LETTERS TO MY FORMER SELVES

We All Numb

On vulnerability

Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

We all numb. We all anesthetize ours pent-up feelings of discomfort with unwholesome doses of stuff everyday.

We criticize those who do booze, gambling, porn, drugs and other addictive substances as their numbing agents of choice. But the rest of us are no different. We coddle our shadow selves in food, work, money, shopping, relationships, social media, busyness, and the Internet.

As long as we’re dodging the bullets of vulnerability, none of us can confidently claim that we’re sober.

My parents raised me the best way they knew how (they all are). For one, they were constantly working out ways to spoon-feed me and my brothers with the brightest of gold stars. We were starving for warmth, not coated decals. Our highs from collecting hard-earned stars amount to nothing in amping up the temperature at home.

Over the decades, under their increasingly intense cold war, so many fears and feelings have gone unaddressed. So many nuances and layers that needed rumbling got dismissed. I write to cope and found hands-on activities like cooking and making art soothing. Deep down, parts of me couldn’t help but blame them for all the ghosts that linger in me.

Yet, finger-pointing doesn’t gets anyone anywhere. So we selectively numb our shadows without realizing that when we do so, we’re numbing our light too.

The antidote isn’t another topical treatment. It is believing that the stars have aligned in this manner in order to get you to where you are today.

What I’m saying is that pain and discomfort exists within the same spectrum of joy, love, meaning, and belonging. It’s all part of the same collective, and until you come to terms with it, one day the pokes of vulnerability will pierce you through the masks and reveal the sickness inside.

At the height of my depression, therapy was still considered taboo. At the height of my parents’ dissolution, I was still feeding on gold stars. At the height of their separation, my secondborn arrived to poke at me without fail. I decided to go with therapy to cut me open.

What we found: Scraps. Litters of love. Pain and resentment, unmet expectations, bitterness. Yet on the other hand, evidence of their efforts to get sober, yet have come to irreconcilable differences as a collective.

To that, I have accepted that I will never arrive. The feelings might never go away, but I can stay informed of where they’re coming from and what I’m going to do about it.

It’s a good idea to rub your hands together and say, “It’s okay to not be okay.”

And when you do, you’ll feel a little less cold. ⬥

Stacia Priscilla (Blank Stace) is an Indonesian-born Chinese wife and mother of two. She lives in Jakarta with her husband and daughters. Connect with her on personal growth, faith, and motherhood on Medium, Instagram, and Threads.

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