A Reason for Being

It’s hard being myself a lot of times. It’s easier these days but that was not always the case.
We all have our ups and downs in life, the small moments of boundless happiness mixed with
the horrors of our personal failures intertwined by the ever ad nauseum of mindless
nothingness entails the common human condition. But I guess what keeps the world spinning
for most of us is the idea that we can have faith in ourselves and our own personal ability to
see things through in search of a better tomorrow. However, as no human being is an island
in of itself, we require something not only from ourselves, but also from others. We require
acceptance; an approval of our selves through the eyes of others which is the determinant of
our very own existence. Acceptance is needed for us to know that we are not alone in this
world, that we have others to look out for us, through the good and the bad, and if the fates be
kind through the very, very ugly moments of our lives. For a long time, I craved acceptance
from others, a yearning which would leave me crippled at time for some sort of human
contact, any human contact. But to feel me, you must first know me. So hence my dear
reader, I take you through the vestiges of my past so that you may have a taste of what I
wanted and still yearn for. This, is my story.

As darkness is but the absence of light, abandonment is but the absence of acceptance. For
what it’s worth, I don’t blame my feelings of abandonment on my parents. They raised in me
a manner which I can only describe as being “functional”. They fed me, clothed me, gave me
a roof above my head and listened to my irrational ramblings to some degree of tolerance.
However, even from an early age I noticed that when it came to parents’ actions, there always
seemed to be a separation of duty and caring. It felt as if they addressed my needs not
because they cared for me but rather they wouldn’t want the situation to escalate any further.
The intangibility of it was what hurt the most. You couldn’t complain to any one because
there never felt like anything to complain about. I guess I could chalk it down to being an
Asian thing, wherein the idea of love comes from what your parents do for you rather than
how they do it. It didn’t help my case either when my sister came along into this world. She
brought with her something that I felt I never truly got; a genuine sense of affection towards
her from my parents as well as my relatives. Like I said, it’s the intangibles that hurt; the
sight of seeing your mother scoop your sister into her arms and having a smile across her
face, as if it was something that she had wanted to do and not needed to do. What about my
smile? Where was that when I was the only one. Why wouldn’t I be the object of your care
and not just your attention. Suffice to say, my relationship with my sister never got off to a
great start and has been strained to this day. I would pick fights with her constantly, so I
could get the attention of my parents. I never said I was the good girl in this story; just a girl
looking for acceptance, and if that meant creating some chaos, then so be it.

Things didn’t exactly pick up when school started for me. Due to my genes, I was taller then
the other girls in my class and owing to my shy nature, I wouldn’t be the first one to
necessarily start a conversation with someone. This was a symptom which I had picked up
from home. By the time school had started, the idea of rejection frightened me, and I thought
up a brilliant mode of action; you couldn’t be rejected if you never put yourself out in the first
place. It was the hedgehog’s dilemma in real life, being played to perfection by yours truly. I
couldn’t be hurt, yet I could never be loved as well. Even when you think you have come up
with a fool proof plan that keeps you in your own world of misery, you can never discount
the ingenuity of human cruelty. One day, one of the girls from a very popular group in my
class decided to approach me and offered a place within the group. It was confusing yet
escalating, intimidating yet inviting at the same time. A chance to be part of a group, to be
recognized, to be accepted. As it turned out, I learned a new life lesson in the following
months. That you can be a part of the group but never feel like you were in the group in the
first place. It was a mutual action of isolation. I would never be aware of any group activities
which would be going on because I would never be informed about them. Even when I would
be with them, they would never talk with me, nor ask for my opinions. Simply put, I was an
afterthought. Suddenly, the same feelings of abandonment which I would feel when I was at
home began to haunt me at school, and in one of those moments it hit me; I can never be
accepted because I am not worthy of acceptance.

It’s a horrifying feeling when your sense of self worth crumbles around you. You feel your
existence as a burden to the whole of creation. Nothing matters to you because you don’t
matter to yourself. Nobody cares for you because you are simply something that was never
meant to be cared for. It’s a clarity of this thought which brings forward the lethargy of being
and the inception of self-loathing and self-harm. My education progressed along smoothly.
Hell, I was a high achiever. But it never meant anything because I felt they were
achievements I could never share with anyone. My mother left this world when I was in my
teens. Cancer is a horrible thing. Yet, somehow in those times I felt closer to her then ever
before. She would talk with me more often, the mundanities which I had longed for were
more accessible to me now. However, my own sense of being wasn’t in the right place to
accept it. I felt her passing away, yet I pained more for what I could have had than what I had
lost and the guilt of that thought drove me further into my sense of isolation and self-loathing.

I would imagine that it’s always a curious point in your life when you begin to see yourself as
a sexual being. That you begin to feel desires which you never had before and my, do they
bring with them a lot of questions and a decadent desire for exploration. However, with that
sense of exploration is the underpinning thought that you consider your body as something to
be gained pleasure from and pleasure to be given to. As it turns out, you add self-loathing
into that mix and suddenly it becomes a way to deride yourself even further. Self-play paves
way for self-abuse and humiliation. So, in my early teens when I first discovered that I could
tap into my own realms of pleasure; I realized another thing that I could feel, shame. With
each act, my sense of shame would just increase. But it didn’t matter. It was nice to feel
something. Even shame. It was a confirmation of my existence. Asian societies typically have
a broad generalization of what they consider as shameful activities and I would assume that
the whole spectrum of sex could easily fill up that definition. I found shame as a reason for
social connection. The internet suddenly became a valuable commodity.

It seems like a weird thing to say, but I have made more friends in online sex chat rooms than
in real life. Once you get past the social taboo of being on a chat room as well as your mutual
orgasm with an online partner, you realize that it’s just another person on the other side of a
computer wanting to share their own stories with you, their own ups and downs and dreams
and ambitions. I felt more connected to them than real people because they were real to me;
they listened to me, they shared with me and most of all, they cared about what I said.
Suddenly, my feeling of abandonment began to chip away from the layers of my psyche.
However, they did not do much in changing the way I felt about myself and I realized that I
wanted more than what I had. And so, the online dating encounters started, and I very quickly
realized that a woman’s body was desired more than a woman’s being. You would look much
more appealing in men’s eyes if you were willing to put out and because I didn’t value my
body, I gave it away for free. It was a gamble born out of desperation. That there would be
someone out there who would want me for me and not just what I could give. It was a
mistake which I did several times and it began to conform to my own sense of self-loathing.
Within those meetings I would give myself to the other person, to do with what he desired.
Shame just became another part of the orgasm; and those men were highly skilled at making
one feel shameful. You would be an object to them, to be observed lecherously and groped
and played with feverishly and when done with, to be ignored and left behind.
Now, my dear reader, I feel as if at this point you are wondering “When does it get better?”
This was supposed to be a story about overcoming personal disasters. Here is a thing about
personal disasters, they never truly go away. They leave behind scars, the mementos of your
failure and shortcomings. Some never truly close at all. My case is the latter. My moment of
realization never came as a bang but as a whisper. I was out on a holiday with my father and
sister on a beach side area. During the night when both of them were sleeping, I walked to the
balcony of our hotel room and began to look at the surroundings. My aunt had created an
interest in astrology within me and the stars always held a fascination for me, probably
because I wondered whether I belonged to this Earth in the first place. I don’t know what it
was, the stillness of the night, the sounds of crashing waves by the sea side but I was
suddenly hit with a moment of euphoric clarity. I began to see myself in everything, in every
grain of sand on the beach, in every leaf on every tree, in the waves of ocean I felt
interconnected with everything and for a single moment I felt it; Joy. It was a beautiful
feeling, a heightened state of self-worth which tore through the layers of my own personal
demons. I realized that to be accepted, one must accept themselves for who they are, and that
to truly be loved, one must first learn to love themselves.

After this revelation, I quit the one-night stands, those meaningless moments of physical
gratification without any inner substance. I had realized that if I did not love myself, I could
never find someone who truly loved me. And that is where I have been lucky enough that I
have found someone who does love me for who I am and who cares enough to not only look
at me as a human being, but as someone with whom love can be shared. I hope, dear reader
that you may find some semblance of hope from reading the snippets of my life. It has been a
cathartic experience, writing this very personal essay. As I said earlier, I don’t know whether
my scars will fully heal or not. But I can say this, that I am at a much better point in my life
and that a smile on my face is never far away and I hope that it will never be far away from
your face as well.