Tag Archives: Depression

A Little Something I Wanted to Share

I wrote this to a friend and thought it would be cool to post it here. I do mention references to my story I am writing, which is what sparked this conversation.

Have a little of my past 🙂

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Personally, why I don’t agree to forced marriage and fear it, is because I don’t want to lose my freedom. I had to struggle just to be the person that I am right now. When I was growing up, I was “the pretty one with white skin” that all the old ladies doted on. I grew up with expectations to do well, to marry well, and to have a good looking boyfriend/husband, all because the fact of me having “a pretty face.”
I was basically told what to expect out of life. But having all these words thrown at me didn’t make my feel any better. My sisters, and cousins had to witness it too. They were being compared to me, but I didn’t like to be the china doll that everyone showed off. Honestly, as a young girl, I didn’t think there was much about me that was charming. I blinked too much, I was empty minded, and filled with
imaginations.
It should have made me a bitch, and maybe it did, but since I was so different, I secluded myself. I didn’t want to stand out as “the pretty one.” It got to the point that if any guy talked to me, I would turn my back to them, honestly I was an ice princess during my middle and high school years. It was something that I never noticed till just last year..
I never allowed myself to grow to my full potential, I was scared to be ‘me’. So while I still worked hard, I pulled back in the department of social skills and love life.
For awhile I did find ‘me’, and I thought I was finally going to go somewhere in life, but things aren’t always that dandy and great. I had a conflict with my sisters. I had other life ambitions and they were worried about their love lives. We weren’t seeing eye to eye in anything. They were the closes people to me in my family, and in matter of months we hated each other with a passion…
But they were still my family, and with time we slowly became family again, but never as close as we once were.
I still lost myself though, and I was lost for so long too. I closed myself off again. My best friend could see it, but she didn’t know how to deal with it. She didn’t know what I had to grow up with. For years I would put on a mask with a smile, but I was basically dying on the inside.
It was just two years ago that I started on my life journey to be happy and to be ‘me’. I feel like I took three big steps in my life. If I were to be married, I would be taking four steps back.
Plus, I tend to think that my dreams carry heavy messages that I am afraid to admit, and I had dreams about forced marriages. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was thinking consistently about my story, but it showed me what my darkest fears were about forced marriage. People kept trying to get into my bubble, trying to control everything for me. Just like Luna, everyone was making mistakes for her and she had to deal with the mess. Nobody would let me grow as a person, and nothing would be mine anymore.
That is another thing, while growing up, my sister’s would claim things as theirs and I would step back and let them. I had nothing to claim as mine. Now that I do have something that is mine, I am scared that someone is going to take it away from me.
And yeah, I lost a lot of my sisters while I was young. They were never really sister figures though, or at least I felt like they never were. They never tried to understand me as a human being, even though I tried with every last tear to understand what was going on in their minds. I tried so hard with my younger sisters too, and it only left me hurt even more. I love them to pieces, but no one really understands me.. So yea, I do have a silent promise with myself to not let my younger sisters go through what I went through when all my married sisters left. Because honestly, when my family was already under scrutiny, it hurt that my sisters were finding love and I was stuck to deal with all the drama and gossip.
Rather than focusing on others, my main goal in life is to focus on me. As greedy as that sounds, it’s something that I owe to myself, to my kid self who worried too much about what other’s thought about themselves and about me.
When I write a stories, my characters are their own people, but I tend to leave a bit of me with my them. And that may seem greedy too, but I can’t help but leave part of myself in places that my family would never think to look.
I can’t seem to make my stories short…. I had to share my whole life story… (and why would i share my whole life story? i don’t fear my flaws or horrible past.)

Nothing is Wrong with Loving Your Culture

it hurts me to write this…

i’ve always been an open minded person. i have always wanted to know MORE. i have this guilty pleasure of knowledge. and not only that, but i have this guilty pleasure of broadening my mind to different cultures.

i am Hmong, born in America. i am a Hmong American girl.

i grew up with TWO cultures. there are times when something from BOTH cultures don’t make sense to me. it is hard, to be made fun of for not understanding something from someone who was more exposed to that culture. it is hard, to be made fun of for liking something that another person does not take time to try and understand.

it is even harder when my Hmong siblings make fun of me, a Hmong girl, for liking Hmong music.

judgement on me, on who i am.

as a Hmong girl trying to make a name for myself, is it wrong to enjoy and encourage other Hmong artists that are on the same path as me, as all of us are?

because of this judgement, this sneer that would come my way, the disagreement of what is “good” and “bad”, i have been lost.

i am a lost Hmong American girl.

i love music and it makes me who i am.

yet i can’t even enjoy it when my family, my peers are judging me about it…

in this moment where i am lost, i have given in to the guilty pleasure of Hmong music and i have not regret it at all.

i can finally connect to something. relate to other Hmong communities, like finding a little lost piece of myself.

these past few days have been filled with nothing but good. i can finally write, write and write without worries. i can finally write what is deep in my heart. what bothers me and what makes me, me.

so don’t suppress yourself just for the sake of others. find out who you are, find all your little missing puzzle pieces. take a stand for what makes you, you.

a girl sits in front of her computer screen

a girl sits in front of her computer screen

unaware of who she is

unaware of how she is supposed to

tell the world how she came to be

where she came from

why she does the things she does

days turn to weeks

weeks into years

but there is only

confusion after confusion

My After Effects Of Depression

I haven’t been able to think straight for a while now. After school ended my goal was to find myself and figure out the reason why I went back to school. I didn’t know it would actually consist of losing myself in the process.

I am lost. Everyday that I don’t work was supposed to be a day full of writing. I wanted to write every moment I could. But I can’t, my heart isn’t in it. I was writing and having thoughts of writing almost everyday when I was in school. Now I can’t even sit down to think about it.

I feel like I am nothing since I have nothing to do everyday. Going to classes was my life for those five months. Now that school is done, I’ve gone back to the girl who has nothing to wake up to anymore.

My reasons for going to school is still the same and the motivation is still the same too. I guess I just added another reason to wanting to go. I want to wake up to something to look forward too. I want to wake up early with a full list of schedules.

I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m not having nightmares, I’m not staying up to look forward to anything, I just can’t sleep. I lay there and hope to knock out but my mind won’t let me.

I’ve been thinking about my after effects of depression.

For a person who never cared about timing, I started to do things in a timely matter. One of the biggest was leaving for work at a certain time. Small things were doing things at 1, 1:15, 1:30, or 1:45. I don’t know why, but I would always look for a time marker.

I don’t do it as much anymore. I know for a fact that it started when I hit depression stage and I wanted to get rid of that habit. I try to take life as it is and not worry as much as I did anymore.

There was this one time in the past when I thought was over my depression, and this habit hadn’t disappeared yet. I was getting ready for work, and when I went outside to my car, it was gone. I came back inside screaming my head off, wondering where and who took my car. I found out from my sisters that it was my mother and I was angry! It was my time to leave and I had no other way to get to work. It felt like my life was out of my control! I started to cry and bawl my eyes out over this fact.

I cried in front of my sisters. I didn’t even know why I did that in the past. But when I think of it now, I guess it was the fact that I was screaming out to them that I wasn’t fine. I needed help, I needed my sisters to help. But I am the black sheep of the family, and everyone is scared to ask me how I am feeling unless I talk to them first. So life went on. My mother came back and I left later than I did normally for work. I was still angry but I did make it in on time.

The sleeping thing is another side effect of my depression. Like I said, I used to have nightmares. It sucked even more since I remembered them, all of them. They weren’t of monsters or anything like that. The people, who had a cause in my depression, they were ignoring me in my dreams. Even though I wasn’t acting any different, even though I was trying my hardest to get things back to the way it was before, nothing was working. They still ignored me and left me out. And it may sound silly but it really hurt me. Even in my dreams they were still causing me pain.

Ever since I started those dreams I’ve been scared to sleep. I started to sleep later and later every night. I would wait till I was crazy tired, unable to keep my eyes open tired, then finally I would fall asleep.

The last one may be the biggest for me. I can’t help but become a hermit crab again. There is no reason to go out. There is no reason to socialize with other human beings. I feel like even though I try to look more approachable, people just don’t want to talk with me.

I don’t even want a boyfriend at the moment, I just want people to acknowledge that I am alive and worthy of talking to. Make me realize that all human beings aren’t bad, since I’ve lost all hope in men already…

Another thing that has been bothering me is the fact that my memory is horrible. I was the girl who remembered everybodies birthdays and sent out cards ahead of time. I was the girl who people could rely on to have everything. But now I refer to myself has the girl who has a memory of a goldfish. Someone could say something to me and I would forget it in the next three seconds.

And in trying to forget what made my depression happen, I forgot a lot of things that happened around that same time. I even went further back and forgot most of my high school years. People could ask me about things that happened to me back in 09’ and I wouldn’t know.

Except, I would remember random weird things. Like the fact that my parents wanted body pillows and a year later I would buy one for each of them. Or the random little conversations I had that weren’t that important.

I’ve become a different person since then. For better or for worse, I live with it and do my best every day.

Yea I’m weird, I’m random, I’m shy, I’m awkward, I’m an ice princess, I’m boring, I’m strange. I’m a lot of things…


Hard to be Happy

It is hard to be happy.

I should just stop trying.

But there is a reputation to uphold!

Who the fuck cares about a reputation!

But wait, who am I really doing this for?

Why the hell do I even try to be so nice to everybody for?

Oh yea…

Those people who conceived, birthed, and took care of me till now.

They are the only reason why I am still living at home, why I still act nice to our other family members, the only reason why I haven’t fallen back into my deep hole of depression.

But it is so hard…

When they can’t let go of the past.

When they can’t stop caring about how everybody else views them.

It makes it hard for them to be a happy person.

Thus, making it hard for me to be a happy person.

Depression Hurts.. Something I Wrote Back in March 2013

03.03.13

I didn’t think I was still depressed, but it seems like it is still here. This has been following me around for a year and a half now. It has been a year now that I have gotten a bit better but now, all of sudden, I am in the schedule I was before. Wake up, stay in bed, get ready in bed, try to eat something in bed, take a shower, go to work, come back, stay in my room, on the computer in bed, sleep (or try to at least), wake up and go back to work. I either stay hidden from the world or am at work. I talk to no one but to the people who I have to at work. I even stay hidden from my family.

At first it was because I didn’t want my family to know, and I was ashamed. But this time around, they are starting to become the reason for my depression.

Every time I see someone it is always, “Lucy, do this.” “Lucy, do that.” “Lucy, give me that.” “Lucy, I want this.” “Lucy, why are you not good enough!”

There is always a demand, a want, a need. So I give it all, and I try my best at it too, because I hate not giving it my all. I receive nothing or little in return, which is fine with me. I love quotes and one of them is “to give more than you receive”.

Yet there is a time when you get sick of it, and I am sick of it. For the last two years, I have lost all my time, and not only time, but also money. I have nothing to show for the last two years of work. Only have I started to save this year and still there is not much.

I was supposed to take time away to be a good sister, and to find myself. But being a good sister took all the time, and I’m not even sure I did a good job of that. At first I thought I was doing great. Then it became too much about money, and buying all their needs and wants. I started to become their mother. Driving them where they wanted and needed to be. Taking in all the whines and giving in to what they wanted.

When all I want is to live a normal life, they are expecting so much out of me. Why is it so bad to just live a normal life? Does having a diploma from college have to be considered normal?

I’ve even distanced myself from my extended family. As much as they are all great, sometimes they get on my nerves so bad. Sadly they are the reason to me going into depression. Right now, I am not in contact with any of them, and I am actually okay with it.

They also had expectations out of me. All my older sisters are married, and my older brother has a severe case of ADHD, so I was left the oldest. My dad being the oldest too, I had a lot of responsibilities that I was not ready for at the young age of 18/19. Yet I took them all. I had to grow up fast and my rebellion age was taken away from me. I grew up and at times I practically ran the house when my mom was not in her right state of mind.

With this depression running around, it didn’t help that I was single for so long too. I started to see myself as never going to find that special someone. I’ve had “boyfriends” but I was young and still experimenting on what I expected in a boyfriend. Those two “boyfriends” ended in a month or a little over a month. Looks never was a big factor to me. But their personality and life style threw me off.

I sit here in my room, staring at Korean boys, waiting for a boy to come to me and sweep me off my feet. I realize that it doesn’t do me any good and that I should be out there, but I still don’t much about it.

Why? Because I saw how my parents reacted with my other sisters boyfriends. And as much as I want to believe that if a boy loved me enough, he would put up with it and stay, I actually don’t want to put someone I love through that, unless I was serious about him or trying to scare him off.

So I’m waiting until I move out, but I have to wonder if that is going to make a big difference at all. I have these day dreams where I am living away from home and I go out and out of nowhere I have a boyfriend, but will it be that easy?

The topic of moving out comes out. I have been trying to do so since I graduated high school, but it hasn’t happened yet. Because I have no money, it has been donated to the needy sisters/family. I am trying and hoping to move out this year, but it keeps being delayed month by month. I want to wait for the snow to end, but it is March already and there is supposed to be a snow storm tonight! Then in April my parents are going out of the country for the whole month. So now I have to wait for May.

I guess it doesn’t help when I fall in love with all the wrong people. Sorry for the random tangent…

Growing up, I see things around me and I learn from it and remember them for a long time. I saw such independent ladies when they were single. Yet when they got with a guy, their level of insecurity shot down and they changed.

I’ve been independent for all my life. So when people actually start caring… I am confused as what to do. How do I explain myself for them to understand? When I don’t even understand myself?

My past makes me, but my future molds me. I am me because of my past. I distance myself in fear of what people will think. I walk through a crowd of people with a cold stone face because I don’t care what they think.

Who am I? What makes me, ME!? When I was younger, all the older ladies would praise my looks. I have nothing to prove though, being single for all my life. Should a man prove my beauty though? Can’t I be beautiful and independent?

I am never happy? Or where did my happiness go? Or maybe it is because that happiness was never there in the first place. Is it wrong that I am tired of being happy? Tired of pleasing people with an image of what people want to see.

Don’t miss judge though, because I am not depressed, sad, mad, or even angry. In fact I don’t know what I am feeling right now. I am socially awkward. Even I admit it. But do I have to go and explain myself to everyone? Do I have to shout to the world that the words are there, but they are a jumbled mess, because I have three to four different things going on in my mind at once?