doing it, because I need to break my cycle, admit my flaws – I am a horrible housekeeper and never will get any better, but that doesn’t make me a bad woman!