Feel

I've never felt this tired in my entire life. I'm physically and mentally tired. My soul is tired. I'm so tired having to move my fingers all over the keyboard to type out this post is a struggle. My dishes are not done; the laundry's in the machine and i have no idea what to do with them; the unpacked boxes remained unpacked; Al is begging for something and I haven't the energy to find out what it is; there are so many calls to make that I just can't be bothered anymore to make any of them. I should be updating my resume and sending them out but I have neither the motivation nor the inspiration to start work on it.

I'm officially the laziest and most useless person I see around me.

I've lived 35 years - 20 of which I lived exactly as I was taught to live by my dad, who was my role model, my idol, and the pillar of my strength and my life. It never occurred to me to question the rationale behind the way I was raised. I was brought up sheltered, overly protected, and isolated from the rest of the world. I was raised like a boy, and one that was expected to be without blemish. I hardly wore a dress, never really behaved like a typical girl, and never showed any signs of meekness. The only authority I submitted to was my dad's. It didn't bother him a bit that I was almost every teacher's nightmare. After all, I was bright, I was bold like a boy, and most importantly, I was not beyond his control.

I was a good kid by today's standard -

I smiled and greeted my parents every morning;

I smiled and greeted every adult that I met that was a friend or an acquaintance of my parents';

I never failed to express my gratitude for any services rendered to me;

I always asked politely for people to get out of my way;

I always apologized and smiled ever so sweetly to boys I beat up after bashing them up and after their parents complained to my dad about my bullying;

I never hit a girl (not really, I've slapped a pair of twins - which made them TWO girls - at one go);

I never whined;

up til I was 20 and married, I never reasoned with my dad over what he dictated that i should and should not do - suffice to say that how I felt about those ridiculously strict rules imposed on me was not of material concern to him - and on occasions that I so much as asked "why", I would get in every instance an angry "because I said so" response;

I did my workout, practiced on my electric organ, swam, ate, drank and slept at the time designated by my dad;

I kept no friends and therefore never really hogged the phone like the other normal teenage girls and guys did (the first person I spent longer than half an hour on the phone with was my baby sister's classmate, and the reason I bothered to talk to him in the first place was because he had loads of second hand books for sale and I loved books...anyways, we really clicked and hence chatted frequently, mostly about books and about his hunky brother who was incidentally a star athlete in my school...had I known that all my phone calls were actually tapped, I would never have talked about his cute brother that I was then insanely infatuated with!!);

I was chauffeured everywhere, and I do mean EVEYWHERE, by my dad so it was impossible for me to get into trouble anywhere else other than within my school compound;

my dad hardly had to see the principal more than once a month for her to complain to him about what a rogue I had been;

I never hit my maids;

I never tortured any living things - their deaths were swift (whilst I would supervise the blowing up of toads with fire starters, my baby brother, on the other hand, was covertly conducting vicious experiments like freezing grasshoppers to death, in jello...);

even in frustration over being confined, I always came out to greet and hug my dad after turning my room into a war zone (anger, or, to be precise, the free expression of anger, was something which was totally accepted in my family, as long as the expression bit was done in the privacy of our own rooms);

I never burdened my dad with meaningless grievances or annoyed him with the cliched "you don't/ won't understand" retort, because I was fully aware that I had not earned the right to be heard and understood;

I knew as a 4-year-old to not bother my parents with how bad I felt about anything - except about death - because having or showing emotions other than positive ones is a taboo;

as a 4-year-old (that was as far back as I could remember), I had mastered the art of giving a sunshine smile upon request, even when I was upset and feeling like beating the daylight out of the very person I had been asked to smile to (the only thing i couldn't smile to was the camera);

I never bullied anyone smaller (in size AND in age - I might be young but I had my principles)than me - why bother when my beating up of anyone male and bigger was fully condoned;

I knew what I wanted, asked in grammatically correct English (to say that bad English is frowned upon is a gross understatement) for whatever I wanted, then waited for my request to be processed, and whenever the outcome was a "no", I always had the option of throwing a fit behind the doors of my own room, and I would be spared the cane so long as by dinner time, I was all smiles again - negotiations and appeals were never part of the process, not that it mattered to me since they never existed in my dictionary and it was only a week ago that I realized it was not unreasonable, and definitely not a crime, for a 16-year-old to negotiate and reason with her parents;

and the list goes on...

But why does it even matter to me what kind of a kid I had been? I'm 35 turning 36 for crying out loud!

It matters because after having lived for 20 years in accordance to the rules (some adhered to and 90% broken, nevertheless, my thoughts and actions were all in some ways reactions to them, and they are what I have been using to analyze everything and everyone around me)dictated by my dad, I didn't know how to live after he died suddenly and tragically shortly before my 21st birthday. He had left me no instruction on how I should think and behave as an adult, so I continued to see the world and live my life based on the same set of rules set by him. The result of not having developed my own rules as I was growing up was a mishmash of moderate success in certain aspects of my adult life and colossal failures in the aspect that matters the most to any human being.

I realized, having come so far in life, that I can't feel what I'm supposed to feel, let alone express them. I can't feel me, and I can't feel others. I can analyze, and I excel at engineering and evoking desired responses from people (I read a lot, love psychology, sociology and anthropology and has a degree in human ecology - what I know about people I've really learned them from books, not from having experienced the full range of human emotions myself or by observing and understanding others) but I generally and genuinely can neither FEEL their feelings nor appreciate their right to feel the way they have chosen to feel. I just KNOW for a fact that THAT’s what someone’s feeling, and my inclination is to immediately – instead of acknowledging and giving it support – attempt to establish if there's anything constructive I should and can do about it.

I realize today that I've got to be the most self-centred person I know - I had expected everyone around me to see the world as I see it... And I would never have come to the realization had it not been for D's devastatingly heartbreaking "you're a 16-year-old trapped in a 35-year-old body" comment and the 5 hours I spent with my therapist.

When my therapist gave me 2 assignments - the first was to recall incidents from my childhood and describe my feelings about them; the second, to start identifying my feelings and EXPRESSING them when interacting with D - I didn't show up for two consecutive sessions because I couldn't do my homework. I thought about them everyday and dreaded the very thought of them by the third day. The only feeling I ever knew and understood and expressed without reservation was rage, only to be told that anger or rage is not even technically a feeling but merely a manifestation of a set of deep-rooted feelings. Kill me, please, someone, anyone.

But I did it. I went back to see AiMei with my completed assignment. And at the end of the session, I was told that I need to start giving myself and others the PERMISSION to FEEL.

I'm stumped again. I can't help but adore AiMei for her ability to keep giving me things I would actually bother pondering on, exactly what I need to distract myself from all the things that I shouldn't be thinking about in my current state anyway.

But I'm exhausted. I don't know if I have the stamina to reorganize my very messy life and I don't know if I can go on pretending that I can totally live with all the hurt I've caused others. For the longest time, I've convinced myself that as long as I'm willing to bear the consequences of my own actions, I am free to do whatever I decide to do. Never once had it occurred to me that my actions could cause people around me irreparable emotional damages. Because until recently, I've never felt - my heart was an uncharted territory - it was virtually impossible to break me because I always recovered from pain in matter of days. So I thought. And I expected the general population to be like me. I couldn't have been more serious whenever I said that "I have no choice but to get out of depression - I have a short attention span".

But now I can feel. I can feel a little of what I should be feeling, and a hell lot of what others have felt. Justice is being served at last. I'm being punished. The feelings of my victims are so overwhelming I feel like I'm lugging 200 tonnes of weight with me everywhere I go.

A small price to pay for self-knowledge, I suppose.