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.