First, I have to admit that turning thirty feels absolutely terrible.
Last year, I was still looking forward to thirty. I thought I was about to enter that wonderful era of womanhood everyone kept describing. But now that my life has actually arrived here, it feels unbearably hard. Life, work, immigration status, my relationship… Every part of it feels like a bad play I’ve somehow been forced onto the stage to perform. The curtain has already gone up, and all I want to do is hide backstage. My universe feels like it is barely holding together.
All this uncertainty feels especially strange to me because I spent most of my life assuming, rather confidently, that I was one of Heaven’s favorite children. Then suddenly Heaven stopped feeling like Heaven and became just some drunken old man, casually picking up my fate like a pair of dice and throwing it wherever he pleased, leaving it battered and uneven.
At work, I can feel my dysfunction more clearly than ever. My brain is always running at full speed, while my body somehow refuses to move. I can’t get myself to deliver projects on time. The nightmare from my school years has come back: that “gifted girl” everyone expected to be able to learn anything, who somehow always failed when it came to actually doing things, who slowly fell behind whenever there was real competition, and then quietly accepted her father’s insults and her teachers’ disappointment as if they were deserved. Sometimes it feels as though I was born to disappoint people. Am I actually just a useless person who happens to be clever in small ways? Was I born to let people down?
And then there is this damn asthma. It started as allergies, and I kept putting off seeing a doctor until I managed to turn something small into a lifelong burden. Sometimes I think I have a strange kind of self-destructive stubbornness: at every important turning point in my life, I want to take one step backward. I want to see what happens if I really do fall all the way to the bottom. Will the world reach out and pull me back up?
Apparently not. Hahaha.
Life outside work has been even worse. I lost several people very close to me, one after another. These were the elders who had watched me grow from a spoiled girl into an adult woman, and now they are slowly leaving the world. And because of this damn immigration situation, I was absent for every goodbye.
That absence makes me feel as if my connection to home, and somehow to the world itself, is gradually being severed. I can’t even imagine what my parents have been going through. What hurts even more is that I cannot be there beside them.
My parents’ finances ran into trouble too. If I had to summarize my family’s entire relationship with money, it would probably be this: none of us is good at managing it, none of us has much of a concept of money, and none of us has ever cared much about pursuing it. Whenever a relative asks my parents to borrow money, they lend it. Though “lend” is probably not the right word. They give it away. After all these years, not a single relative has paid them back. But that is another story.
The final straw was my relationship. This year has been so difficult that even I, someone who is always pretending to be strong, finally couldn’t keep pretending anymore. I looked up because I desperately wanted something to lean on, and all I saw was a weak shadow. I know he wasn’t doing well either. I couldn’t bear to crush him under the weight of my own pain. But I was so thirsty, and he was a dry well.
I don’t know why the universe made me this kind of person. Before I even begin to process my own emotions, I always try to understand everyone else first. And the more I understand other people, the more painful it becomes. It is as if, once I understand everyone else’s difficulties, my own pain somehow loses its right to be seen or comforted. As though it has been erased from the universe.
I haven’t written a single essay this year. I haven’t read a single book. I spent most of the year alone, crying. But I would never kill myself, because that is not who I am. That is not my soul. And yet I also genuinely feel that being alive has very little meaning right now.
I don’t even know who I am writing this for, so I guess I’ll write it for thirty-one-year-old me. Hey. I really hope life is a little better when you’re thirty-one. But if it isn’t, that’s okay too. I believe that by then, at least, you won’t hurt quite like this anymore. The longer the heart spends living in such a concrete and relentlessly real world, the less capable it becomes of hurting in such abstract ways.
And apparently, living a happy life really is a talent too.