Growing Up

I watched Laggies, and it reminded me about how easy it is to go adrift in the passage of life.

At 30, I'm not happy with my life. I'm not proud of my job, I'm not serious enough about it. I don't have a relationship. I have friends who don't really know me. I have an awesome family but I'm difficult to understand. My skin is getting bad, my hair stringy, I don't bother with make-up. My self-esteem hasn't improved. Instead of better, I'm just getting worse.

I've got some serious growing up to do.

I'm also being quite the parasite of the family. My siblings are all set up in their respective families so I'm usually putting up at either of their places - tagging on to their dinners, clean toilets, snacks and so on. I feel guilty a lot, but I hate cleaning toilets. So basically, I'm a lazy POS. The most I do is the dishes, vacuum the floor or help out with the laundry. I think they've noticed it.

You may think I can just start changing and help out with the cooking and more cleaning - but old habits are stubborn as hell. I think it is time to move the hell out, but I do not want to move out within this tiny island of a country too. Ah I'm a difficult person, ain't I? It's just plain dumb to pay $650 for a little room with a shared toilet when I'm 30 minutes away from home.

And then there's the stupid dysthymia to think about. I caught a break today, otherwise I can't even write, let alone manage the housework. I imagined if I lived alone, I could at least roll around in my own dirt and wallow in self-pity without feeling guilty. I could also cook lousy dinners and clean up at my own pace.

What do I do then? If I was a friend listening to myself, I'll want to strangle myself. I have an excuse to cover every complaint. But, don't we all? Because change is difficult. Inertia is strong. Stability is comfortable.

But there always come a time when staying the same becomes dangerous. If I don't start changing, I'm just going to start giving up on life unconsciously, because the more you stall the less time you're left with and it becomes a sick sort of excuse to forget about really living. In fact, I think I have already started to give up... I have already started to think this is it, and I'll probably accept it. Can I imagine continuing like that? I can, but it'll be a life wasted.

At times I wonder if this is all I deserved, and the answer would be yes if I keep dodging life.
I need to live. And at 30 I still don't know how. Perhaps no one was supposed to know how, that's why we call it "growing up". I think we're supposed to be brave and move towards our own direction and learn along the way.

So, what's my direction?

I actually know it. I'm paralyzed by fear because I know where I want to head towards and it freaks me out. Oh it frightens me so badly.

I guess no one said growing up was easy.

My Father's Daughter - a meaningful song by Jewel

This song took a couple of listen to grow on me, then it took root completely. I think Jewel's latest album "Picking up the Pieces" is amazing. It is intimate and beautiful, and it's the combination of story telling and music. There are a lot of great songs in that album, but this song makes my voice catch when I try to sing it, because it reminds me of my roots.

Here's the link to the song on her youtube channel:

Jewel's My Father's Daughter

The chorus goes like that,

"I am my father's daughter

He has his mother's eyes

I am the product of her sacrifice

I am the accumulation of the dreams of generations

And their stories live in me like holy water

I am my father's daughter"

The first verse talked about her grandma stepping on American land for the first time, to be married the man she had met for the first time. The first sacrifice. Can you imagine how that must have been like? It must have been scary as hell, especially with the harsh Alaskan climate.

Yet so many of our ancestors did the same thing. This song reminded me of my maternal grandparents, who migrated to Malaysia when China was undergoing the revolution. Grandma traveled with only one change of clothes, that's all she had, to join a population that did not speak her language.

There in Malaysia, they survived the horrifying World War II and build a business of their own, while raising a son and 7 beautiful daughters. They had a rubber plantation and the daughters worked hard to keep the plantation going.

One day, one of the hardworking daughters met a man from a neighboring country, who was on his own journey seeking opportunities. They got married, and the daughter went away to Singapore to live with her husband, away from everyone she knows. 

Mom worked hard here. Dad was having a rough patch, so she had to bring up the kids with little help from him while doing embroidery work. Thankfully, she is very resourceful and made a decent living outsourcing extra work to her friends. I know she had a rough time though, being away from family with little support from her husband. Although Dad eventually picked himself up and life became easier, she still nagged about this 30 years later. 

That's how I ended up in Singapore. I would probably be more resourceful had I grown up in Malaysia, as my cousins are, but the economy is better here and the education system here uses English as the main language. This allowed me to be effectively bilingual, and I'll forever be thankful for it. So thanks mom for taking the leap. 

These events had mostly become a distant memory lying in a little drawer at the back of my mind, but the song brought them back again - the stories of my grandparents and parents. 

It was also the song that made me realize what my grandparents and parents went through are sacrifices. They worked hard to build the foundation so we can have a better start, I am more grateful and appreciative of this than ever before. I remember now that I have strong and deep roots, and the stories do indeed live in me. It's our duty to live our lives fully, so we become worthy stars in the family's constellation.

So, thank you Jewel, for your wonderful story told in a lovely melody. I never thought a song can make me a better person, but this one did.

Closeted

Have you ever missed a place you're not sure exist?

I have, and I still do, ever so often.

This sentiment is known as sehnsucht, part of its definition on wikipedia goes like that:

"It is sometimes felt as a longing for a far-off country, but not a particular earthly land which we can identify. Furthermore there is something in the experience which suggests this far-off country is very familiar and indicative of what we might otherwise call "home"... ...But the majority of people who experience it are not conscious of what or who the longed for object may be, and the longing is of such profundity and intensity that the subject may immediately be only aware of the emotion itself and not cognizant that there is a something longed for."

I find it fascinating that I'm not the only one who felt this way. It had seemed like such an absurd emotion, and no one else around me felt this way.

Though I said "a place you're not sure exist", for me it has always been the United States of America. I often wonder if this phenomena is a result of me being exposed to American music and novels growing up, but it clearly started off as an unconscious preference.

I'm born and raised in a tiny island country called Singapore in the middle of Southeast Asia, which is on the other side of the world from America. I grew up amidst tall flats and tiny man-made parks and fields. My family is very Chinese - is there even such a description? They're Mandarin-speaking and generally prefer Chinese entertainment.

As a child, I got my music from the radio and books from the library. It never crossed my mind to check what the country of origin of the songs or novels was. I only know the language is English, yet I gravitated naturally towards American works. I only realized this bias when I got older.

The songs and the movie scenes that send such a severe pang of yearning in me, they're mostly set in America. As a Singaporean, there's no reason for me to feel for lonely freeways surrounded by wilderness; suburban houses with that beautiful glow in the sky at sunset; or that country tune and nostalgic yellow sunshine, but I do. It almost makes me embarrassed to admit it, because I feel like an impostor, being in love with something that was never in my life.

So it created in me a conflict. I love my family, but something huge is missing from my life. As I write this post, I feel a pang, much like homesickness. Should I pursue this unreasonable homesickness, I might learn that home is where I'm born and bred in, not a place born out of imagination. Or I might learn that there's something more to the concept of home. Until then, I'm left to wonder.