what a difference a day makes

I was looking for something to lift inspiration from when I came across a journal entry that made me realize what a difference a few months are.

Here are some paragraphs lifted from an entry dated april 28, 2005 :

(note that these are rant paragraphs, and are not to be taken seriously in their entirety)

There isn’t a day when I don’t wish I had a different mother. Everyday I wake up and eat breakfast under the watchful eyes of my mom, telling me that I am already too fat and if I don’t watch it no one will ever want to have me.

There are many things that I really despise about my mom, things that, when we argue, send me running into my closet, while I try not to let her hear my crying because I don’t want her to have the satisfaction. Yet funnily, when its time for me to let her know how badly I’ve been affected by all her abusive language, I can barely remember anything. And she has the satisfaction of thinking that my silence means that there is nothing unforgivable in the way that she treats me.

A year after law school, I am not at the top of the batch like I expected myself to be. I’m not even at the middle. I am at the bottom of the batch, scraping the bottom of the barrel, barely making enough to pass to the next level. That’s my goal. Not to be at the top of the batch, not even to be better than most, but only to be good enough. I feel despicable. No wonder my mother hates me.

And yet here I am, 23 years old. I’ve woken up feeling this everday for the last 15 years of my life. Still fat, still an underachiever, still blaming my mother. But really, perhaps its all my fault. My fault for not being good enough. My fault for not having what it takes to succeed. How can I be a failure at 23? I don’t know. But I am. I do not even know what I want. I’ve been following orders all my life.

All I know about what I want is this. To wake up in the morning and feel that I am enough. To not be told of what’s lacking with me, but only what they think I am capable of doing. To have control over my day without the thought of pleasing anybody else with what I do, only me. To not have to need the help of others so desperately. To succeed on my own.

I don’t even know how to make that come true for me. I don’t know if I should quit law and find a job, move out and live poor, stop eating and be thin. I feel like everyday I stay in this house and live with my mother, a little part of the me that I love dies. Because I don’t know how to defend her. i feel so impotent.

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this is apt because today, we went out as “a family” and had lunch at the mandarin oriental to celebrate my mother’s birthday. During the much-dreaded honoring, I managed to come up with some words, which though they weren’t really honoring, were fitting for the occasion and I was surprised by what my mother had to say.

My mother has been surprising me a lot lately, being this strong, and this un-nagging, and being semi-easy to live with. After I had told her in my speech that I thought her concern was stifling, she told me she was concerned because she saw so much potential in me, and she couldn’t understand why I wasn’t living up to what I could possibly achieve. She told me that she thought I had everything covered. She told me she thought I was brilliant. She told me she thought I was incredibly talented. She told me she thought my only problem was that I needed to believe that I was brilliant for myself, because I get run down by every negative comment everyone else had to say. I was surprised because I thought she was just disappointed because I wasn’t living my life in the manner she saw fit. I suppose all mothers want to see their daughters happy, but this was how much my mother wants to see me be that: she is willing to go to the point where I will hate her just so I can be the best version of myself that I could ever possibly be, even at the cost of me hating her. I never thought of it that way.

I suppose, we will never really see eye to eye on a lot of things, but now, I finally get her. And hateful as I was of how I grew up under her critical eye, I only feel gratefulness now. I know maybe tomorrow, or in a few day’s time, I will feel very differently, when I’m being told by her to run on the treadmill or eat my vegetables, but at least for today, I feel very differently.