Emily Yu - week 1: Ignorance is Bliss

        

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    Sometimes my house is completely quiet, and the floors are completely still, and there’s nothing left to distract me but my own thoughts. There are nights when I feel like no amount of screaming is enough to ignore all the problems I thought were over.

    It’s strange to me how much of my childhood was trying to understand things I shouldn't have had to understand yet. I think about the childhoods other kids had, where they could make memories and get a head start on their studies while I spent years trying to learn how to survive my own thoughts and how to read other people's faces to put them in a good mood. I learned how to deal with alcoholics and how to trick everyone into thinking that they knew everything about me so they wouldn’t question me. I learned early on how trauma impacts the way you think, how grief and depression can take over your life, and how difficult it can be to explain how you feel when you barely understand it yourself. 

    During those years I didn't have much of a choice. I had to learn to live with everything I was feeling, and I eventually grew around it. I could recognize the difference between anger and sadness, and I started to see why some things hurt more than others. Over time, I became increasingly aware of what drives people to act the way they do. The memories I used to wish I could forget ended up shaping me into someone more empathetic. I learned how to communicate how I feel, how to recognize emotions in myself and in other people. I learned how to sit with grieving families and understand a part of what it means to live with something that can't be fixed. I realize that taking care of my emotional health isn’t selfish. It’s necessary and has to come first.  Strangely, I’ve grown to love the person these experiences turned me into.

    But some nights I find myself wishing it never happened. There are these nights where I spiral; I get angry over these things that probably shouldn't make me angry and want to cry. After all the years I spent trying to understand myself, there are still pieces of me I haven't figured out.

    I think about this phrase “ignorance is bliss” more than I probably should. I wish I could be ignorant of what it feels like to be me. I wish I knew what it was like to live a life without having to know the feeling of being trapped in my own body and holding the urge to rip my skin, nails, and hair off to find something underneath that isn't me.

    Maybe I’ll never be able to decide whether it was worth it or not, but I do know that I am still here, still learning to become someone I can be proud of, even if I wish I hadn’t needed all of those lessons to get here.


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