Lessons Learned: I sold my soul to Daily Trojan — the social contract

My life is not my own. At the moment of my conception, I was already carrying the weight of my parents’ hopes and dreams. My older sister had dreams of having a younger sibling. And as child mortality was rampant in the jungles of Huế, Việt Nam, raising a child quite literally took a village. Extended family and neighbors would come pouring into our little home to help in any way they could. And in return, we were expected to do the same. It was an unspoken agreement — a social contract.

For my first birthday, my older sister, who was nine years old at the time and disappointed that my parents weren’t planning anything, called up our family, friends and neighbors — quite literally running up and down the unpaved streets, inviting “everybody and their mommies.” And so, on the day of my first birthday, with guests flooding into our tiny home, I sat on the floor awaiting the fortune-telling ritual that would set my future in stone: thôi nôi.

Thôi nôi differs because of local culture and traditions. My family would first have to set plates of food, make offerings and say their prayers. When everything was said and done, it was time to see what my future had in store. A tray of assorted objects — a hammer, a stethoscope, a toy car, etc. — was laid out in front of me, each representing an industry or career path. And one-year-old me would crawl and pick up — as everyone leaned in with anticipation — a pen.

The pen represents scholarship — those who pick up the pen are destined to be writers, reporters — anything that has to do with the written word. So I guess in my desperate attempt to break free of the mold that is the stereotypical STEM student, I ended up writing myself into my own destiny. One chosen for me at the age of one, by a boy who I just can’t seem to remember.

At the end of the day, it could have gone any other way. After all, I had just conquered object permanence. I’m Man — I’m one, and I never fucking learned how to read. 

I only recently learned about the pen story from my sister, who reveals buried memories for me like some shitty time capsule. But for my family, it sat in the back of their minds, waiting for the day the prophecy would come true. The day I would pick up the pen and write stories to be published. And if I’m going to be real, the last time I touched a pen was when my The American War in Vietnam professor made the class handwrite our midterm essays like cavemen. My dainty hands were not meant for archaic tools. They were meant to overshare silly little stories as I tap (quite daintily) away at the keyboard. That’s what I do. I tell stories.

I tell stories to give away parts of my soul. Not in the creepy-deal-with-the-Devil way, but in more of a making-my-mark-on-the-impressionable-young-minds-of-my-generation way. And so we come to my second obligation: the one to you, the reader.

When I first started writing this column, I was just looking for an outlet for trauma dumping. And little did I know, I found that many readers (like five) could resonate with my stories. So I continue to write myself away, probing the deepest parts of my brain (there isn’t much left, by the way) for anything of substance. And there are many lessons that I do not be learning.

But the ones that I have learned, I’d love to share with you. I write out of solidarity with my fellow people with mental illnesses. I write for the things I believe in and the people I care about. And that brings us to my last obligation: the people I care about.

Call me a people pleaser, bootlicker, whatever you want to call it. I like helping people. My love language is acts of service. I guess somewhere in my search for purpose, I became a submissive little bitch. 

But god-damn, am I good at it. 

For someone who cannot take care of themselves, I find myself going out of my way to help my friends: driving an hour to visit a friend who’s experienced a recent breakup; teaching myself niche subjects to help them with their homework; cooking meals for friends too overwhelmed to do anything else.

I can do anything if I really wanted to. It’s just that I feel like I don’t deserve to be kind to myself. 

In my soul-searching, I have yet to find a reason to do anything good for myself. To extend a crumb of kindness to myself the way I do for others. I guess my final obligation should be to myself. And the lesson that I should be learning is that you don’t need a reason to be kind to yourself — that you deserve it no matter what. Because we all deserve kindness. So I want to thank you, reader, and I hope this lesson is one that we can learn together.

Man Truong is a rising senior writing on reflections made in life. In a world full of different personal beliefs and philosophies, he makes sense of it in his column, “Lessons Learned,” which runs every other Friday.