Analysis 2: The Trauma

To continue along the path of self-analysis that I started with on the last blog, I’ve decided to take a look at one of the most defining moments of my life.  Originally, this blog was supposed to be about all the things that have caused me some sort of trauma, negative things that still stick out in my mind.  The only problem with that is while there are a lot of little ones, they are so little and so insignificant, I feel it would do a disservice to mention them in the same breath as the one moment in my life that I replay over and over again.  I’ve gone over this situation with therapists and friends before, but I don’t remember every just laying it out there like this, so I figured if I put it down, it might have some positive effect, or it may do nothing, but at least there’s something happening here.

The incident happened toward the end of 6th grade.  After so many years, I don’t even remember the exact date anymore, I just remember it being some time in May of 1993.  I was still 11 years old.  I’ve tried several times to just forget it, but over time, I’ve found it healthier to just confront it.  It wasn’t a particularly memorable day.  The weather wasn’t extra nice or bad, the day leading up to what happened wasn’t interesting in any way.  The things that I remember most are seeing my grandmother the morning of, and walking down the block and seeing the apartment I lived in during that time in full view… as a burnt out wreck.  There were fire trucks everywhere, police cars, soot covered people, and that smell of burnt everything in the air. 

Up until that point, I had been spending some time at a friends house, because it was a half day (if I remember correctly), and I didn’t head home until much later in the day because I was playing video games.  I attempted several times to call home, but kept getting a busy signal.  This was a time before call waiting was more or less included for free, so I thought that the phone might’ve been off the hook, as that had happened a few times before.  I thought nothing of it, so I wasn’t really too worried.  When I got home, and saw for myself what had happened, I honestly had no idea what to do.  I looked around for someone I knew, and that ended up being the father of one of my friends who happened to work at the hospital near where I lived.  He was standing outside, just sort of gaping at the building, and when I went up to him, I remember asking something along the lines of, “What happened?  Oh crap, did anyone get my games out?”

Yeah… that’s what occurred to me to ask at that moment, whether or not anyone had saved my video games.  My friend’s father just looked at me for a moment, and brought me over to my parents who were a little further down the block.  My dad was covered in soot, wearing shorts, and suddenly the day just seemed colder.  My mom pulled me aside and asked where I had been all this time, and when I told her, she actually seemed glad.  She had said she knew it was a half day, and thought I might have been home at the time the fire had started.  That’s the only time when it occurred to me, “Wait… no one was home right?  Where’s grandma?”  That’s when they told me that she had been caught in the fire, and that my dad had helped pull her out of the apartment through the window, the same window that not too long before had child safety bars put in, which would have made her escape that much more difficult. 

I was sent to stay with my friend while everyone figured out what the next step was.  I would later find out she was in the hospital with third degree burns over 80% of her body.  My parents told me they were hopeful at first, because the burns weren’t around her chest or too much on her head, so they thought maybe she could pull out of it.  They kept telling me that things would be alright.  I attempted to see her at the hospital once, but when I got to the front desk, they told me that I wasn’t allowed in because I was so young, and they were worried it might frighten me, and that I might cause a disturbance.  When I was told that, I was both a little upset and a little relieved.  From what my parents had told me, they said that I might not recognize her because of the burns, and the treatments she had been through.  So I sat in the car, waiting for about half an hour or so while my parents visited my grandmother. 

About 3 weeks or so after the fire, someone called my friend’s parents, and told them that my grandmother had died.  I remember I was eating a popsicle at the time, and I just sort of froze with it in my mouth.  I walked to the bedroom, sat down on the bed behind my friend as he was playing Street Fighter II on the Super Nintendo, and just said “My grandma’s dead…”  He looked at me for a second, a little sad, and then his mom came in the room and started talking to me about attending the funeral.  That’s basically when I lost it, saying how much I didn’t want to go.  I started thrashing around on the bed, crying, wailing, screaming at the top of my lungs that I didn’t want to go, that they couldn’t make me.  I was told it was my responsibility to go because I was her grandson through my father’s line, and it’s important because of Chinese tradition.  I wanted no part of it, I didn’t care, I just didn’t want to be there.

Eventually, my friend’s parents calmed me down, and I accepted that I had to be there.  The funeral was surreal in some ways.  I don’t remember much of it, because I more or less kept my head down, but what I remember most about it was the wailing of her friends.  It was such a tragic death, because she had only came to the US to visit us from Vietnam for a little while, and no one ever thought something like this was possible.  It scared me, and it saddened me, because of how terrible everyone sounded.  I could hear the heartbreak in their voices. 

After the funeral was over, I continued to live apart from my family for some time.  Until the end of 6th grade, which was about another month or so, I stayed with my friend in the Bronx.  During this time, my family was staying in a hotel (which coincided with my staying at my friend’s), then they eventually got put into a temporary shelter while they found a new place to live. At that point, the shelter where they put us in was somewhere in the South Bronx, and it was in a sketchy neighborhood (to put it politely) so my parents decided to send me down to my uncle’s, and my brother to a different aunt’s place.  I ended up moving in with my uncle down in Brooklyn, where I stayed with him, his wife, and their three kids.  I was the oldest out of all of them, by about 8 years, but I think I ended up just being a burden to them.  I remember feeling just so awkward down there, like I was only there because no one else would take me.  I think they tried their best, but they already had three kids, and I just ended up being another mouth to feed and another kid to watch, so I’m not sure how enthused they were about that.

Eventually, when school started up, I was moved back with my brother.  I was starting a nearby junior high, so it made sense for me to commute from there instead of Brooklyn.  Eventually, during that year, after moving out of my aunt’s to a temporary room across the street from the school, we finally got our new apartment on the upper west side.  This was before all of the current renovations, so it was still a bit sketchy, but nowhere near as bad as the place in the Bronx, and since it was on its way up, it turned out to be a great place to live. 

Now, those were the circumstances surrounding the fire and the death of my grandmother.  I think it took quite some time for all of the shock to settle in and really affect my brain.  Over time, I started blaming myself for her death.  Not too long before the fire, my grandmother had asked me whether or not I thought she should stay.  She had been there for a month or two, and was thinking about staying to help my parents watch us.  My mom had helped her settle in a bit, and got her some seamstress work, so she was contributing to the household, and seemed to genuinely enjoy spending time with her grandsons.  I liked her, so I told her yeah, it’d be nice if she stayed longer.  Because of that innocent statement, for the longest time, I felt as though I had contributed greatly to my grandmother’s death.  I felt that if I had instead said no, she would have left and never been caught in the fire, and she would never have had to die.  Looking at it from an adult’s point of view now, it seems ludicrous to think that I could have possibly thought it was my fault, but at that time, I could only think about what could have been.  I tried to push past it, tried to ignore that thought wiggling around in the back of my head, but I always felt some great guilt for it. 

As I got older, I went through some other things, which would eventually get me into therapy.  I may tell that story sometime, but for now, it was in therapy where a couple of realizations came to light.  You may have already realized what it might have been from reading an earlier passage.  During much of the time after the fire, I had very little contact with my actual family.  My therapist helped me to realize that for the longest time, I had felt abandoned by them, and that helped to explain the strange relationship that had come to form with my family for all the years after that.  I was really distant from them, and especially from my extended family for quite some time up to that point.  I never wanted to participate in anything, and I was routinely the only one who wasn’t at family gatherings.  Up until that point, it had never occurred to me why those things had happened the way they did.  Why was I apart from the rest of the family all that time?

Eventually, after some confrontations with family, and some explanations, I found out that it would have been harder on me at the time if I had stayed with them.  They were dealing with all of the post-fire paperwork and various bureaucratic things, and would not have had much time to watch after me.  There were some other things involved to, but since then, I’ve made my peace with everyone involved.  However, despite having dealt with the trauma, it left some indelible marks on my being.

Primarily, I am now deathly paranoid when I can’t reach someone immediately.  I always worry the worst has happened, and that I wasn’t there to somehow prevent it or to help.  Secondly, I hold the people who are important to me much closer than I think is normal, because I’m always afraid of losing them.  Third, I try my best to tell people how I really feel about them, because I never got the chance to tell my grandma how much I loved her, and to this day, I still regret not having that opportunity.  I want to make sure I never take anyone for granted and not let them know. 

There are some other things that are possibly related.  I’m pretty risk adverse, which while it may not be directly related, since her death wasn’t caused by some stupid risk, is still a matter of preventing something bad from happening if I can.  I’m also very blunt, which goes hand in hand with that whole “Don’t take people for granted thing” because I don’t want to miss the opportunity to say something that I feel needs to be said. 

To this day, that moment still defines much of who I am.  I feel as I’m more focused on what’s important because of it, but I still wish it had never happened.  I often wonder what my grandmother would have thought of me had she the chance to see me grow up.  I just hope she would be proud, and I hope she knows that even after all these years, I still miss her.

Analysis 1: All the Girls I’ve Loved Before

The recent entries about depression have gotten me to thinking about various aspects of my life and how they might be playing a part in this malaise.  Normally, this is all very introspective, but I’ve been finding that writing has been very cathartic, so I figured I’d think out loud on paper on the interwebs… as it were.  This set of blogs will be me going over parts of my life that have had an impact on the kind of person I am, which might help me to understand why I’ve been in such a funk lately.  This particular entry will be about the women who I have fallen in love with over the course of my life, and what I learned from each of them. 

I’ve only ever been in love four times in my life.  There have been a lot of crushes, a lot of interests, but only four women have been burned into my memory because of my feelings for them.  Not all of them loved me back, or even knew how I felt, but they all had a profound effect on the kind of person I’ve become, and there are aspects of my character that can be directly traced back to these women.  I don’t know if four is considered a lot or a little, or if that’s about average, but that’s the number that I have, and they all pop into my head from time to time, sometimes fondly, sometimes not.  I’m going to keep names out of here because I’d rather not embarrass anybody, but people who know me know who they are.

The first woman I ever fell in love with was my high school biology teacher.  Like I said, just because I was in love with them doesn’t mean they ever returned it or knew about it. However, she was the first woman I ever had strong feelings for.  Some may call it a schoolboy crush, and that’s fine to have that opinion, but I know how I felt.  As silly as it is to say, she was the first woman who ever made me really know that I liked women.  Not saying my sexuality was ever in doubt, but I was what some would call a late bloomer, and up until that point, I hadn’t really found any girls really all that attractive.  I thought there were some cute ones, and some pretty ones, but I would look at them like I would a pretty piece of art.  Nice to look at, but ultimately, just an appreciation of beauty, not something I was attracted to. 

With this teacher though, she showed me qualities in a woman that I found myself drawn towards.  It helped that I found her excessively attractive, and not only because I was in an all boys school and therefore surrounded by nothing but other guys.  However, that wasn’t what drew me too her.  She has this boundless energy, and this endless optimism.  She always had this smile on her face, which made her just light up, and I never missed an opportunity to see her and hope to catch that smile.  The thing that stuck out in my mind about her was that she was the first woman that I ever knew to utter the words, “I love you,” to me, although mind you it wasn’t in a romantic context.  Her words exactly were, “I love you, but you are the most pessimistic person I know.”  It was a throwaway sort of line, and now that I think back on it, she probably said some variation of that to a lot of other students, but at that moment, it was shocking to hear those words said to me, in any context.  It never occurred to me that I could be loved, as strange as that sounds, and it was just really heart warming to hear it. 

For some time after that, even after I graduated, I would stop by the school just to say hi and see her.  I eventually lost touch when she left the school, and I held her on a pedestal for quite some time afterwards.  I’ve learned some things since then that has brought my image of her back down to earth, but I still think of her fondly, and wish her the best.  I wish I had been able to keep in contact with her, because she really was one of the few bright spots in my otherwise gloomy high school experience, and I always wanted to thank her for that, but alas, life has deigned to remove her from my life fully.  (That was a lot more florid than I wanted to say it, but for some reason it fits… so I’ll leave it.)

Not too long after I graduated from high school, I met the second woman I would ever fall in love with.  With her, it was the first time any woman had ever shown any interest in me.  I don’t mean to say she was attracted to me, I just mean she actively sought me out to do things with.  Oddly, it wasn’t in college that I met her.  Instead, I had met her at a restaurant I frequented, and it was pure happenstance that we ever got to know each other.  I had spoken to her briefly in previous visits, but there was one time where, for reasons I don’t recall, we decided we would hang out.  It was completely random, because up until that point, I don’t think I had spoken more than a handful of words to her, but it just sort of happened, and I went with it.

What struck me the first time I spent time with her was how open and friendly she was.  It just seemed like the most natural thing in the world for us to be hanging out, even though I was honestly nervous as all hell that first time.  I had never spent any serious alone time with a girl before that, so it was a new experience for me.  I felt awkward through much of the night, but as it progressed, I was able to loosen up and just enjoy the night.  Another first for me, on the way back to the train station, we held hands.  I’m surprised my hands didn’t sweat so much it would’ve grossed her out.  Prior to that, the only time I had held a girl’s hand was when I was in grade school, and we needed to hold hands for the buddy system.  Like I said, late bloomer. 

We would go on to spend a lot more time together after that, when we found that we seemed to get along really well.  She had a lot of the same qualities as my bio teacher, in the sense she had a lot of energy and seemed really optimistic.  The biggest difference though, since I had the opportunity to get to know her, was how human she was.  While I held my teacher up on this pedestal, this person had very real life troubles, and issues that weighed on her.  Hanging out with her, I got to learn how people had to cope with things when it seemed like the world was against them.  From her, I learned how sheltered my life really was, and due to that, I tried my best to make her happy.  I would go out of my way to do things for her to make her smile.  She also gave really great hugs, so that was a reward I couldn’t pass up. 

After spending all this time with her, I couldn’t help but develop feelings for her. There were moments during the times we spent together where I felt as if maybe more could happen, but I was never able to act on any of them due to fear of rejection.  This led to some mixed feelings on my part, because I wasn’t sure if it was just me reading things wrong, or if my lack of action was sending mixed signals.  Whatever it may have been, things started to get a little awkward.  It didn’t help as I was still very immature when it came to these feelings, and I was unable to deal with them properly, and ended up feeling possessive.  Despite having no claim to her, I ended up getting jealous over things that were none of my business or outright ridiculous, and it would end up fracturing our relationship.  Initially, she was very understanding, and wanted to remain friends.  However, I couldn’t get over myself, and I did one of the few things in my life that I regret.  I wish I had handled it better, but I drove a wedge into that friendship that it would never recover from.  We remained friends in name only after that, but it always felt awkward whenever I was around her, and the conversation never flowed as freely as it used to.  It’s been a long time since all of that happened, and we’ve since buried the hatchet, so to speak, but it will never be what it was in terms of our interactions with each other, and I do miss it.  I do hope she ultimately finds happiness, and if she ever needs me, I would love to be there, but it’s not likely to ever happen.

For a while after that, I didn’t really meet any girls that I had any interest in.  I began to fall more into the stereotypical role of hardcore geek.  I surrounded myself with geek culture; comic books, video games, anime, manga, the internet (which was still the realm of the geek at the time), and I was isolating myself from the world at large.  I was nearing the end of my college career when I would get a job with a company based on Wall Street, and there I met this girl who would, in a roundabout way, introduce me to the next girl I would fall in love with. 

It was the strangest chance meeting.  I became friends with the girl from my job, because we found we had similar interests in random things, and also that we were in the same school.  Because of this, she invited me to take a swim class with her, which is not something I would ever have done before, mainly because I can’t swim and am generally terrified of drowning.  However, at the time, I was on a self-improvement kick, and my friend kept bugging me, so I decided that getting over that fear would be a good thing, so I agreed to join.  I go to the first class, and wouldn’t you know it, the friend I signed up with didn’t show up.  In fact, there was only one other person there, and it was this short little girl.  Since I had descended so far into my geek habits, I was less than amicable towards her, since I was kind of pissed that I was alone at this thing that I had only signed up for because my friend had coerced me to go.  What little conversation with her was curt at best, and I resolved to not come the next time if my friend wasn’t showing up.

So I confirmed with my friend for the following week, and showed up early for the class because I had nothing better to do.  As I sat there, this cute girl walks in, and looks at me as if she knew me.  I had no idea where I knew her from, until she spoke to me and I realized it was the same girl who was at the swim class the last time.  When I had first met her, she had on goggles and a swim cap, and here she was without the goggles, and her hair out, and I had no idea she was as cute as she was.  We chatted for a few minutes, and then got going to get changed.  After the class was over (and I chastised my friend for not showing up the previous class) I asked the girl from earlier if she wanted to have lunch together.  I don’t know what possessed me to do that, but she surprised me by saying yes, and we went to BBQs.

As we sat there chatting, I once again felt that comfortable feeling, as if I had known her for a long time.  During that chat, we found the oddest coincidence that we actually lived just four blocks apart from each other, and had been for several years.   Mind you, we met at the school’s gym where the pool was, which was on the complete other side of the city, so it was a strange moment to find out we were basically next door neighbors.  After this revelation, I suddenly found myself running into her all the time, and we soon became fast friends.

We started spending so much time together, that once again, I began to develop feelings for her.  This time, I tried to remain more level-headed, but apparently I was still too immature, and once again, made a fool of myself.  This time however, when she said we should remain friends, I was able to back off and just concentrate on the friendship, and we maintained a very solid relationship.  She stuck by her word to try to stay friends, and we were as close as two friends could be.  We spent nearly every day together, doing everything from biking, watching TV, skiing, rollerblading, going out to dinner, cooking at each other’s places, to just chilling and talking with a beer.  Over time though, some things changed, and we became intimate.  Despite that, she never acknowledged any feelings for me, and it caused me to be rather confused as to the nature of our relationship.  She never acknowledged me as a boyfriend, but I never stopped admitting my feelings for her, so we were at a sort of weird impasse.  The reasoning behind her failure to acknowledge any feelings for me were kind of strange, as she would tell me she wasn’t attracted to me, but her actions spoke otherwise.  She also tended to knitpick a lot about my personality traits and how I looked and dressed, and would constantly try to make improvements.  Me, being the in love fool I was, followed her “advice” and made some pretty drastic changes to myself. 

This all finally came to a head after a few years when I finally gathered the courage to tell her that I needed to hear some sort of acknowledgement of our relationship.  I straight-forwardly told her that if she didn’t, I couldn’t remain in this type of strange holding pattern, with this unrequited love forever.  She told me that she couldn’t force herself to feel that way about me, and I had basically closed the book on that chapter of my life.  This coincided with a trip of hers with her family, so I felt the need to tell her these things before she left because it just felt like the right time to get it off my chest.

Wouldn’t you know it, during the time that she was away, my future wife would walk into my life.  Well, more like message her way into my life, as we met on Myspace because she sent me a random message.  Normally, I would think it was spam, but I decided to look at her profile, and found that it was an actual person, not some weird robo-messager who was attempting to convince me to join a sex website.  I was still doubtful at first, because when I saw her profile because, I couldn’t believe how hot she was, but I took a chance, and we began a conversation online, where I made some awful puns, and she actually laughed at them, which told me I was dealing with a very different kind of girl.  We decided to meet shortly after those initial messages, and found that we hit it off incredible well, despite spending the first two hours in each other’s presence without speaking so much as 2 sentences to each other (we were at Barnes & Nobles reading manga together).

And thus began the most difficult year of my life.  When the other girl came back from her trip, she found out that I had met a new girl, and despite her previous protestations, the green-eyed monster reared its ugly head.  Suddenly, all of the feelings that I had expressed to her had become a big lie, and I had been deceiving her all that time when I had been telling her I loved her.  Mind you, this was literally 3 days after I had met my future wife, and I hadn’t even gotten to know her all that well and wasn’t even sure if it was going to go anywhere, before the first girl decided to rip my head off. 

During the course of the next year or so, I attempted to stay friends with the girl who didn’t love me, because she had stayed true to her word before, when I had made a fool of myself.  Needless to say, it was hard on my new relationship, but somehow, she stuck by me.  She was so patient as I would engage in these drawn out conversations with my “friend” that lasted until well into the wee hours of the morning.  My future wife would literally be waiting in my bed at home while I was down the block, at my friend’s house, arguing with her about all of these things she was accusing me of, primarily some form of betrayal.  I would come home, exhausted, weary, sad, and angry, and my future wife was just waiting in bed, welcoming me back with open arms, a warm hug, and a loving kiss.  Never in my life had I experienced that, someone who just seemed to care about me so much that they were willing to put up with that much ridiculousness.

Eventually, I broke off all ties with this friend of mine.  I look back at that time of my life as a learning period.  While she was harsh on me about my appearance and general demeanor, it did force me to make some changes that I was unwilling or hesitant to make, and I did improve a lot because of it.  If it had not been for her, I wouldn’t have been ready for the relationship that I was to have with my future wife, because oddly enough, I gained a lot of confidence from dealing with a girl like her.  It made me aware that I was able to make someone happy, even if they had a hard time expressing it.  It showed me the amount of fortitude I had to deal with a difficult situation.  It taught me how to communicate to the best of my abilities, so that I was clear with my feelings.  While it didn’t end well, I was able to gain a lot from it, so while I don’t have the best feelings toward her, I am grateful for her influence in my life, if for no other reason than what became of it.

This brings me of course, to the fourth and final love of my life, my wife.  As I said before, she showed an amazing amount of patience during that particularly difficult time.  She also showed me that someone could love me for who I am, not for who they want me to be.  She accepted me as I was, and actually encouraged some of my more geeky behavior.  It was a shock to me, to say the least, but here was this incredibly attractive woman who loved me, who wasn’t afraid to say it or show it, and who didn’t want me to be anything or anyone else than what I was.  My mind was blown.  Obviously, that story is ongoing, and it’s a happy one so far, despite my depression. 

From my wife, I learned that I could be who I am, and still find love.  I also learned that I was capable of taking care of someone, as she was having a bit of a hard time with her life at the time I met her.  She was a bit lost with her direction in life, and I did my best to foster her growth as she was groping around to find who she wanted to be.  That search is not done yet, but neither is mine, and we’re working together to find who we ultimately want to be as we get older.  We’ve had our trials and tribulations (to use a cliché) but we know that the best way to get past them is to work together, and communicate as much as we can.  Now that we have a daughter, we have found that we’re either not bad parents, or have been very lucky with our child.  Either way, we have a beautiful, sweet baby girl who brings up joy with her every waking moment. 

Maybe it got a little sappy at the end there, but looking back at how my life has been shaped by my relationships, and the difficulties I’ve faced, it’s made me more appreciative of what I have now.  I may not be magically cleared of my depression, but having a little bit of perspective on where my life has been and where it is now does make some things easier to bear.  Of course, the whole purpose of these entries is to gain some perspective, so I guess we’ll see what kind of progress can be made with the next post.