A letter to those that don’t know me.

I am not sure who, if anyone, will read this blog. I am simultaneously terrified of exposing myself, and self-conscious of exaggerating the interest people may have in my writing or the reach of my ideas. I confess that it took me 2 months after I bought my domain name to do anything beyond clumsily create a backdrop, and draft the first banal “about me” in which I tried to maintain a pretense of anonymity. I imagined I could write with a pen name and post only headless photos of myself (creepy! But safe?). But what draws me to write is my belief that so many of my emotional and spiritual wounds have been made septic by silence. I need to write the complete truth of my life in order to examine it, and perhaps offer some salve from it, and I’m unfortunately pretty identifiable. I don’t know how many Filipina-Sri-Lankan speech language pathologists there are in the world, before even sketching in the details of family make-up, locale and pursuits. So it seemed silly to bother cropping my face out of the scene.

So, if you don’t know me, you get to construct me from these words, and match them to a face and a name – a real, living, Human Being (whether I am the premium Excellent™ version, I leave in your hands to judge). It is easy to judge, isn’t it? Both constructed Human Beings, and real ones. I recently told someone I was so good at judging (myself, and others) that I could be on a reality TV show.  But I can’t stop you from doing it – I know for me, it’s been a reflexive habit, something I’m trying to unlearn. My fear that you will also judge is probably rooted in an attachment to my own Goodness, and I am learning how much that’s gotten in the way of my own healing (almost as much as the belief in my own Badness).

Learning and unlearning – I am sure that will come up a lot in my writing. I am, with no pride nor shame, a nerd. I just… really like to learn. My mother saw this, and fed my voracious curiosity as a child: whatever new interest I developed, she found a book for. And think of the commitment that entailed! There was no Youtube at her fingertips back in those days.  I wonder if there was embarrassment in her voice when she asked the librarian if they had any books on ventriloquism (oh god – I’m at once mortified and amused to be sharing this!), chess, dress-making for Barbies, or ancient civilizations.

I have watched home videos of myself, a short-haired sprite with layers of 80s tulle frothing around me, jumping on the furniture, spinning myself and baby sister into unstable pirouettes for what seems like hours. (The atmosphere of 80s parenting allowed my dad, a gadget-happy photography enthusiast, to document it all on his RCA Camcorder, rather than interrupt for our safety). I have in seriousness questioned whether I had some sort of attention or hyperactivity disorder – so I can imagine that sourcing books for my many curiosities was evidence of my parents’ loving (or exasperated) dedication to me. At some point they must have given up on it,  and instead would come home with boxes of the books that the library was taking out of circulation. Brilliant! This should keep Thanya entertained for days! Perhaps long enough to fix the creaking sofa springs and vacuum up all the damned Barbie shoes left lying around to be stepped on.

As such I read all kinds of things – my parents likely thrilled because when I was reading, I was still (and quiet). I’m not sure if they took pause at the teen fiction that my 8 year old hands pulled out of the box, or if they were relieved because my 8 year old mind was reading well enough to sink into chapter books for longer stretches of time. I read about eating disorders, teen romances, horror, and… the bible. I read the bible as a child. Not because I, nor my family, were piously religious, but because it is quite the anthology of stories that could keep a highly active child puzzling over for weeks. I feel for my young parents though – this solution to keeping their furniture (and infant) intact was a partial one. It came with Questions. All of them. What’s anorexia? What does gay mean? It doesn’t make sense – how can God be Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit all at once?

Bless them. My mother, a Filipina Catholic, answered my questions with an honesty that – looking back – makes my chest swell. I came home from kindergarten having heard the word fag, and asked her what it was. She said “it’s a cigarette. And also a bundle of sticks that people used to use to burn gay people on.” Perhaps it was in the chain of follow-up questions that she provided a definition of homosexuality, or perhaps some other time. But a lump rises in my throat to remember that she saw me, my curiosity, and my intelligence, as precious enough to take seriously. Not to sugar coat or deflect these big questions from my little heart. This child who at once wanted to throw her voice in a puppet show, and understand why some people wish harm on others.

I don’t remember my mother’s explanation of the religious dogma of Catholicism, but we were baptized, and initially enrolled in Catholic school. Though I think her relationship with God was deep and true (deeper and truer as her cancer became terminal, I suspect), she gave us a healthy space in which to ask questions. She took us to church, but also encouraged my father to take us to the Buddhist temple with him and learn about the religion he had grown up in. Perhaps she also had a healthy limit of patience for my many questions, and charged my dad with the shared responsibility for answering them. When I asked how there could be only One True God as the bible says, when Buddhism speaks of one too, he explained that Buddhism is a guide for how you live your life, and doesn’t mind how you think of your God. What clothes you dress “Him” in. Little Thanya took this in stride. Aha! That makes sense. We all dress God differently. Like my fanciful little Barbie clothes, all fitted to the same peach-coloured, hard-plastic likeness.

Not that I thought God was blonde, blue-eyed and leggy. I knew God heard me when I prayed. I figured God, Jesus, Buddha and all the rest sat in a council, leaning in to hear my supplications – that the hungry people my parents told me about would have enough to eat, that no one would make any more fires to burn people on, and that my dog Chaplin would not get heartworm. I must admit I most fervently prayed the last request, for at least a year after my parents sent Chaplin to live with another family. I don’t blame them for sending him away. Managing a 6-year-old, a 3-year-old and a cancer diagnosis proved too much for adequate puppy care.

I’ve gone off on a tangent. Down memory lane. I had wanted to tell you why learning and unlearning is a theme I believe will thread through my writing. But perhaps it’s not wrong. I am learning about non-linearity. That the Truth doesn’t exist in a straight line, deduced from a sequence of events that happens one after the other. That spirals and circles yield patterns of their own – Truths that echo in wider and larger frequencies, like fractals (my fourth grade teacher introduced me to those! Sorry parents – I had so many questions about them then. It’s taken 25 years, but they’ve come back to me on a deeper level now). Learning defined me – my mother eventually made the decision to take me out of Catholic school, to get me into the gifted education stream the teachers said I needed. I am so grateful for her willingness, because it was a richly nurturing environment for my little budding personhood. I imagine she believed her love would be the environment I needed for my spirithood.

Learning so defined me, that when it became tied to achievement, at the high school, then university, then post-graduate levels, it threatened to take over my personhood. I didn’t have my mother by then, and she had charged me (lovingly, but also probably with the fear of a parent who had to let go of me too soon) with getting my education. My mother’s patient answering of questions taught me to value my own intelligence, but this certainly overshadowed and withered any other part of me that I figured was an unfortunate casualty of pursuing a Career.

It tried, anyway. Spirithood seems to have a way to cling to life, though crinkled, browned, and sickly – like the sad little plants I forget to water that surprise me with their insistent stems. I saw my desire to feel connected to others – the partying, my love life, the increasingly tattered relationship to my family –  as gaping inadequacies in the person my mother had asked me to become. But I got there eventually. I threw a cap in the air and imagined her smiling down. And then I got to work.

The other charge I had been given by my parents, who loved me so much they brought home boxes of books, indulged our wheedling cries for a puppy, and worked their souls from village life to first-world wealth, was to succeed. My parents are nothing short of immigrant magic. My father’s intelligence, scrappiness, and devotion to the western dream of Making It changed the trajectory of his life. He played boldly around elephants’ legs as a child, as his father worked them to clear coconut trees from the land for developers. And yet, by his effort and his sparkling intellect, he obtained an exclusive university education that allowed him to pack up and find work in England. He’d meet my mother there, who also left a family in the Philippines; the first daughter of a hopeful runaway bride, born to my grandmother at 18 after she eloped. Both my sets of grandparents eloped, actually. It’s romantic, perhaps; until I think about the restrictions of a society that set them on that path – for better or for worse.

My parents made a life for us that neither of them could imagine when, and where, they were born into the world. They did it through education, hard work, and the endless depth of dreaming in their souls. So it’s little question as to what I knew I had to do once I’d finally graduated. Gifted with degrees in science, a license to a valuable career, and the unwavering financial support of my parents. Emotional support, though I know they offered it in their own way, was hard for me to recognize – remember, my spirithood was wilted and out of use. All I could feel was the weight of expectation. Perhaps their spirithood, too, had suffered in their quest to give me a good life; we all were frayed and deeply wounded, exposed like naked wires, sparking against each other.

And this is where I find myself now. A decade hustling to earn success, for my own self-worth and to deserve the sacrifices of my parents. 2 decades of learning everything I could from books, a decade of learning how to apply it all to make not just a living, but a mark. To be certified Excellent™.

This last course is tricky. You don’t get a grade, no matter how many assignments you complete or how late into the night your eyes widen, desperately trying to solve the equation of having it all. You don’t even have a rubric. Everything that has worked in the past, every skill and technique and study group that you’ve employed even just to scrape by with a pass, earns you redder and redder ink as you scramble to correct. It’s like a hall of mirrors, an experiment I remember from summer camp: goggles taped over in black, save for a prism attached over the eyes. At first you walk around, bumping into tables and chairs – until you realize the perception shift, and course-correct smartly, taking into account the bend in the light leading into your eyes. Except you’re wrong again. And you smash harder and harder into the walls around you every time you take a step. Try again. Wrong again. Bruises and walls and rising panic; suffocation as they seem to close around you. No one to help, no one to ask, no patient explanations or loving hands to grip and guide the way.

I can breathe now though. I may still have those goggles on, but I’m learning to close my eyes and listen. There are voices that are guiding me, calming and delivering me. They are telling me to stop. To UN-learn. There are teachers in this work, and their voices soothe me. They pace my breathing and strengthen my hands, sharpen my sense of touch. They coax me. Soften my trust in feeling my way around. Like the books that my parents gifted me, they call me to be quiet and still. Unlearn. Listen. There is a voice to lead me through. A voice that will connect me though I feel alone against these walls, clumsy and unworthy and trapped. It’s mine. I can’t be the only one here with goggles on. I will listen and call out and see who else is there, as lost and confounded as I am.

So here I am, perhaps standing stupidly alone, wondering if this course was worth the tuition at all. Listening and unlearning, wondering if it’s too late to drop out and go backpacking instead. I wonder if you have constructed me now, in your mind, those of you who could follow me this far – piecing me together from my messy metaphors, Picasso-esque. I wonder what I look like to you. You can see my face in the pictures, my real name and my words. I hope you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt. It’s a much harder thing to unlearn than to learn, and the books are newly written or not yet even dreamed up. I have work to do, in every way.

But I have big beliefs that I think existed, in my spirithood, from long before my education. No one deserves to be burned. Everyone is good. Everyone is hurt. Everyone deserves joy and peace. Everyone deserves to be called to as they bump and crash and fight their way along. The silence around their wounds pierced, to draw in fresh air, to scab; perhaps to scar. To heal.

TD