Editor’s Epilogue: The things left unsaid, I wanted to say the most


Content warning: This article contains references to struggles with mental health.

Some days, life feels like you’re holding your breath through an endless tunnel, hoping that you can make a fun wish once it ends. You know the tunnel ends at some point, but it just seems to drag on. Before you know it, the sky appears outside your window and you forgot to make a wish. You held your breath for nothing. 

Often, we form rituals to control situations that feel ungovernable. Life is short, but we continue to prepare for things that might not even happen. But, all the times I focused on my breath in the tunnel, I missed out on conversations with my dad in the car. My dad died when I was 14, and now I go through tunnels wishing I had spent more time talking to him rather than making wishes. 

My debilitating ritual involves never asking for help without it sounding like an apology and never fully expressing my thoughts in fear of making things worse by opening my mouth. This is also a fun result of learned helplessness — after going through the same situation repeatedly, you learn to stop trying to fight it and give in, even though logically there is a possibility for change. This was especially true in growing up with my mom.

My mom emigrated from Vietnam when she was in her late 20s, and after living through the Vietnam War and its aftermath, I don’t think she ever turned off her survival mode; she bottles up her emotions and expects others to do the same, more than anyone I know. 

She wanted a perfect, A-student, religious Catholic daughter that would never talk back, and one that would get a high-paying job to take care of the family and her when she got older. A daughter that would never dye her hair or get tattoos because somehow that was equivalent to promiscuity. I was that for a time being because the fear of possibly losing my mother somehow or upsetting her overwhelmed me, and that sentiment continuously repeated as I grew older and the yelling became hitting when I made a mistake. 

I know my mom never wanted to hurt me. It was just the only way she knew how to love. It wasn’t all bad; she also paired this with love by making homecooked meals nearly every single day of my life and bringing me cold plates of my favorite fruit. 

Her love was shown in her strictness, and while her lack of empathy hurt me, how could I blame or hate her when no one offered her any empathy growing up? How can I resent her when she gave up her dreams of having a successful restaurant and leaving her family to move to a new country with nothing so I wouldn’t have to go through what she did? How can I possibly bite the hand that fed me, provided me shelter, gave me life? How do I cope with the fact that it was that hand that hurt me the most? 

That painful paradox results in silence — glass-shattering, suffocating silence. So while I was miserable, I continued to abide by her wishes to avoid hurting her and to avoid any more bruises appearing on my body — until my senior year of high school when the bomb I created by bottling everything up exploded.

While my mom has seen me cry, I always sucked those tears back in before I got the “Why are you crying? Would you like a real reason to cry?” This time, I couldn’t control the tears or my emotions. I can’t remember what exactly happened, but it was something about her finding out I had a boyfriend and not understanding my depression that was the breaking point for me.

I explained that I knew she needed help when I was younger as both her and my dad worked endless hours to pay the handful of bills we had. I knew she needed a strong daughter to carry the weight my dad left after he died. But I needed a mom who would just let me cry and hold me and tell me things would be okay. I needed a mom who could understand that emotional vulnerability isn’t a weakness, and that closing yourself off from your emotions doesn’t make you strong. 

I told her how much I was hurting, how some days I wish I didn’t exist, how I spent years just trying to survive living in that house and never learned how just to live life. I told her how I never wanted to keep secrets from her but I had to because I could never be the perfect daughter she wanted, and while there’s always room for self-improvement, constantly expecting more from yourself leads to self-hatred. 

For once, the words simply could not stop leaving my mouth. After what felt like an eternity, I finally took a breath of air, and my eyes cleared up a bit to find tears flowing down my mother’s eyes as she told me that everything she does is out of love, and if I felt this way, she failed as a mother, and I should just kill her to ease both our pain.

The world stopped, or maybe part of me died at that moment. I already lost my dad, and now I was losing her too.

It was not until I left home for a college about 300 miles away that I realized I lost my mom a long time ago — just as she lost her idea of a perfect daughter the moment I was born. I can never be what she wants me to be, nor can she be the warm, comforting, understanding mom I want her to be. So, in the process of learning how to grieve my dad, I’m learning how to grieve for my mom, too — the mom that never existed. 

Tears flood my eyes as I imagine what would happen if my mom were to possibly read this. The likelihood of it is slim to none, but just the thought of it paralyzes me because while I desperately want her to understand, I know that she won’t and these words will only hurt her. 

I wish things would magically change in my life without me ripping myself apart to make them happen. But I can’t keep making wishes by holding my breath through highway tunnels or sacrificing parts of myself for others to change. Life is too short, and I want to live it for once. So, as much as it hurts and I don’t want to, I’m going to leave the things left unsaid alone. I mean, wrecking myself trying to say them wasn’t doing me any good anyway.

“Editors’ Epilogue” is a rotating column featuring a new Daily Trojan editor in each installment and their personal experiences of living in what seems to be an irrepressible dumpster fire of a world.