I've figured it out.
It took me 11 years to find it, but I've figured out something significant. Since the start of my little personal journey, I've decided inadvertently to live in the vague. I became obsessed with not tying myself down with any sort of concrete commitment. Some soul-searching, finding a way to better myself, even becoming healthier. What did that even mean? Those phrases that I told myself were my missions that had no real end or beginning to them. Had I decided to lose a specific amount of weight or do a particular number of pushups instead of the arbitrary become healthier I had chosen to do then maybe my life would have become better.
My point is that my life from the very beginning had no direction. I blame that 100% on my parents. It was in their third-world understanding that school -- specifically school in the first-world -- would provide ample intelligence in order to guide me through this new and unfamiliar country that we journeyed together through. They needed to only nudge with the minimal amount of parenting required, and I'd be on my way to success. They were wrong.
I don't blame them, it was a new country, new people, new environment; How could they guide me through the pitfalls of life if they too were ignorant of them? Maybe because of this, they decided to neglect my harrowing personal development in lieu of just having more children? How can I really know? Can you count how many hugs and kisses BOTH of your parents have given you with one hand? I can.
What gave me some comfort was the fact that the millennials -- my generation -- have a stereotype that they were not loved enough as children; It's why I became such a clingy person.
Nevertheless, I found love by matching my crazy with another crazy. Nobody told me that true love was just looking for someone whose faults you can tolerate and someone who can handle your faults; that last part requires communication because, in the beginning, it's tough to believe that someone can actually love that side of you. That ugly side that you've been told by media, people, and maybe even your loved ones, is ugly -- very very ugly.
It gets hard pretending, it gets so hard that that effort you've mustered up at the beginning of your relationship about who you want to portray yourself as eventually crumbles and all that's left is the person you actually are. It's much easier, and it's also much nicer to show your true self as soon as possible to the person who you want to love you.
My set of crazy is clinginess.
I clung to things very easily, even bad things. That's why the thing that I love the most is the thing that will kill me; my dependence on food.
When anyone first meets me, the first thing that comes to their mind is horribly obese. It's something I've battled my entire life. My first real memory, the memory that triggered my life, was one of incredible sadness. I was crying. I was young, less than 4, and I held in my hand an ice cream cone as I was being carried by my dad who was leaving to go to Canada. I loved him, he took care of me and gave me love, and now he was now leaving me. Then the next set of memories were of my mom coming back from what I think was her school. She would leave for long periods of time and leave me with her mother with her many sisters and brothers; they became my surrogate parents. Abandonment was my first real memory.
An intense recollection was being told in the morning that instead of the school bus, my mom would pick me up from school. I spent the entire day bubbling with excitement, and when we all were gathered and herded into the school bus I was too scared to tell them that my mom was going to pick me up; so I snuck out before it left. But she was late. I gripped the cold metal links of that chain link front fence of the school hard as Kevin and I bawled our eyes out. I don't know why he was, all I knew was that I felt that I was being abandoned again. But lo and behold she was just late, and in her hands, she held a big pile of steamy tasty Jollibee fast food. I had launched my extreme despair into extreme jubilation, the two extremes exploded into my first taste of catharsis. As I swam in that beautiful, emotional soup, I munched on the Jollibee hotdog with that heavenly cheese sauce that I never have and will probably never taste again, I sealed within my psyche a very scary curse.
It also didn't help that my mom was mean -- like really mean. To the point where being yelled at and told how I was worthless was part of the morning routine. It was so normal that as a treat for my birthday, mom would try extra hard to be nicer to me that morning. Even to this day, it's still the best present I have ever received. I did so well in school that day that my teachers even noticed that I was actually smiling. "Wow, you look so happy. You must really love your birthday!'
I don't even want to start on what it's like being the only Philippino in an entire school. I fit in nowhere, and I was treated with either pity or contempt, genuine racism is passed down prejudice from parent to child and hand-delivered from classmate to classmate. It was never direct. Quiet whispers I was never privy to; groups and giggling that was stifled when I came near. Something bad brewed beneath my young self and it coalesced in my teenage years. It was hatred.
So that's it.
I've figured out that I am a bad person fuelled by the still strong cinders of a bright blue blaze of hatred. I was tiptoeing around it in my 20s, blissfully unaware as to why it was so hard to make friends. Turns out that people get turned off by my general toxic hating personality. I'd like to think that I had the general gist of it a couple years ago and am already a couple steps towards extinguishing it if it isn't already. Maybe, hopefully, all I'm doing now is waiting for the heat to dissipate.
My 20s were spent figuring out that I have all these nails lodged inside me and I grew so accustomed to the hate and sorrow that I didn't even feel the pain anymore. If I live through this pandemic then maybe I can keep yanking them out; even if they scar me for life at least they will begin to heal.