Childhood in Metaphors

Content warning: the following content discusses subject matters containing self-harm, suicide, and emotional abuse.

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin…Everything that is ugly or unfortunate is called beautiful, and no one knows why. You can’t get out of childhood, and it clings to you like a bad smell.

— Tove Ditlevsen

Childhood as Amature Psychology Best-seller

You always thought that memories are named trauma because they effectively destroy even though and because they are dormant, seeping silently through the barren ground of your existence. Tangled in confusion, you do still sense that all these explosions of emotions must be acquired somewhere — when you collapse into violent sobs while your eyes trace the gliding raindrop on the bus window, when you scream at your best friend on the phone for a kitchen glass you broke, when you bitterly dismiss everyone who expresses affection towards you, and when you realize your inability to grieve without wrapping your vulnerability in aggression.

Your therapist always jokes about how your story is a textbook example of the diathesis-stress model, a painful childhood rejuvenated by on-time existential angst, typical yet nuanced enough for analysis.

According to research done at the University of Manchester, people with borderline personality disorder are 13 times more likely to report experiences of childhood adversities. You used to rely on empiricism and data to help make sense of your experiences, but they don’t make meaning. Wounds of the past conceal themselves in their present-day metamorphosed manifestations, often vivid only in the form of actions, thus to a greater extent subject to misunderstanding — impulsive decision-making, quick anger, emotions out of proportion and control, inwardly-turned spite and violence. It must be easier to stop when you’re your own abuser, they said.

Childhood as De-somatization

Somatization, when emotions are expressed and perhaps experienced through physical symptoms, is especially salient within Chinese populations, and there has been no ethnographic explanation in the present literature. However, no matter how frequently your family members disclose their bodily discomfort when it comes to you, you are always just crying wolf. Everything was the result of freeing the restless and relentless monster in your head.

They told you that when you were 6 years old, you wanted to “go to the washroom” every twenty minutes for months. They tried going to every hospital in town and some Shaman master in Wutai mountain cured you with Wu — Chinese witchcraft. Your illnesses and any exhibition of pain were since chained to a danger of alienation and punishment. You are constantly called a liar for feeling the only thing that feels real in your life.

The lumps on your skin are lying. Your constant nausea is lying. The pink eye is lying. And your chronic headache is lying. They attribute your physical pains to psychological causes, and all your immense mental agony communicates only weakness and disrespect.

This entire journal entry is probably a lie, too.

Childhood as Pandora’s Box

“I did come back. I was there. I was home late last night, and I left for work early”. Your mom sounded barely awake, repeatedly rephrasing and re-embellishing her lies for years until you stopped caring to break it to her that you knew all along.

They kept you up in Rapunzel’s tower, cut your hair, and grew poisonous secrets elsewhere in order to protect you until your innocence finally turned into unbearable ignorance.

Divorce documents, a baby trolley hidden in the closet in your dad’s house, pregnancy tests, your mom’s brother who doesn’t call your grandma mom… The list gets even more reckless because it was designed to be impalpable to you — you didn’t know what the word divorce means until your twelfth birthday, even though you’ve never seen your parents together your entire life.

Childhood as Living Room with Empty Walls

“Grandpa and grandma are fighting”, you retrieved back into a corner and phoned your mom.

“You start a fight with them again? You need to see how other children treat their grandparents. They brought you up and you showed no gratitude.”

As spacious as it already was, the living room felt especially boundless back then, and with invisible walls, you easily mistook it for your entire world. Apparently only you saw the apartment crumbling, close to collapsing. Only you saw the bloody red mold in between the delicate tiles on the living room wall. You tried to reach out for another human being, choking on smoke, grasping onto nothing but the ashes in the air, but with every step, you took you slipped further away.

It was until recently that you realized that it shouldn’t be raining porcelain in there, that your pain of suffocating in war fire with a mouth stuffed with crab meat and money doesn’t deserve the persistent dismissal and scorn.

Last summer you tried to jump out of the seventeenth-floor window because of the empty walls. It would probably make no difference, you thought. You were never able to distinguish standing in that living room from falling, nor to separate being alive from not living, anyway.

A heartless, ungrateful beast.

“I drove myself crazy trying to figure out what made you like this. Did that teacher in middle school touch you without consent? Did your dad beat you? Please, see, I am begging you like I’m your daughter, just tell me what I’ve done wrong. Just tell me.”

You weren’t doing or saying anything, but you knew that only if your grief and misery were terminated can your mom stop hurting. You’ve always believed her, and you explained to her that it would be ridiculous if your obsession with death was a mere gesture of revenge. You never understood why imagining yourself drowning brought you comfort, and why you couldn’t extinguish your resentment towards her no matter how hard you tried to love.

Also, she didn’t know that you have not yet mastered how to be loved.

Childhood as Clogged Feeding Tube

Your therapist once said in a session: “when you are starved for too long and suddenly given an enormous amount of food, it would be nothing but a burden on your stomach. It pains you to satiate your hunger.”

Childhood as Love Allergy

“I really enjoyed reading your essay. You are so talented.”

You shook your head with all your might as if the motion itself could temporarily alleviate the debilitating stir of chaos within you. It would be easy if you intended to turn down the validation. You knew you wanted to suckle on it so badly to replenish your barren self-respect, yet no matter how you injected love into your veins to stop yourself from dying, your immune system started to fight it.

Your stifling self-loathe has always been reflexive to you but offensive to others. And sometimes you forget that it pains others, too.

You threw up in the washroom the night she said she loved you after you fought. You said I love you back and left her, throwing out olive branches like hair on your shower wall. It was not that love was foreign to you. It was just that the things that keep you in this life make you want to die. You were so terrified. Everything in this life terrifies you — the smell of fried rice, waking up to the afternoon sun, people in summer-coloured garments crossing streets hand-in-hand, the hiring ads on the lamp posts…Sights of life immobilized you for your lack of it, so you fantasized about it with all of its benevolence stripped away, allowing your fatal allergic reaction to happiness and love to be left untreated.

“Hey mom, my professor really likes my essay so I’m working on it for submission.”

“Oh, that could then replace your lack of work experience for grad school applications, I guess?”

“Yeah, right.”

Childhood as Nobody’s Masterpiece

“You see the problem now? You wouldn’t feel content even if you get a Nobel Prize.”

Childhood as Newton’s First Law

So where is that unbalancing force that throws the object out of its movement towards ruin in constant velocity?

You flew overseas, scrounging for understanding in a new continent, in another language. Only then do your confusions unravel. When the external punishment for your sadness and pain is absent, you inherit the role of your own abuser. Inertia became your torture chamber.

You bruised yourself to the rhythm of the banging on your childhood bedroom door, ripping open your skin like how your grandpa’s shattered wine bottle pierced through the wooden living room floor, sentencing yourself to death for secret after secret you had no clue about but was accused of being guilty of.

In a spoken word poem that you’ve been trying to summon up the courage to perform, you wrote:

the victim of pavlovian conditioning learned how

to burn. Even when the scars have faded

from skin and consciousness, it is the urge

of burning that arrested her.

You counted the times that the word “trapped” appeared in all seven of your journals and thought that if they were to be published, the editor wouldn’t be able to find enough synonyms to replace them.

It must be easier to stop if you are your own abuser, they said.

Childhood as T&T Parking Lot

The day before your twenty-first birthday you smashed your back onto the rough cement wall at the back of the T&T parking lot, watching Chinese families come and go with bags of groceries that reminded them of home - pickled radishes, rice cakes, red bean buns. Their unfathomable laughter made you cry, thinking of how you failed to imagine your future to be sheltered in a similar pool of joy and security, or if you ever wanted that. You didn’t know that one can be so incredibly unsure of where tomorrow lies, and more terrifyingly, were yesterday has taken place.

“A Chinese grocery store in Richmond must be the saddest place in this world for you.”

A place in which the entire purpose of its existence is to make people belong is doing the opposite for you. If you wished that home was a completely strange place that you’d never been, then at least you could treat it with curiosity.

You yelled at your mom on the phone. You never wanted to hurt her. Perhaps your mom is right – you shouldn’t be unhappy on your birthday.

You wished to be run over. You’d better feel love because she had tried every single way to make it love.

You wished to be run over. Then you would indeed lose something you’ve never had.

Childhood as Moth in a Fire

Your grief is like a humming refrigerator, you never know how long it’s been there buzzing until silence interrupts. Then when you start to pay attention to it, the absence of noise unsettles you.

“Why do you keep going back to your mom if every endeavour ends in a bloodbath?”