Family Secrets

It’s hard to know where to begin. It always is. The moment when you start trying to put it all together in words, it feels like opening a door that you’ve kept shut for a long time. And when it opens, everything rushes out—chaotic, messy, too fast for me to grab onto anything that makes sense. But I guess that’s how these things are. They never make sense, not really.

My brother visited recently, and, well, it did something to me. He always does. We’ve got one of those relationships that I’ve never seen in any book or film, one that doesn’t fit into a neat category. We are distant—so distant that sometimes I wonder if we even know each other. I mean, really know each other. But we do. Because even if we are distant, there is a connection we have because of what we have endured. We are connected because of the secrets we hold, family ones. There’s this undercurrent, this thing we share but never talk about, a thing that shaped us both but twisted us in different directions.

He left the house at what I remember at 16 but he said he was 21 (there is a reason why we remember things differently, because he checked out at 16 emotionally - from my point of view - while he left our home town at 21, physically), and from then on, things were drastically different, for both he and I. He got away, and I stayed. And in some weird way, at that time, I was envious of that, of his escape, even though I know what it cost him. He carries my father’s anger now - wears it like a second skin. I see it in the way he walks, the way he talks, or doesn’t talk, more like. Emotional dysregulation. Suppression. Repression. All those big words that try to explain something that’s so much bigger than any word can really hold.

I’ve got some of those traits too. From my father. And I hate that. I hate that when I’m around him, I turn into a version of myself I can’t stand. It’s like a poison. It seeps into my veins, and I become this person I swore I’d never be, but there it is anyway. And I see it in my brother too. But he’s different - this big, intimidating guy that people can’t help but fawn over, even though they don’t really know him. They don’t know about the seizures, about the violence.

There’s this urge in me to justify it all, to explain it away. That’s the  survivor in me. And maybe the Korean too. In our culture, you’re taught to tolerate things, to explain away the harm, especially if it’s family. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay. It never was.

I’m stuck somewhere between who I was raised to be and who I’ve fought to become. And it’s exhausting. You either become like your parents, or you run as far from them as you can. I’ve spent my whole life running. Running from them, from the shame of being anything like them. It’s all subconscious, but it’s there.

I remember swearing I’d never be like that, swearing I’d be the opposite. But there’s a cost to that too. The shame runs deep. And it’s tiring.

It’s strange to look back and see how far I’ve come, how far I’ve gotten from that house, and still feel tethered to it. My cousin visited too, at the same time as my brother. He cried, told me how hurt he was that I never reached out when I left. He didn’t understand why I left so completely, until we talked. Until my brother got drunk and started spilling the things we never talked about as kids - the difference between our childhood and our cousin’s. Our dads are twins, but they couldn’t have been more different. My cousin’s father never laid a hand on him, never raised his voice. Ours… well, our house was a war zone.

I still can’t go back there, and after talking to them, my cousin finally understood why. It’s hard to talk about the things that happened in that house. Most of it, I’ll never say out loud. It’s too ugly, too raw. But there was this one thing - a family secret I never planned to share, but it slipped out that night. I saw my brother’s face, the way he wanted to shut it down, to keep the silence. And my cousin… he was the first one to have a real emotional reaction. He finally understood why I left the way I did. You see, when I was young and told my mother what happened to me, she was silent and walked away and we never talked about it since. My brother had the same response. We don’t talk about such things because they never happened. 

It’s strange, this loyalty I have. This deep love that keeps me tied to the people who have hurt me. I want to cut the strings, to walk away clean, but I can’t. I love them too much. Even my brother, even my father. There’s this part of me that’s still that little girl, still trying to understand, to empathize, to find some way to make it okay. To make them okay. (and I know intellectually why I continue to have this urge to want to make things better even though I know it will never)

But being around my brother, it put me back there. Back in that house. I thought I had gotten out, but in a lot of ways, I never did. I’m trying to put myself back together since, but it’s like picking up shards of glass, and I know I’ll never be the same. Perfectionism is a symptom of child abuse. And yeah, on paper, maybe I seem perfect - successful, strong, together. But inside, I’m still far from it.

I wonder if this feeling will ever go away, this sense that I’m tainted, like there’s something fundamentally wrong with me. I feel like I’ll never be able to wash it off, no matter how many times I try. Maybe that’s why I take those long, hot showers, trying to scrub it all away. But it doesn’t go away. It sticks. And I’m not sure it ever will.

PS: Be kind, always.

September 25, 2024