Tag: family dynamics

You Can Always Come Home

The American singer Alan Jackson once sang:

You can always come home
Wherever life’s road leads
You can get back
To a love that’s strong and free
You’ll never be alone
In your heart there’s still a place
No matter how right or wrong you’ve gone
You can always come home

As an introvert, I’ve always thought I was pretty good at navigating my alone time, especially during the pandemic. I was able to fill up my days with solo activities and discover new ways to keep myself occupied at home, even impressing friends and family who would ask with curiosity and a little bit of awe, “How do you not get bored being alone all the time?”

Admittedly, that alone time got a little harder to navigate after I went separate ways with the last person I dated. I was still mostly okay, but there were times—laying in bed at night or when my mind began to wander—that I’d feel it. That tiny but potent ache, the one that made me yearn to be held, to be with someone who made me feel warm and safe, to be taken care of.

This past Friday, my older sister came to pick me up so we could drive to my parents’ house for the holidays. Though I talk to my family almost every day, it had been a few months since I’d seen them or been home. I was looking forward to being reunited with everyone, but I also felt a faint sense of dread as we set off. It was the first time I’d be back home since things ended with my ex. I worried that if my mother made comments about me settling down or if I didn’t have my usual activities to distract me, it would make me think of him and all the negative emotions I’d done such a good job of evading so far. There were so many unpredictable factors at home that I didn’t have to worry about in the safety of my apartment and daily routine.

We got home around lunchtime, and by the time we walked through the door, there were already two plates of warm, home-cooked food waiting for me and my sister. To someone who’d spent the last few weeks eating salads, microwave meals, and takeout, I couldn’t get enough. Each bite made me think of my childhood, to all the times I’d gotten home from school to find my mom bustling around the kitchen, preparing my afternoon snack.

A lot of times when I come home, I’ll get bored pretty quickly. I’ll retreat to my bedroom and watch a movie on my laptop or see if any hometown friends are available to meet up. The last few times I came home, I would keep my phone beside me, anxiously checking to see if my ex had returned a text yet.

This time, I didn’t want to retreat. I wanted to be present and soak up every good feeling. Over the weekend, we spent a lot of time together as a family. My parents sat with us in the kitchen while my sister and I tried out new recipes, we watched the snow fall outside while laughing about past memories, we spent hours video-chatting with extended family, my sister and I snuggled up together at night the way we used to when we were younger and watched cheesy television.

The thing is, when you start telling yourself a story, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. The only thing that matters is if you believe it’s true. For a long time, the story I’ve been telling myself is that I’m alone. I don’t have a boyfriend or as big of a social circle as I’d like. Not even a roommate to keep me company during this pandemic. I was so lonely, and I was tired of being alone.

But then you have these moments that put everything back into perspective. When my mom offered up something for the umpteenth time (“Take these bananas with you,” “Do you need more paper towels?” “Here’s some cookware you can take with you.”), or my dad jumped up and got ready to drive to the store anytime we even vaguely mentioned needing something, or my sister spoiled me the way she always has since I was a baby, I was overcome by how wrong I’d been.

I’d spent months, maybe even longer, bemoaning the love I didn’t have in my life, never appreciating the love I did have. My parents and sister would call me daily, checking up on me, seeing if I needed anything, and I would brush them off so I could invest all my emotions and energy into people who didn’t invest in me at all. Despite that, their love for me never changed.

I still have a few more weeks left at home. I’ll probably get annoyed at my family a bunch of times while I’m here, but I’ll also be grateful that I get to spend this time with them. In the new year, I’ll head back to the city. I’ll take risks and push myself, experience both successes and failures, but above all I’m going to remind myself as often as I can that I will never be alone, no matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise. Knowing that, I already feel a little braver in building the life I want. Everything’s easier when you have people you love in your corner, and I’m willing to bet if you take a close look at your life, you’ll find you have plenty of people in your corner, too.

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Shhh

I had something of a revelation recently.

The more I learn about the psychology of happiness, the more I realize how much of our current happiness is influenced by the things that happened in the past. I had a relatively boring upbringing (much to the chagrin of this wannabe writer), so I always figured I’d escaped relatively unscathed. I have friends who were affected by parents’ divorces, distant family members, traumatic incidents, while the worst thing I’d ever experienced were some hormone-driven argument while I was going through puberty.

I don’t blame my parents for any of the decisions they made. After all, they were doing the best they could with the knowledge they had, and they did a pretty great job if I do say so myself. Still, nobody’s perfect.

Maybe this is something you can relate to if you come from a South Asian background. Maybe you can relate even if you don’t. Growing up, whenever anything “negative” happened in our family, we were told to keep it a secret. When someone lost a job, when someone was suffering from health issues, when someone was going through a hard time in their life, it was something that stayed in the family.

When grandparents died, I sometimes didn’t find out until days later. When my dad got laid off, my sister and I were told after several months. My parents’ intentions were good. They didn’t want to us to worry, they thought they could protect us from all the bad things. It didn’t matter how much time they let pass, my sister and I would still be hurt by the news, stung that they could keep something so important from us. We constantly wondered what else they were keeping from us.

When it came to our own issues, the intentions were different. My parents were scared that others would judge us or revel in our misfortune. When I was diagnosed with infertility issues, my mother admonished me when she found out I had confided the news to some close friends.

In the end, it didn’t really matter what my parents’ intentions were, because it all just served to make me view the negative events in my life as shameful. Losing my job was shameful, getting dumped was shameful, being told I might not be able to have children was shameful.

Part of me thinks that’s why I’m always striving so hard for everything in my life to be “perfect.” Anything that goes wrong, even if I have no control over it, is a dark secret that would only draw the judgement of others if they were to find out. When I find myself in these periods of life when everything doesn’t line up, my unhappiness is heightened until I find my way to a place where things look a little better from the outside.

Whenever I go against my parents’ wishes and tell my friends the secrets I’ve been so carefully guarding, it feels like a little act of rebellion. It’s exhilarating and freeing, and always comes as a surprise. My friends and loved one never judge me, only offer their support and kind words. And yet, the instincts have been ingrained so deeply inside of me that I still feel like I’m doing something wrong whenever I do it.

I don’t want to live my life with shame anymore. It’s not shameful to get laid-off or get your heart broken or to discover your body isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. These are things that everyone experiences. It’s all just part of the motions of life. If someone judges you for these things, that’s a reflection on them, not you.

So I’m making a promise to myself. The next time I find myself hurting, I won’t keep it to myself. I’ll reach out all the people who care about me, because as it turns out, the only thing that can combat shame is love.