Being here is tearing me apart. The ‘rents have been trying to be really nice now that they’ve got me to agree to take the LSAT and apply to law school. My thinking and feelings go around in circles, perhaps starting with a statement like, “I resent them”, and then the thoughts start going back and forth, each thought or feeling prompting an opposite thought or feeling.
I start with a statement like, “I resent them”. I arrive at a room. It is chaotic and confusion. I run around and look at the options; the options are doors. The options are all the ways I can react to the juxtapositions, the opposing feelings. Finally I choose a door that leads me to the appropriate thought, the good supportive argument against them. But that’s never the end, there are more thoughts, more feelings, more arguments to chase, so I have to run around more until I find the right door for the next argument. And when I’ve gone through all the doors, I’m left with the original statement, “I resent them”, present and as strong as ever.
All the arguments, all the explanations and justifications for my feelings, attitudes, and actions have been written down. I’ve already gone through them. But for some reason, I can’t keep those feelings in my head or heart. Every time I do something in opposition to them, I have to go through the whole runaround to justify what I do.
It’s draining to have to go through the full circle every time I have a feeling for or against the ‘rents, and it’s so unnecessary because the bottom line is that I can’t stand them. But every blasted time I go through the whole thing. I’m fighting a losing battle that I won’t lose because it will never end.
Ching Ching and I got reacquainted today. I had heard that she was in New York attending Columbia and I’ve been thinking of hunting her down, but she called me first and I went to visit her today. She was among the very first people I befriended at Oberlin, how odd how natural it was to find us having lunch at Tom’s Restaurant so many years later after having so many ups and downs.
It was terrific seeing her and being with her. We connect in so many ways, but it’s clear to me that our paths were meant to be different. We have so much to teach each other through our different experiences if we just connect every few years and share what we’ve been doing. But only if the connection between us stays the same.
I spoke with Luyen for several hours the other night. She got suspended from Oberlin for poor academic performance. The suspension part, sound familiar? More parallels between us.
It was so weird when she was going through her troubles last Spring because I would listen to her and I knew exactly what she was going through. I knew what she needed to hear, the answers she needed to get out of the woods, but I couldn’t tell her. I realized that four years prior, if someone had come to me with the answers I needed to get out of my torment, I would have resisted. I would have said that it wasn’t that fucking easy.
Answers are only answers if you understand why they are answers. For me, the only way out was through personal experience, walking the path was the only way to understand where it led out of the woods. So I thought Luyen had to do the same, but I thought I could help by pointing in certain directions; plant seeds so that when she encountered key experiences, words to help understand them would have already gone into her ears.
It feels like it was such a mistake to go out with her, but how else could I have gotten close enough to be any help? It may have been the only way to get her to trust me enough to open up and listen. Of course I didn’t think this through back then, it’s easy to say this in retrospect, but the truth is that it was all impulse and feelings back then. I wanted to give a relationship with Luyen a chance after Hiromi was out of the picture. Not a very good reason when things obviously weren’t going so well.
The ‘rents have been trying to be really nice lately. It makes it necessary to put in an extra effort to resent them. I have to remember that there is a price, nothing they give comes free. I told them what I want to do and they just steamrolled right over it to push their agenda. Their interference in my life plans is not something I should forget about just because of some immediate feel-good gestures on their part.
