Sometimes I feel like my own worst enemy. It’s been quite the week and it’s only the first week of the year. Is this what my 2023 is going to be like? To be fair, I was feeling apprehensive walking into it, whereas past years, I ran into it like BRING IT ON. Is this what growing up is like? You develop irrational fears and anxiety that didn’t use to be there? Like how I used to ride Six Flags rollercoasters back in high school fearlessly, but nowadays, I have a real fear of death if made to ride Tower of Terror. I hate that drop feeling in my stomach. I also developed bad anxiety on planes when experiencing turbulence. My last trip home from California, I started looking up Jetblue’s crash statistics when turbulence hit and went on a downward spiral on the internet. Let’s just say, I’m seriously considering getting Xanax prescribed for the next plane ride. Sadly, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
But it’s like Meghan’s song says. I do feel like I need help a lot of the times. I do feel like I want to talk to someone, but at the same time, I don’t know who to turn to, where to go, how to ask. I don’t know how to heal from trauma. I feel like I’ve played this strong, independent, bad bitch person for so long, everyone sees me as someone who can handle it. So I don’t know how to translate my pain into asking for help and be vulnerable. I smile a lot and I’m okay for the most part, but there are days where I feel low. And sometimes, overwhelmingly, severely low. And when I feel drained from feeling this way, it’s like I’m running on E. It’s either I’m all the way up, or all the way down. Why does it feel like a rollercoaster? Why can’t I have just medium moments where I feel like okay, this is manageable? Le sigh. I didn’t use to feel this deeply about my anxiety in the past but as I get older, it feels harder to cope sometimes. Is it because of getting older or is it because of everything piling and adding up?
In the meantime, I guess I’ll write about what I know. An emotional dump, if you will, to work through my feelings and anxiety. Especially since therapy is expensive and time-consuming to even search for the right person to talk to. I’m going to try and do more of this in 2023 to try and crack down on the heaviness I feel in my life. Maybe this is the year I work through my trauma. A cathartic release. I wonder if I should get a small journal to keep with me to write down my thoughts when they come. It’s funny because this is what I use my long distance runs for. Therapy to work out my thoughts. But maybe I need to place to jot it all down instead of letting it bounce in my head.
This week, part of my anxiety is from all the different emotions I feel from my grandpa passing. I feel guilt, I feel regret, I feel like a bad person, I feel sad, I feel angry, I feel…lost.
My grief from Rocco’s death is different from my grandpa’s death in many ways, which probably doesn’t make coping any better. The depressive state and feelings of sadness are familiar, but the circumstances with each death, I’ve learned, I have to learn to grieve, cope and heal in a different way. With Rocco’s death, it was sudden and unexpected; I had just seen and spoken to him a day before and everything seemed fine. With my grandpa’s death, it was expected due to his old age and known declining health and condition, so it was more a natural course of life, but still devastating and heartbreaking nonetheless. Both still hurt.
My grandpa’s death, hit me in a depressive wave. I’ve spent the last few years purposely avoiding my dad’s side of the family due to the toxicity I experienced growing up. I never felt like I belonged or welcomed much. This can also be attributed to the toxic nature of Vietnamese culture growing up as well. The stereotype or rather the shared experience amongst my peers is that our families are not directly encouraging or supportive of our desires, our personalities, our dreams, our expressive nature, our career choices - especially if they’re outside the realm of traditional jobs our parents want us to follow. They tease us, they bully us, they discourage, they can be very mean and harsh growing up. And all any of us ever want is to feel accepted and “enough” as we navigate our way through life and figure out who we are meant to be. My relatives were definitely very judgmental, snarky, snobby, and rude. I grew up with them because my parents would send me to stay with them every summer vacation. When I reached college, I was finally old enough to make my own decisions and stopped going, opting to stay home and find a summer job instead. So my visits started becoming more limited and then after I got married, life and my full time job got in the way and I used that an excuse that I was just too busy to attend. So if I’m being honest, I haven’t had the greatest relationship with them.
But again, if I’m being honest, it’s not fair to talk about the bad parts only, and not give credit for the good parts. Growing up, they called me too skinny, too fat, ugly, told me I was wasting my time in fashion school when I took summer classes at FIT, they insulted my mother calling me mất dạy because I didn’t dress conservative and was more outspoken and loud than most children and brazen enough to talk back to defend myself. But like how I’ve given my parents some grace and forgiven them for our past relationship growing up, I too should reflect on my relationship with my relatives and give them credit. They were there for me to provide for me when my parents couldn’t afford everything I needed - especially in a family with 4 other siblings who had needs too - and also a lot of times would buy me things I wanted as well. I say this because wants and needs are obviously different. My aunt provided me with an expensive TI-84+ calculator when my parents could not afford it, but my aunts and uncles also bought me fashionable new school clothes and shoes for the fall school year so I would feel less than the other kids. They may have been snobby but sometimes it worked in my advantage, lol. And they did a lot of times, provide me with spending money so I could buy snacks and fun things at school when my parents could only give enough for lunch when we no longer qualified for free lunch. They provided me with a lot of experiences my parents simply couldn’t due to time and limited funds trying to raise 5 kids. They took me to see the latest popular movies. They took me to Coney Island. They took me to see Santa Claus at the mall. They searched for hard to find Sailor Moon merchandise at a time when it wasn’t popular yet like how it is now. They let me stay up late and watch as much tv as I want since I didn’t have cable back at home. They took me to see the 4th of July fireworks. They took me to beaches and they always bought me my own Happy Meal that I didn’t have to share with anyone. They helped raise me in the best way they knew how, even if I didn’t feel the love I wanted to feel, growing up. I’m not making excuses for their toxicity, I’m just trying to make an understanding of it and balance out the good and the bad. I don’t believe my relatives have bad intentions, but were rather a product of their own upbringing and experiences. I do believe, they care for me in their own and different ways. How do I know this? I haven’t seen them in years, like I said, but at my grandfather’s wake when we all spoke our piece to make our peace with each other and with grandpa, the way they talked about each other, and about me, revealed themselves, even if it was under sad circumstances. It’s when people are honest sometimes, when looking at life and death in the face and seeing how precious life is and how little time we truly have with another. My dad revealed to me at the wake that I truly was my grandpa’s favorite, despite not being a boy. And my aunt when I first walked into the funeral home, hugged me tightly and sobbed into my arms, severely disappointed at herself for not making it on time racing back to the state and hospital, but also how happy she was that we were with him in his final moments because of how much he loved his grandkids above everything else. We are his legacy and she was so very proud of all of us. It’s very rare to hear these words from Asian culture. It’s very eye-opening to us kids after spending so long bitter at the adults in our lives.
It made me feel bad for the years I spent angry and resentful at my relatives and stayed away. My aunts insisted I come to their house this past weekend on the 7th day after my grandpa’s passing, to practice đám giỗ. We do this on the 7th, 49th and 100th day of our loved one’s passing in the first year, and then annually thereafter. I’ve been doing this since I was little (up until college when I started going less and less and then not at all), but this time, it took a different meaning. As a child, the đám giỗ were always for ancestors I never knew/met. Now it was for someone I knew and played a role in my life. It was personal. So I went. And now, it felt much less toxic than before when I was younger. I don’t know if it’s because I grew up, or my relatives grew up and have become warmer and more understanding as people and less toxic. But they want me to start visiting more again. They live far though so I don’t know if I will continue these trips as often as they would like me to, but I would like to be able to try and make my grandfather’s đám giỗ a priority in my life to pay my respects and honor him since I didn’t visit as much as I should in his final years.
What is đám giỗ, though? Plainly put, it is the death anniversary of a passed loved one. In Vietnamese culture, the family gets together to share a meal. Many dishes are cooked and eaten family style, a lot of the times, the dishes can be the ancestor’s favorite dishes. One relative will host and the family members are expected to make their best efforts to make the trip. There is usually a family altar where a photo of the deceased are placed, sometimes along with other ancestors. The eldest family member will light 3 incense first and pray, placing the incense into a bowl of rice, inviting the ancestor into the home. The rest of the family will follow and light their own incense and pray as well. After all the incense has burned, then the family can share a meal since the ancestor has “finished eating” all the food placed on the altar. These events are not meant to be sorrowful, but a time of celebration and joy. You are celebrating their past life and cherished past memories you have of them. It is meant to be a time of togetherness and bonding. If you have ever watched Disney’s Coco, it is similar to Día de los Muertos.
