There’s no clever opening line. No wry quip or apologies for the absence of my voice for the past seven months. Just a plain and simple truth: I’ve been depressed.
Since my last personal essay, life became a shitstorm in all of its major aspects: Work, Love and Family. It started innocuously enough with feeling like there’s never enough hours in a day to check off the endless list of tasks and deadlines. “Oh but Rin, isn’t that Adulting?
As much as I love what I do, there was barely a moment to let anything sink in as I tick off my list before moving onto the Next Action Item To Execute™. On Sundays, as soon as I saw the clock hit five and the skies begin to darken, the little bubble of anxiety would rise from the pit of my stomach and get stuck at my throat for the rest of the evening. Nausea would follow and then his good friend, Migraine. Screw the Monday Blues, it was the Sunday Scaries that got to me.
So in a bid to remind myself that there’s more to life than work, I dipped my toes into the world of online dating again with Bumble. My good friends were sharing how they met their other halves on the app so I figured there might be something there as opposed to my usual route of Tinder. However instead of the refreshing escape I’d imagined, I ended up with an experience that resembled more of a sneaky push into the deep end of the pool and waving frantically for someone to save me. After months of going cold turkey on dating apps, I forgot how brutal on the heart and ego it can be.
There were the promising chats that fizzled out with barely an attempt to meet in real life. Then the ghost(er)s that pulled jumpscares on my phone screen when they return “just to say hi….”. You’ll assume I’ll be a pro at the dating game by now but I was still desperately hanging on for dear life on the swinging pendulum of ‘Does he like me? Does he like me not? Do I like him? Do I like him not (forhisrealselfthatIknownothingaboutbuttheimaginedHimIproject)?’
In the midst of all that drama though, finally a glimmer of hope came in the form of a cute boy who was smart, funny, a great cook, amazing in bed, AND can quote every line of Zoolander in two languages. Ooff, I thought, have I finally met My Next Boyfriend? Unfortunately for reasons that he was very honest and upfront about which I’m grateful for, we didn’t make it to the third date. While it still took me weeks of wondering why not and bargaining with the Universe to please let him change his mind, at least this time around I made peace with it and told myself, “Ok, let’s just let it go. If it’s meant to be, it’ll work out in the end.”
So while I was quietly licking my wounds, the Universe then decided that I REALLY needed to take the hint that my current version of life as-is was destined to be a was-once. Hence it blasted a 1000 lumens spotlight onto a shadowy aspect of my life that I don’t like to venture to – my relationship with my father.
At risk of sounding like a total cliché, you can trace every single belief I have about love and worth to daddy issues. I am the eldest daughter of an emotionally avoidant narcissist who married four women in secret at the same time. Well, five if you count him being a divorcee prior to marrying my mum.
Ah, but that’s my telenovela to share for another time. Until then, this is the episode where my father had a double stroke at home under my watch.
Nothing truly prepares you for waking up to 10 miscalls and the sight of your aged parent helplessly sprawled on the floor in soiled pants. Let alone when the said parent is kicking and cussing at you to go to Hell as you scream back at him to stop fucking moving around while you’re still on the phone with the paramedics.
He was spitting at me with such venom while I was trying to get his pulse because I wouldn’t stop to help him get his wallet before the ambulance came. He’d wanted to pass me his ATM card so I could make another deposit to his wife whom he’d literally transfered money to three days prior when he had his other stroke. Yes, his other stroke. That stroke happened on Thursday but he was sent back home on Saturday when they couldn’t find anything wrong with him at the hospital.
Yet there we were the next morning – with my father lying on the floor and hitting me like a toddler throwing a tantrum, “You go to Hell! I didn’t fall down the bed! I just slid down and can’t get up! There’s nothing wrong with me! It’s not a stroke! You go to hell!”
They say that strokes can cause a personality change and to take any bizarre behaviour with a left cheek turned. I don’t doubt that as he’d never been physically violent to anyone in all these years. But I have seen him turned against my late mother in a similar tantrum before when things don’t go his way while she was desperately still trying to make their marriage work. And it was at that precise moment, trying to keep him still while he was wriggling around, that all my pent-up rage and grief repressed across the decades exploded at the man who abandoned his family, yet still expected a throne on a pedestal. I roared back in his face, “What the fuck is wrong with you?? Who do you think you are??!!”
As the last guttural scream left my lips, I walked away before I physically snapped and regret it. I knew that was it. I was done.
My father survived the stroke and is now under the care of his other wife in Batam (cliche much?). Am I proud of what I did? Well I wish that wasn’t the last moment I will remember him by. Was it necessary? Yes, ultimately it was self-preservation in the heat of the moment. He’s a grown man who made his choices and priorities clear a long time ago. We have been estranged ever since that day and that’s all I will divulge at this moment. That’s also codeword for “You can read about it when I finish my tell-all memoir…”
So yeah, guess who had two simultaneous mental meltdowns within a span of a month? That’s right, this girl over here and her house of cards. The shitstorm thus morphed into a level 8 shit typhoon.
If one is new to the world of Tarot, you’ll assume that the card that’ll bring the most anxiety if it turns up in a reading would be Death. Au contraire mon Cherie, the Tower card is your man to dread.
The Tower is a Major Arcana card that signifies a total wipe-out of a key aspect in your life because it was built on a faulty foundation. It is depicted by the rather alarming scene of a stone tower collapsing in a fire as those stuck inside try to desperately escape. The reason why the cards come tumbling down in a Tower moment is that it signifies that you’re completed with this phase of life and ready for the next lesson. Be it love, work, or family, the Universe isn’t going to give you any more gentle hints or tiny nudges. It’s rapping you on your knuckles with a ruler and smacking the back of your head because it wants you to reclaim and rebuild your life the way you truly deserve.
These days the shitstorm has mellowed down to just a passing drizzle here and there. If I’m being honest, I’m not totally out of the woods yet. There are days where I feel like my usual self again, joking and caring about the things I used to before the big D. (Awww honey, you made a pun…)
Then there are days where I’ll wake up and it feels like lead in my chest and throat. Everything feels so heavy and I’m exhausted and oh so tired and why me and I really wanna hide and wouldn’t it be nice to just run away to another country and wipe the slate clean and start all over again?
Alas, my bank account disagrees. And of course my friends and family who’s been steadfastly holding up the umbrella over me while the storm passes through wouldn’t like that either. They’ve been my saving grace through these seven months of grief, rage and disappointments. They’re the ones who held the fort when I broke down, and held my hand as we sat in silence. Looking back, that’s all I needed really. To rest and be seen. A place where I don’t have to be strong and independent for a while. A place in time where it’s safe to retreat, cry and wonder what’s the lesson I can glean from this.
Not having firm boundaries? Check.
Not having an identity outside of work? Check.
Still waiting for Prince Charming to come and save me? Check.
Guilt from growing up Daddy’s Girl and ostracising my own mother? Check.
Resentment at a patriarchal society where I’m still told my father is a good man because he provided when we were younger and I should take care of him? Check.
Shame at myself for still not having my shit together compared to my peers?
Abso-fucking-lutely Check.
Yet within all the possibilities of ‘moral-of-the-story’ moments I’ve had while I was a reclusive hermit, do you know which epiphany really struck me in this storm?
That I am still afraid to ask for help.
My friends and family stepped in when they saw me drowning but I had hesitated for so long to reach out. I was afraid of rejection or worse, coming across as a whining ingrate for a life that was still good 80% of the time. Yet the day I had a session where my therapist gently said to me, “It must be very difficult. I am very sorry you’re going through this,” I bawled like a baby.
That simple kind act of acknowledgement broke me. I’d been so terrified of being seen as a weak snowflake to my loved ones in the back of my mind that I barely even noticed the fear when I kept things to myself. With so much going on, how can I be preaching self-love and empowerment when I felt so ashamed of being a complete mess? I took a pause on the blog then and took life one day at a time.
It may seem pretty normal now, especially on social media, to have mental health under the spotlight and seen as an essential part of self-love. Yet especially as Asians, we grew up with stoicism as a virtue. “Don’t cry, suck it up, deal with it.” That seemed to be a mantra across majority of Asian households, no matter the race or religion. Coupled with being raised Muslim and as a daughter, I’ve been endlessly lectured about how patience and sacrifice are the ultimate symbols of love.
In this reality, patience is really another name for ‘tolerate’ and sacrifice means the unjust you face because your mother kept quiet and dealt it with, because her mother kept still and sucked it up, and her mother’s mother said nothing because it’s her duty and she had no choice.
These are the stories we inherit in our bones and despite our best attempts to heal, they peek out once in a while to remind you that growth sometimes requires wiping the slate clean and starting again.
But that’s the beauty of it as the storm tapers down and the muck gets washed away. You’re never ever really starting from scratch again. You’re starting with the wisdom of all those falls, failures and follies. You have the battle scars to prove you’ve put the work in and while life may not have turned out how you’d imagined it, you’ll know how to react when the terrain looks familiar and your inner guide takes over. And it’s not all doom and gloom, you’re also rebuilding that tower of yours up again with all the triumphs, joy and lessons gleaned from the dragons you’ve conquered. You’ve got this. Whatever form ‘this’ takes.
There’s a line that is often used in a tarot reading, “take what resonates and discard the rest away”. Obviously it’s a liability disclaimer to avoid taking these predictions seriously. Yet I find it oddly comforting as life advice too.
I wished I took better care of myself last year so it wouldn’t take a breakdown to wake me up. But without that shitstorm, it wouldn’t have hit me how much of my identity was wrapped up in the external things that can be taken away. What’s left behind when you’re not your job, a daughter, a sister, a lover or a friend? Well, it’s just you and that inner little you.
I used to roll my eyes at the platitude – ‘healing your inner child.’ My inner Rin can be quite a petty bitch who wants revenge on those who doubted and abandoned her. But if I hugged her a little tighter and let her anger recede, what’s remains is actually fear. The fear of being left behind for something she did, or being unseen for what she didn’t. I think most of us do. And that’s ok – because little Rin only knew what she did back then and she tried her best with what she had. For that fact alone, I love who she was and I’ll love who she’ll grow to be anyway. Even if it takes a few crumbling towers, shit storms and total wipe-outs for that lesson to sink in.