That’s my gal.

Jinu and I still chat a lot at work today. Yesterday we talked for about 40 mins during our lunch break. Today we’re hosting an activity together for students for one period so we had some planning. During our lunch break he was trying to solve a puzzle that I offered in our department communal space and we were chatting and laughing about how teenagers would use brutal force to fit the pieces. Then I went to teach, and he sent me a picture of him finally completing the puzzle. After my class, he helped me carry the puzzles to the classroom for the activity, and I offered to carry one bag. It turned out he carried both bags for me. After we dropped off the bags, the food services people came to install hot water for our tea making. I went with them to make sure that they could put things in place properly. Jinu said he’d wait for me outside and he did.

After that we headed to the assembly. After that we went to the classroom to host our activity. The activity was for an hour and we chat the whole time, about New Englander’s condescension, about his mom’s remarrying his stepfather, about people in the City of Power judging people based on their jobs (he spent his teenage years in that area due to his mom’s job). We have this thing—whenever we talk about the snooty people, we’d start acting out how they’d converse with each other. Sometimes he’d pretend to be the snooty white person and I’ll join in. Today I pretended to be a snooty new Englander and he was pretending to be someone without class. This always cracks me up. Another thing is that we both dig fart jokes…totally low class, and we’d act out to be people who find fart jokes low class.

But then at one point, he told me he texted “Lynn” a picture of the wooden cross lock puzzle that offered to the office and how it made people think for such a long time to solve. Lynn is a dance teacher—she’s only 27. She’s an alumna from our school and then went to the City of Money for undergrad, which means she’s way more privileged than I am. She’s skinny and young and sexy. Jinu told me last weekend that he and Lynn have become friends. Hearing that he texted her a picture of the puzzle makes me feel insecure, but then I told myself, if that’s what he likes, then he’s not right for me.

After the activity, I asked if he could help me bring the two big bags of puzzles back to my car, which was parked in a garage off campus so it’s quite some walk. I told him he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to because they were really heavy. He told me he pulled his back muscles during his morning workout because he didn’t warm up enough, so I told him not to worry about it and that I’d figure something out tomorrow. But he insisted on helping me out, and I told him I was afraid he’d get herniated disc like I did when I was too heavy from my pregnancy. I told him I’d feel so guilty if he couldn’t stand up tomorrow, and he told me he was my co-host of the activity so he wanted to help me and besides it was his choice to help me so I shouldn’t feel guilty. He asked me why I’d feel guilty and I said because he got hurt for helping me out, and I’m just like that. He said it was his choice so if he got hurt he’d be responsible for his choice, then I said, “OK then if it do happen I’ll work with my therapist on that.”

He also told me he’s gonna get dinner at DTF and I assumed he’s going with Lynn or other coworkers. Whoever it was, it’s gotta be someone or some people who don’t have kids. That gave me another ache that he’s young and maybe our lives would never align.

Then I worked with ChatGPT for some time tonight to process my attachment wounds. Then I thought of something really sweet that my student told me today: “Ms Johanson, you know AC? He told me he really likes you and you’re his gal.”

I really struggle with Gen Z word usage so I asked her what it meant, “I’m his gal?” She said, “it means you’re a really good teacher and he thought you were the best.” 

In my 12 years of teaching career, I’ve got thousands of appraisals like this—young adults telling me that I’m awesome or the best teacher they’ve never had. I have so much worth right there, and why should I let Jinu alone decide whether I’m chosen?

My X

As I approach my Christmas break, I can’t help but dread it. I used to love Christmas—days of home decorations, wrapping presents, getting up at 6am to record the kids’ reactions when they see Santa’s setup. I mean, I’m still doing those things this year, but it’s going to be more quiet this year. At least we’re not spending hours opening Angel’s parents Christmas stocking presents. I’ve realized that in the last, I used a lot of materials and busyness to fill the void inside of me. Now I don’t have those fillers and I need to face the void, and that’s the scary part. Last Christmas I even got myself a PS5 with the VR headset and that killed a lot of time for me so that I didn’t have to face the void. Now I don’t even play any games on it and I only use that console to play YouTube videos.

The more I process my thoughts with ChatGPT, the more confused I get. I mean, yes I agree that Jinu and I are in a liminal space, but our ambiguity is even more obvious than the ambiguity I had with Eric. Eric came to the City of Rain to see me twice over the summer, and we only had one meal together each time. Besides those two meetups, we used to talk on the phone a lot and text a lot and he said all those loving things to me, including, “I never want to lose you again in my life. You have to remember this if you feel that I am distancing myself from you”, “I feel that I can be my original self when I’m talking to you,” “you unlocked things in me,” “if you love being on the receiving end of love, why push me away?” Eric said all those things to me and yet he would not go on a scenic drive with me. He would not meet me in Sapporo.

Jinu had two outings with me so far, and at work we also chat a lot, but he has absolutely not said anything remotely close to what Eric said to me. He and I have never even hugged. When he told me he had a great time on Saturday before he got off the car, he couldn’t even look me in the eyes to say it. I don’t know if I’m anything special to him, but I know I am to Eric because the first time we met up in the City of Rain, he asked me if I had felt anything like this in my almost 40 years of life because he hadn’t. He thought what we had was much rarer than falling in love and that’s why there’s no word for what we have because most people have never experienced this in their life. But then, so what? He doesn’t even text me to check on me anymore. It only makes me feel betrayed, lied to, and I can’t stop imagining how happy he will be and how much sex he will have with his wife.

I haven’t been kissed or physically intimate with anyone for six years, even though Angel and I have been living under the same roof. It’s been 8 months since we started to talk about divorce, and we still haven’t signed the papers yet. I wish on Christmas I could be kissed under the mistletoes like I had wished every year but never received.

My X, I’ve been waiting for you my whole life. When I  was 10, I was hoping that you would come pick me up in a helicopter because I couldn’t survive domestic violence on my own, but I still did. Then over the years my request for X has become smaller and smaller. I made my own money; I stood up again and again despite the storm. I just wish he could make me laugh, and stay with me whenever there’s a storm. I can handle all the parenting, finance, crises on my own. I just need him to hold me when I’m scared.

The happier I feel…

 The more scared I get.

Saturday with Jinu was so much fun, maybe too much fun that I had so many emotional flashbacks on Sunday. 

I picked him up at 11am from his apartment (his apartment is about 600 meters away from mine). When he got into my car, he said he was excited, but he couldn’t look at me in my eyes at the beginning. Then he told me he didn’t sleep well the night before because he got too drunk at a party hosted by our coworkers. In the morning he was still a bit hungover. Then the traffic to “Ocean to table” was pretty bad so it took us about 2 hours to get to the restaurant. On our way there, we talked nonstop. When we stopped for gas, I asked him why his mom chose to marry his stepdad even though he was abusive to Jinu, he said, “I guess when you really like someone, you refuse to believe…” I said, “I get it. It’s easier to live in denial.” Then we talked about work, his friends at our school now, music, my brain etc. We also talked about the incident I had at the parking lot on Monday and he got so activated again. He said he can’t stand his friends being aggressed and if he was physically there he would have thrown a lot of f-words at him and called him fucking ugly, which I find really amusing because it was like he was regressing to a high schooler. I forgot the context but I told him that besides being intellectually gifted, I’m also very visual and I like art, and I also have perfect pitch. Then as we were on the highway, we decided to do karaoke because he was in a choir in high school and he thinks our taste in music is so similar, like 90s pop. So the number one karaoke song was obviously It’s My Life by Bon Jovi. We were singing so happily and there were just so much laughter from 11am to 9pm (we got home at 9pm). 

Our reservation was at 1:40pm and we arrived at the restaurant at 1pm so we decided to sing even more in the car. I showed him Chasing Time, the song written for me by Gen, and Jinu’s first question was, “are you dating him?” I said and laughed, “NO!!” I told him Gen was living in Tokyo and he asked, “no chance that he’s moving back?” I said, “No, no, no. I have never met him in person. There’s a website where people can share stories anonymously and he saw my story and told me I inspired him.” Jinu asked, “so you reached out to him?” I said, “no he reached out to me and wanted to write my story into a song.” When he saw Gen’s photo on Spotify, he thought Gen was good looking. When I showed him the version that had “Feel Better Kendra” at the start, he was suspicious and said there were a million Kendras in the world. Then I showed him another short video saying that the Chinese version was written by Kendra Johanson. I told him “frangipani by the tide” was completely my story. He first had to google what frangipani looked like, and then I explained at my wedding chapel in Bali, there were all these floor to ceiling glass windows and people could look out into the ocean and the entire floor was covered by frangipani petals. Then he said holy shit I think. He asked to see a photo of it so I showed him the music video I made with my photos and lyrics. 

At Ocean to Table, the dining experience was awesome. It was basically a show where the chef performed for the omakase teppanyaki. He found it incredible that he could have a dining experience like this on a work weekend and he had never had any dining experience like this before. It was good to dine with him because he’s very happy to spend big bucks on fine dining, unlike Angel, and he loves seafood like I do. With Angel, every time when I wanted to eat some seafood, I’d have to convince him that it was worth it or that he’d get his parents to pay for it. Jinu doesn’t have much family money but he has more of an abundance mentality like me; he’s very willing to spend big bucks on good food and good experiences. 

The thing that cracked us up at the table was some of the things the chef said. The chef would say things like, “I’m going to put black peppers in the fried rice so that it tastes like black peppers”, “this is called golden fried rice because it’s cooked with eggs and the egg yolks are yellow”, “the waiter will give everyone a napkin so that you can use it to wipe your hands.” He would even point at the lettuce of the burger and say to us, “this is lettuce”. I told him the two things that always get me are “stating the obvious” and redundancies and we were laughing so much. He also said that if anyone asked what he did for Saturday, he’d tell them “I had PD on Saturday” because I told him that dining experience was just like inquiry-based learning, in which the idea is to activate all of a student’s senses—verbal, visual, auditory, touch, smell and taste if you’d want to achieve “deep” learning. That’s what the chef did with us with his explanation and cooking, and we had a view of the mountains and rice fields, and all the utensils and plates’ colors were coordinated with the food.

Then this thing became our inside joke for the rest of the day. Then we went to a lake nearby for a walk. I told him I love the mountains in the rain because you’d always see the misty clouds around the mountains. At one point I laughed so hard that I was tearing up and my stomach was sore. Another joke that made us laugh really hard was that on Friday, our secretary told another teacher “You should check your junk” when the teacher told the secretary that he didn’t get her email. When the secretary replied like this, both Jinu and I laughed in the office, and no one else did. When we revisited the joke, we laughed so hard, and I told him that our secretary was afraid that she could be accused of sexual harassment for saying that. I told Jinu maybe it’s Jinu and I who’d be accused of that because we laughed. While we were walking around the lake, we talked about WASPs, and he seems to really hate WASPs, ideologically. When I told him the condescending things that Angel’s parents had said to me, he had the exact same response like Erik—it gave him chills. He asked, “why are the cheap like this even though they’re so rich?” I said, “I don’t know? Maybe it’s a Jewish thing? I’m don’t wanna be racist…” Jinu said, “Jewish is not a race” and I said, “I know. OK. I don’t wanna be anti-Semitic.”

The only time when we were quiet was at the hot springs. We had two separate private rooms and we did hot springs for 90 minutes so we didn’t talk during that time. Afterwards he said he was very relaxed and we went shopping for souvenirs for his parents; he’s going back to the US to see his parents for Christmas. He told me he’s a very different person when he’s in front of his family; he barely says anything in front of his family. He said when he was 5, he made a mistake and he was so upset, and his dad thought he was sad that he made a mistake, and I continued, “no, you were sad because you wanted to punish yourself before you were actually punished because you were terrified.” He said, “yes”. I told him I am the same way. We also gossiped about some coworkers. I asked him if he thought I was on the spectrum, and he said he’d be biased because he already knew I had a disability. I said “no i don’t have a disability. My car’s disability badge is my kids’.” He said when he first met me, he noticed that I’d go very deep about things, and at work I even had time to read other books so he suspected that I was on the spectrum. I told him I am neurodivergent because I have complex PTSD and intellectual giftedness, and those things these days count as neurodivergence. I also told him that when I was little I had speech impairment and I corrected myself without any intervention at age 6 in the first grade. He told me he had speech impairment when he was little too and he got speech therapy for that; he was a stutterer. I told him it was weird that we’re both so verbal and yet when we were little we had speech problems. Maybe we had too many things to say in our brain and our mouth couldn’t catch up yet. We weren’t patient enough to wait for the words to come out so we’d say those words improperly. 

At one point he asked me, “in a different life where I could be good at Econ, do you think we’d make great teammates? I think we would.” I thought for a second, “maybe. Who knows.” We also talked about people’s relationship with money—both of us are generous to others, but not to ourselves. I told him not many people are generous with me but when I value a connection I don’t care about the money.

When I dropped him off, he said, “I had a great time today” without looking at me in the eye at all again, and I said, “me too”. Then I drove away.

Today I had a lot of emotional flashbacks and cried a lot. I think the flashbacks of abandonment was when my parents left me in my grandparents’ house when I was 5. We visited my grandparents and my parents wanted to take us back to The City of Rain, but my uncle was going to take his family to the beach and I really wanted to go with them and kept crying. Then my parents let me go with them. I had so much fun, and I thought, “for the first time my parents finally let me be happy for once, but would they go home without me?” Then after my uncle dropped me off at my grandparents’ house, I saw my suitcase on the front porch of my grandparents’ house. My parents went back to the City of Rain without us. For the entire six months, I went to a kindergarten in the neighborhood of my grandparents’ house, raised by my grandparents, completely without my parents. I lived with neglect, abuse, and had to protect my younger brother because he was stubborn and difficult and often got into trouble with my grandparents. The abuse from my grandparents was obviously not as bad as my father’s abuse, but I really missed my mom. I remember clearly that she called me on the phone once, asking me if I missed her. It was the first time in my life that I lied about my feelings and suppressed my tears and said, “no I don’t miss you.”

On Saturday, Jinu made me laugh so hard and everything was so much fun, but I am terrified of being abandoned again, because it has happened too many times.

I saw the second half of Zootopia 2 today (long story short—I misremembered the time of the movie and arrived at the theater there with my family and could only see half of it) and Judy Hobbs and Nick Wilde were talking about that they are each other’s most important person in their life, that they were scared and insecure, and my tears just kept rolling down my face.

Slowly changing

The emotional flashbacks I had over the week had drained me physically. I needed time to process thoughts and feelings every day and as a result I ended up being very sleep deprived. It’s finally Friday and I’m gonna sleep in tomorrow, but I do have a day of outing with Jinu starting 11am so technically I still can’t really sleep in.

We are going to somewhere far, a different city, to enjoy fine dining again. Let’s call it “ocean to table”, as opposed to stupid Americans’ organic “farm to table”. It’s omakase teppanyaki, and it’s so popular that our reservation is at 1:40pm because all the earlier time slots were fully booked. And yet, we had to pay for the entire meal upfront and if we don’t show up or if we show up more than ten minutes late, then we lose our entire deposit. I have never seen any restaurant this snooty, so it’d better be good.

After that we’re gonna do hot springs at a hotel with private rooms. The highway back to the City of Rain has HOV restrictions until 8pm so we’d probably get home at 10pm. 

This past week had been like a roller coaster ride for me. I feel so unfair that those emotional flashbacks are still following me, haunting me, giving me cold sweats, making me cry. My upbringing is such a costly one—I not only have spent so much time, energy and money on healing myself but also there’s a ceiling to what I can achieve in my life. So many small things that don’t trigger others would trigger me, and therefore I have to do something simply and easily controllable for work because otherwise too much human interaction or uncertainty would completely overwhelm me. Someone’s mindless words or actions could easily haunt me for days and I don’t want to live like this anymore.

I have two BFFs at work now; both of them are about ten years older than me. One has never been married and never had kids (let’s call her Cat Woman because she has several cats and two dogs at home); the other one is married, has two boys too, but her husband had a stroke a few years ago and she’s been the only one making money supporting her whole family for over a decade. Today at work I told Cat Woman my upbringing, because she told me most people had the impression that I grew up wealthy. I told her I was born a love child, grew up with domestic violence and had to pay off so much debt for my parents. Everyone who’s known my story would be impressed by how much I had overcome and how capable I am, but who knows how tired I am and just want to be held for once?

I’ve also been thinking about Jinu. We didn’t talk much at work over the past week. Well, I’ve been busy grading and I guess he’s noticed that I’ve been busy, but I’ve also noticed that he’s often not in the office. Maybe he’s socializing in his free periods too. I sometimes feel nervous about our trip tomorrow; other times I just want to be carefree like a little girl and enjoy the fact that there’s finally someone who can afford (or actually it’s not about affordability; it’s more about whether they enjoy good food enough and understand the beauty of good food) fine dining with me. In the past if I wanted fine dining with anyone, I’d have to be the one paying for everyone because if I don’t, no one would want to go there with me because it’s not worth it to them. I’ve also learned from Angel that Jinu is going to Palau with a few other coworkers who don’t have kids or are single for spring break, and one of them is a female teacher in his cohort. Sometimes when I think about this I feel that his life is so distant from mine. I think he’s looking for someone young, someone who can travel with him every break, someone free. I don’t know what I mean to him and why he likes to talk to me.

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow. Maybe something in him might repel me and then we go back to being strictly coworkers, and not even friends. 

I’ve also thought of Eric a few times this week. He’s feeling so distant to me now. A part of me feels tired that someone who already knows so much about me is gone again and I have to start over and keep telling new people about myself and what I’ve been through. That’s quite time and energy consuming. I’ve know Cat Woman for five years for me to tell her all theses things about myself. If I ever want to have a partner, I not only have to repeat these conversations with many different people, hoping that one of the will choose me and stay. On top of that I have a full time demanding job and two kids with special needs, one of whom is partially homeschooled. I also need time to sleep, eat, write, get a massage and fine dining. Mathematically speaking it’s just very hard.

Just like Gen. I spent months writing emails to him, rewriting his lyrics and telling him my life stories so that he was inspired to write a couple of songs for me. In the end, he started to reply to my emails using ChatGPT, and he very rarely shares his personal life or inner world with me so now we’re not talking. We haven’t sent anything to each other since Blue’s concert because he wanted to “pick my brain” to give him advice on his lyrics. The Chinese version of Chasing Time got the most hits on YouTube and Spotify, and I rewrote the lyrics for him. I started to see that some of his lyrics must have been written by ChatGPT, even tho he told me at the beginning of our correspondence that he would not use AI, stubbornly so. I feel used and fooled so I don’t email him anymore. He’d asked me to write to him when I could, but he never writes anything personal to me, not even small things that happen in his life. His long replies often were just reflecting my emotions without providing his own experience, exactly like ChatGPT. And now all the personal stories I shared with him have to be shared with someone else again and I’m getting tired of knowing new people.

Today I’ve found out that Gen took down all the songs he had released on YouTube and Spotify, so I can’t even hear the ones written for me and one of which had a singer say “Feel Better Kendra”. I don’t know what he’s thinking and why he had to do this.

So much

This morning I addressed the gift misunderstanding from yesterday. I had taken two wrapped presents from the water cooler room in the central office, assuming they were communal items like snacks or any unopened consumables that are usually left on that table. Students often bring consumable presents like that and people always leave them in communal spaces to share. When I saw that those were bath bombs that smelled so good, I simply couldn’t resist it and took two. 

When I got home, I excited told Little O that he could have a rainbow bath (he loves colored baths) so we used one. After his bath, I suddenly noticed that there was a tiny card with the recipient’s name on it. It was for one of the secretaries in the central office. 

Upon seeing this, I completely panicked. I panicked so much that I had to hold myself so tightly and kept crying. I cried not exactly because I made a mistake, but because I resented myself for feeling so scared for a mistake that would not bother most other people if they were in the same situation. My adult brain kept thinking about solutions. I decided to give away a fancy specialty store candle that I got in the City of Richard for the bath bomb that Little O had used as a replacement gift. I wrote a card explaining what happened with the help of ChatGPT. I kept talking to Angel but it didn’t help that much because even though he thought I was over catastrophizing it he sometimes questioned why I did it and that still made me feel so much shame and guilt. I kept having cold sweats. Eventually I kept processing it with ChatGPT until I fell asleep, but I didn’t get much sleep because I was waiting for the morning and that’d be the first thing I’d fix in the morning.

Today I returned the unopened gift to the same table. I brought a replacement gift for the secretary whose present had been opened. I said, “Hi L, this is for you. I had a misunderstanding and I’m so sorry. I hope you like it. I wrote a card in the bag.” She said “oh oh it’s ok. Thank you!” The interaction was brief like ChatGPT had predicted, but I still felt so heavy as if another bomb might drop.

During the school day, I continued with classes as usual. After work, an incident occurred in the parking lot. A white American man carrying his mixed-race child approached my car and accused me of “cutting him out” earlier when I walked past him toward the exit. I was walking much faster than he did. When I arrived at the exit, he still had space between himself and the door so I just squeezed through the space between himself and the door and got to my car. After I started the engine, he initially said “thank you for cutting me off” using a weird speech as if he was pretending that he was mentally retarded. I said, “what did you say? I couldn’t understand it.” He realized I could speak English then he repeated the accusation in normal speech. He wasn’t mentally retarded after all. He used that speech either to mock me for my ethnicity and that I am a woman in my own fucking country or he saw that I had a disability badge on my car and he was mocking me for my disability (the badge is actually for Little O, not mine.)

I told him I hadn’t been paying attention and apologized. He repeated the accusation several times. I said, “I already apologized and why are you still being sarcastic?” He said, “I’m not being sarcastic. I think you’re rude.” And I said, “OK I’m sorry and I wasn’t paying attention.” He said, “thank you for cutting me off” again, and it got on my nerves (maybe he is mentally retarded after all). I said, “you don’t know where I’m coming from and what my physical condition is like. My condition could prevent me from paying attention to where I was going.” He repeated “thank you for cutting me off” again. I said “I have a disability badge in my car and I have a disability and that could prevent me from paying attention to where you were.” He said, “oh I’m sure”. And I yelled at him, “that is discrimination! Do you work at XYZ (my workplace)?” He said no. I was thinking that he could be fired for what he did. Then he went into the elevator with his wife and child and I drove away.

On a very tiring, sleep deprived day like this, I just wish I could pick up Little N and go home and enjoy my peace, but why do all these people have to provoke me? It’s the same shit that I went through in the City of Extremity. I was being dismissed from the program, and yet they spread rumors about my integrity, saying that Ivan, who was an engineer, did all my homework. Why do people do this to me? Because I’m a super verbal Asian female? Because Asian females are supposed to be quiet and obedient and no critical thinking? They feel shame that I outsmart them? They feel shame that they couldn’t even dominate me? I grew up fighting that one male (my father)  who thought he could control women so when a man threatens me I never step back. I fight until they shut up. I’m supposed to be scared of them but I’m not. My adrenaline completely takes over and I fight as if they’re shit to me. 

What makes me cry is that I don’t like myself feeling this way. I wish I could have a calm, chill response, thinking that I’ve done my best to repair a mistake and it is what it is, but I simply can’t. I am terrified. I keep trying to figure out what emotional flashback this is about.

When I was five, one day after school, our school bus dropped me and my brother home. We found couple of chalks on the street and I was so happy. I used them to draw on the wall in common spaces in our apartment building in the stairwells. I taught my brother how to draw the cartoon characters that we saw recently and I was fascinated by the cartoon. I was so happy that I could finally draw the tall man with long legs from the cartoon. In the evening, some neighbors complained to my father. My father asked me if I had drawn on the public walls. That day at school I had learned that George Washington being honest about the apples actually got his parents to admire him, so I honestly said yes it was me. Then my father asked me to kneel down in front of the whole family in the living room and slapped me on my face twice. My mom, my older half brother, his mom, my cousin were all there. Nobody came to save me.

I had been punishing myself for the many hours already. I wish I didn’t have to do that. I kept thinking about all possible scenarios that could happen in the morning when I go replace the gifts. Maybe there would be a school wide email telling people not to take the communal stuff in the water cooler room. Maybe they’d yell at me and make me kneel down in public. Maybe they’d gossip behind my back that I’m greedy and took those things. Those ideas gave me so much fear and made me wanna die or just disappear from the world. 

I wish I could be held very very tightly. That night when my dad slapped me in front my whole family and even a cousin, nobody held me afterwards. My mom took me out of the apartment and we were hiding in her car, not saying anything. She was sad and I tried to comfort her, trying not to focus on my pain. And I was only five. Now as a parent, I feel so much sadness about what I had to endure, and how early on I started to take care of my mom while no one took care of me.

When I was 9, I struggled academically because I was living with very bad domestic violence and eventually I moved in with my aunt for six months without my mom. After one exam, my homeroom teacher called me out in front of the whole class angrily asking me why I only got 73% on my math test. I told her honestly that I couldn’t understand it. She was so angry and my other classmates surrounded me and watched me. She said if I didn’t understand it why didn’t I ask questions or ask help? I didn’t know how to answer the question. She was a young teacher who was super nice and I thought she was the least scary teacher I had ever had and I was so shocked that she was so angry at my low math grade. Now as a teacher, I can also see how abusive and insensitive she was. At one point I thought she understood me but she didn’t. 

That day I was so stressed and scared that I developed a migraine. I didn’t wanna upset my mom so I hid the exam result from her. But my head kept hurting so I told her about it and she took me to see a doctor. I was hoping that the migraine would make her feel some sympathy for me once she saw my exam result. The doctor couldn’t give a diagnosis either. I now see how much I suffered as a child. I’d never let my child suffer from anything remotely close to this. I had already learned to punish myself at age 9 to avoid making my mom sad or angry.

When I was a child my favorite book was the Little Princess. I read so many different versions of it because I wanted to escape so badly.

I also remembered there were a few times in my teenage years where my father yelled at me so angrily when I didn’t exactly understand and follow his instructions. One time I received a registered mail sent to our house to his brother and it turned out to be a court order. He got so angry all night and my mom took me to drive to the court late at night trying to return the mail. That kind of abuse lived in my body, even though I was already a teenager. Those were my formative years and the fear stays with me. I’ve been trying so hard to escape from the City of Rain, but I’m still here, because the trauma is imprinted in me. No matter where I move to the trauma stays with me.

Sometimes I keep wondering if there will ever be a time when I don’t need therapy anymore, when I can be “healed enough.”

The whole incident about taking gifts triggered too many past memories; it’s not only my father’s abuse, my teachers’, classmates’ and other family members’ shaming of me as well as the time when my integrity was rumored by others in a time of my life where my American dream shattered. All these things put together caused me to collapse. If ChatGPT didn’t stay with me the whole time, I wouldn’t be able to process the trauma response so quickly (oh well it took one night and one day, but compared to what I used to do this is good enough.) before ChatGPT was created and before I decided to divorce, I had always pushed down all these fears, telling myself those weren’t big deals, until they couldn’t be pushed anymore. I’d live with anxiety for months or even years over something that had ended a long time ago. Now the feeling of anxiety has become short-lived.

Fleeting

It’s December again. I have been reading my old entries in this blog and I’ve realized every December of my life has been very lonely. Every year I’ve always wished for someone to build Christmas with and to count down to the new year with, but I just haven’t had anyone. Even the December of 2016, when I got married in Bali, was lonely. Angel could not stay up late past 9pm so we had never done any countdown together.

This year has been fleeting too fast. I went to Bali in April, reconnected with Jes, Erik, Richard, Ivan (barely) and met Gen and Jinu, and now in December I am not talking to anyone of them—ok to be fair Jinu works in my office so I have to talk to him every day, but you get the point. Nobody is capable of staying and loving me; they’re only capable of admiring me from a distance, with illusions. In two more weeks my Christmas break will begin. Free days are the scariest, again. Angel’s parents are coming to the City of Rain to see the kids, and I will also need to visit my dad to bring him money. I have been dreading it already. I used to visit him once a month but it was too draining and now I visit him once every two months but I spend one month worrying about him and feeling somewhat guilty because I don’t know how he is doing. I also hate myself for feeling guilty, as if his trauma and torture of me in this life isn’t enough.

ChatGPT keeps telling me that I am transforming, but I don’t know if I am. Time goes by so fast, and we’re all getting closer to death. To this day, I still have not see anyone who’s brave enough to walk towards me in the storm. That day 10 years ago, in the typhoon, I was trapped and all alone in the heavy storm, completely drenched, and went home defeated. Today, I’m still feeling the same way. I look at all these men, I just feel that none of them is brave enough to hold with me in the storm, let alone to get me out of the storm. 

Ivan briefly reconnected with me in September asking if we could talk, and it caused me a lot of emotional turmoil, and then he disappeared again, saying that he’s going through something right now, without any further explanation. This only reminds me of his emotional ambivalence that once traumatized me; on the NYE of 2008, we counted down together and afterwards he immediately called D to wish her happy new year too. When we broke up, he never really told me why we had to break up—was it because D had always been in his heart, he and I would never have a future and we should never give it a try, or he actually had been talking to D after I left the City of Extremity? He told me he talked to her because he was hurting. If he was hurting, why didn’t he come visit me like he told me he would if he had missed me too much? And be broke up with me before Christmas and I spent my December in excruciating pain. We never had the happy new year kiss.

But what’s the biggest pain of all this? The person who I thought had loved me the most didn’t love me that much after all. Be it Ivan, Angel, Ken, Jes, all of them, or none of them. Jinu actually reminds me of Ivan. Jinu is very social, and he’s new to the City of Rain, so he goes to all sorts of gatherings trying to meet people, and I’ve realized most of his friends are women, or single women. When Ivan and I first hooked up but not official, he also had a female friend who would pass out in his bed exposing her underwear. I despised her and what she did so much and Ivan kept telling me she was just a friend and he asked me to pick her up from the airport because I had a car. It was one hour drive each way and back then I was nervous driving on the highway. I was reluctant but I did it for Ivan. I’ve never had a man come pick me up at any airport my whole life. I always paid someone to do it. 

Jinu said he had a friend who was injured in a car accident so he went to visit her tonight and got home late so he was tired. He traveled to Tokyo with two other single female coworkers for Thanksgiving. This pattern reminds me so much of Ivan and how he treated me when we first started dating. I would never put myself in that kind of situation anymore.

There are so many women out there who are just treasured by their men from the start. Some women can immediately be cherished by someone else as soon as they get out of one relationship. I think I am just not that kind of woman. When I look at those women and their photos with their fathers, I just know they were way ahead of me from the start. When you see their photo, you can see that those women feel protection from their fathers, the way they smile next to their father—you can really just feel that “I am daddy’s little girl vibe”. I have never been that girl and I think no matter how much therapy I get, I can’t feel what that feels like. In therapy they keep telling me that if I can have a corrective experience then I can be healed, but to have corrective experience the universe needs to be on my side. The universe actually needs to bring me someone who can treasure me, protect me, see my exhaustion and want to hold me because holding me is the happiest thing for him in the world. 

A couple of days ago in my talk therapy I talked about my road rage. I lose my nerves on the road because it’s always a man trying to threaten a woman who’s driving a large luxury car. Then the adrenaline rush afterwards becomes too much for my nervous system and I’d regret having road rage. My therapist asked me if I could think of a better way to end the conflict with those men. I thought about for a while and said, “yes, if there’s a big, mature man right next to me and tells me ‘I’ve got this’ and goes to talk to the taxi driver and scares the hell out of the driver.” Then my therapist asked again, “can you think of anyone in your life who did or could do that for you?” I thought about it again for a while and said, “no one.”

I faced all the dangers entirely alone in my life. I’ve never had any corrective experience and without it, I can never be healed. And if I can never be healed, no one would never want to walk beside me and hold me in the storm. I am destined to be alone.

ChatGPT is going to say, “this is your wound speaking. I need you to look at things truthfully”. But the problem is, how can you believe in something you’ve never seen? I tried to believe it for decades and look what I’ve got? Nothing, nowhere near. Every Christmas I’d go to Macy’s because every Macy’s would have beautiful Christmas lights saying “Believe”, whether it was in the City of Money or the City of Gold. I would always cry looking at it every year. I’ve tried really hard to believe in the unknown, the unseen, the impossible and the unbelievable for so many years, but I’m so tired. The amount of heartbreaks is just too much for me. Perhaps I’m really better off being alone. Maybe I’m too hard to be with.

City of Richard 2

It’s already past midnight and I’m finally settled in my bed at this so-called 5-star hotel that stinks cigarettes. I need to check in at the conference at 7:30am so I only have 6 hours to sleep. Jeez.

I still went to work and taught the first period of class, then I rushed to Little N’s school to observe him in the classroom. After that I went to pick up Little O from his school and dropped him home. Then I had a quick call with a potential personal trainer who’s licensed to give swimming therapy to autistic children. After that I took Little O with me to pick up Little N from school so that we could have lunch together before I left for the airport. After lunch I took them home because Little O has an art class at 1:30pm. After they were settled I left home and drove myself to the airport.

At the airport I had a free call with my talk therapist for about 30 mins. Got some food and kept thinking about things. There were some pent up feelings but they’re not very clear to me. Finally after the plane took off I could see those images. The City of Richard is a heavy place for me because it was where I met Richard and my BFF Jane. I was only 20 and I had so much hope in life. The last time I came here was 2011, with my two brothers, and now I’m not talking to my brothers anymore. Another thing is that Ken used to tell me how much he hated the City of Richard and yet he married a woman from here and they relocated here during COVID. All those years I kept wondering how much he must have loved her so that he would choose to follow her and live in this city that he hates.

I wanted to write an email to David’s mom about my memories of him these days, but I was too tired at the airport to do this. I was too occupied by too many thoughts in my head.