Photo by Frank Okay on Unsplash
It’s been a strange August. I think it’s been a bit weird for everyone.
Perhaps I’m a nostalgic millennial, but I miss the simpler days of the school summer holidays. Admittedly, my family rarely went on holidays, but at least it felt like a seasonal pause from school work.
August no longer seems to have that feeling of being a real break. Everything seems to be in constant motion. The chase for productivity is winning out against periodic rest.
My life has seemingly regressed to a similar style of living as I had when I was young. Perhaps it’s my way of searching for creature comforts, even if the comforts weren’t all that comfortable. In my youthful summers, I spent most of my time playing video games feeling pretty isolated from the world. My current situation does feel remarkably similar.
I had few friends when I was young. I felt like I was not allowed to have them. My parents, particularly my mother, was perennially paranoid of me spending time with white people due to what she say as their dangerous influence. I grew up in a white majority town, so this ended up being a cut-off from most social contact. My childhood had regular occurrences of interrogation of where I was going, or who I was seeing. I remember that my parents at one point held an intervention because I was out of the house several days during the summer.
I noticed our wider family found kinship through fellow community members and extended family. But my father by my teenage years had become particularly prominent in the community, meaning family visits were really about homage or business. Our home regularly had people visiting. I had no idea who these people were. Aside from surface interactions, they also seemed to have no interest in me either. I learnt to hate family gatherings and functions. I’m not sure that feeling has shifted since.
I was undoubtedly very depressed when I was a teenager. I do not need the benefit of hindsight to realise this, I knew it at the time. I felt no motivation to do anything, and would often just blankly stare out in the distance. Alas, I do not know if the real tragedy was about how I felt or the fact that everyone was too busy to ever notice. The one dangled carrot that was moving away for university at 18. That was the only thing really kept me going.
For a long time, I’ve been wary of touching the subject of childhood traumas. Not out of shame, but because it has become an all too common refrain of Instagram therapy. It seems to be a trend that we blame all of our problems on our parents.
Yet blind obedience, particularly to our parents, is also a way in which such traumas are buried. In Asian cultures (and no doubt others), it is how we end up never really facing the truth. We laud authority figures as great people, turning a blind eye to the bad things they did.
I had managed to get to my thirties before the weight of these experiences forced a breakdown. I think I had gotten so used to these things in my past that I forgot how abnormal such experiences were. I’ve spent many years trying to figure out why everything felt this hard whilst forgetting the fact that most people aren’t carrying this level of baggage.
I think that if I am to genuinely recover from burnout, it means facing these things. It’s no coincidence that I’ve dreamt so much about my childhood over the last few months.
And now, I find myself reliving my teenage years. Time spent predominantly alone. An August withdrawn from the world whilst playing video games to pass the time.
Is the similarity a coincidence, a cruel irony or some sort of necessary spiritual healing? Honestly, I don’t really know.