Childhood Traumas

I remember when I was three or four years old there was an evening when (what felt like) my entire extended family gathered in my house. I was too young to understand at the time but I knew that it was a big deal. All the elders, every aunt and uncle, and even grandmothers from both sides came to our little apartment in Tian Mu (little suburb outside Taipei) and gathered to do something.

I had no idea what that something was.

Thirty-some odd years later I asked my mother, "Remember that time when all the aunts and uncles came over to our house when I was little?"

She seemed confused at first and suddenly said, "You don't know?"

I said, "Know what?"

She said, "Your dad hit me"

And suddenly it clicked. I'm not sure if I forgot on purpose or didn't remember in the first place but I recall seeing my mom pull a kitchen knife on my dad. You know, that big one that you grab to protect yourself if there's an assailant.

According to my mother that was the only time that my father ever hit my mother.

But that wasn't the only time he was violent.

When I was 7 or 8 years old we had this neighbor, a heavy-set middle-aged man that would ring our doorbell in the middle of the night. It was rumored he had some screws loose and in retrospect it's very possible he had some mental illness. The next morning when my dad, my brother, and I were eating at a traditional Taiwanese breakfast place we saw him eating there too. When the neighbor went down the stairs to use the bathroom in the basement of the restaurant my father got up and waited for him at the top of the stairs. I don't remember if there was an exchange of words (I'm pretty sure there was), but as our neighbor was coming up, my father kicked him down that flight of stairs to send a message to stop ringing our doorbell in the middle of the night.

That was my dad's version of conflict resoulution. Strike first. Like Cobra Kai.

My father had a flash temper. From hitting random taxis with his umbrella (the taxi got too close to my mother and me) to knocking down all the KFC (we'd just bought) onto the floor with a single swipe of his arm (across the table), I am pretty sure I was constantly afraid of my father's flash temper.

I say "pretty sure" because I don't remember anymore.

But I know for a fact I was afraid of him. I'm just not sure if I was on pins and needles all the time.

I do remember that he'd get so mad at me and I'd be so afraid of him that my vision would change and my dad would look like he was pulsating through my eyes. Kind of like a Super Saiyagen but more like a weird tunnel vision where the thing I'm focusing on looks really far away and the whole scene pulsates. I'm pretty sure there's a medical term for this if there are any doctors in the house.

I remember when I was 5 or 6 and couldn't speak a lick of English in Kindergarten when we moved to Los Angeles. On our car ride to school, my dad discovered I couldn't say the word "hippopotamus" correctly and out of anger he made me repeat it over and over again until we arrived.

I remember when I was 7 or 8 when he discovered that the way I wrote the number 2 looked like the number 3 (where both numbers had a little loop tail). He was furious. He made me write an entire page of 2s and 3s without loops and made sure that there were completely discernible from one another.

I remember when I was 9 and he realized I stole a little handheld game from some friends at school and he smashed it with the circular end of an open metal pylon in our yard to punish me and send me a message.

And yet if you ask me, I'd say I had a (relatively) happy childhood. My father didn't physically beat me. I was never molested. I am sure a lot of people had it much worse.

Yes, but when you rationalize your traumas you aren't able to truly reconcile them and see them for what they really are... childhood traumas.

My father terrorized me. So much so that I internalized his voice in my head and amplified it 10x. Why? So I could innoculate myself from his verbal abuse. By the time I was 13 I had recreated a voice in my head that was much so meaner, so much harsher, and so much more extreme... I made it so that there was nothing my father could say to me that I didn't already say to myself and much worse. I retrospect it was an act of self-defense. I beat myself up more and hurt myself first so my dad couldn't hurt me anymore.

Case in point, I was 21 years old and my dad and I were playig tennis. I was having a bad day and couldn't get the ball over the net. When I did get it over the net, it went out of bounds... by a lot. I was super frustrated. I first started cussing myself out. My favorites are dumbass, dumbshit, fucking idiot, fucking asshole, retard, shithead... and any combination thereof. As our session went on, I became angrier and angrier, even slamming the racket on the ground on several occasions. By the end of the session I lost my shit. I repeatedly slammed the racket on the ground and broke the frame into pieces, rendering it useless.

The whole time my dad didn't say a word. He just looked at me in disdain and probably with concern.

I didn't realize what I was doing at the time. I was too young. But in retrospect it made perfect sense because it worked! I won. Not the tennis game but I won by preventing my dad from hurting me. I was so hard on myself and so angry at myself that I preempted my dad from saying anything to hurt me. To this day, I'm not sure if he knows what he observed that day on the tennis court. But that was me executing my many years of practice of beating myself up so he couldn't hurt me anymore. I mean what could he possibly say that I didn't already say to myself at 10x? I protected myself from him so I won.

Or so I thought... because in actuality I lost myself. My self-esteem. My self-confidence. My self-worth. My self-compassion. My self-love.

Ironically my dad was my hero. I never thought of him that way conciously but I always wanted his approval. I just wanted him to give me his validation. Over time he got much better at saying nice things to me. And it's possible that maybe it wasn't that he didn't say nice things to me but rather I was a sensitive kid and reacted poorly to the negativity. I don't know because it's hard for me to remember that far back. All I knew is that in my mind I could never win his approval.

When I was working, he'd always say "Why are you wasting your time working at someone else's company when you could be building out the family business?"

Even when I had a succcessful photography platform, he never once asked me about my work. He much preferred instead to talk about what he was doing and the money he was making.

It made me realize that my failure in his eyes wasn't a reflection of my failure as a person as much as it was that I could never make him proud of me because I wasn't doing what he wanted me to be doing. I could have made a million dollars a year and he would have still shitted all over it because I wasn't working in the family business and cheerleading for *him*. Because that's what he wanted. And that's what I wasn't giving him.

So it was damn near impossible to get his approval or his validation because I was an independent-thinking and somewhat rebellious kid. I still am that. But it meant that I could not get the validation and approval from the one person that mattered to me the most.

And that has scarred me.

But I'm starting to make sense of these traumas. Just as I realized it wasn't my failures that made him resent me but rather my inability to satiate his expectations of me, so too did I start to realize that my feelings of insecurity and worthlessness come from the way I was, and still am, treating myself. At 44 years-old I'm still beating myself up for stupid shit like dribbling food onto my shirt, for dropping things on the ground, for getting sick (he'd berate us for being physically weak). I'm still beating myself up so my dad can't hurt me... even though he stopped verbally abusing me years ago. And that self talk is exactly what makes me feel worthless. It's exactly what makes me feel insecure about the value I bring to the table, whether it's the skills that I possess or the relationships that I'm in. I'm still all fucked up because I haven't changed the way I treat myself.

Ironically my relationship with my dad has evolved. He's grown to become much kinder, calmer, patient, and positive. And yet my relationship with myself has stayed the same. I'm still the worthless piece of shit (oh right, I forgot about "piece of shit") that I have always been. I'm never good enough. I'll never be enough. It's why no one loves me.

And it breaks my heart. I'm in tears right now because of this realization.

But it's not the first time I've had this realization. It's probably the nth iteration. I've always known that I have to be nicer to myself. I've just never known why. But today I know why. I have to be nicer to myself because my self talk is the exact reason why I lack self-esteem, self-confidence, self-worth, self-compassion and self-love. But it seems like a circular argument. I beat myself because I feel worthless. I feel worthless because I beat myself up. Which is the chicken and which is the egg? How do you break the cycle? If it were so easy I'm sure I would have already done it. Or maybe because I needed this self-defense to protect myself from my father. Or maybe I prefer to think of myself in this way because changing my mindset is even harder than beating myself up. Or is it simply a pattern of behavior that is a habit?

Because all of this stuff feeds into my addictions... And that is a tangled mess all in and of itself.

Because I get addicted. Not to the typical things like whoring, gambling, and drugs but rather to everything I enjoy doing like photography, surfing, and music. Worse of all I get addicted to people. Even friends and social interactions. Because they make me feel good about myself and that makes me want more. It’s the validation I crave. That hole in my heart is what I’m trying to fill and the validation from others is how I’m trying to fill it.

But like sand through a sieve it never fills up. It quickly empties and I’m again left feeling worthless and unfulfilled.

And over time I’m starting to realize that I can’t fill that emptiness with the short-term validation of others or through my hobbies and interests. That validation is never enough. I either forget what they said or that they even said it. But just as I can not fulfill my father’s expectations of who I’m supposed to be, so too can I not fill my emptiness with the love of others. Because the problem does not rest with others not loving me but rather the fact that I don’t first and foremost love myself.

So all the praise I get on Instagram for my pictures, the applause for my music, the attention from girls, they don’t complete me. Because the problem does not lie outside of myself but rather inside myself. So all the money, the fame, the career success, and the plastic surgery won’t fill the emptiness that I have created inside my own heart.

It’s so easy to think we are not enough that it becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy. Everywhere I look I see someone better-looking, more successful, more famous, better appreciated, more validated... Because if I were enough, then I would (fill in the blank). For me that blank is that others would see me and validate me and in turn I would feel complete. Or it is that I would not be rejected by people and I would instead be loved and appreciated.

But how will anyone love you when you don’t first love yourself. How will you truly love anyone else when you don’t first love yourself. Those two questions alone are an essay in and of itself.

So unfortunately this is not a typical educational LUCIMA blog post. It also has nothing to do with photography. But they are confessions and a willingness to dig into my heart and mind to find the answers to lifelong questions that have plagued me. I'm sick and I want to be better.