In My Own Skin
CW: sexual violence
A painful amount of guilt has riddled my body for years.
Guilt that floods my every waking moment; where the hours become days and days bleed into weeks and months. I spend my time on this Earth as a cog in a capitalistic world where the hardworking model minority has become my proud identity, my symbolic badge of honor.
I am a human doing.
Not a human being.
Rest and help are not for the guilty. The lack of seeking shelter from others’ aid leaves me in devastating shame, suffering in silence, becoming my life slogan and the price that I pay. Who is out there to save me when I am the eldest, the daughter, the career overachiever, the familial problem solver? If you strip away these internalized labels, what is left of me? Who am I?
Will I still be recognizable?
I am not perfect, though the world, including myself, thinks that I am. Perfectionism has become my number-one enemy, my gateway drug towards unfruitful pursuits of fulfilling my internal needs.
Dare to call me an addict – is rehab in reach?
I have made mistakes in my life thus far. Though some would argue I’m still seen as a good person in their eyes. Then why does my skin crawl with sin, shame, and hurt?
Perhaps it’s because I have stared into the eyes of a rapist. A chapter in my life that’s filled with hurtful words, and embarrassing shame as I put my own body in harm's way. A man I gave so much to and received so little. My kindness and care spit back to me in the forms of emptiness and regret. External validation, concerning my exhausting pursuit of perfectionism, in hopes to be seen, never returned. “No” was never in his vocabulary. “No” wasn’t seen as a complete sentence.
So who is to blame here amid distress and being lost in translation? Is it I, the one who lived by the book? Who consented, only to take it back, for the physical acts became too painful to bear? My voice was nonexistent. I was mute. I was a model of the Asian minority, living in a man’s world; I was born into the broken wings of womanhood where it was – and is – challenging to fly.
To be silenced, I can do no more.
I recognize that now.
The layers of my identity are everchanging and flowing, yet so haphazard and convoluted all the same. Unmarked mental graves imprinted on my skin mark my disassociated past. They show where I’ve been, but not who I am and who I have yet to be. It is finally time to be the person who saves me because I’m worth saving; that broken, shell of a version of myself will go forth with me and cheer me on. She won’t be left behind, in that sunken desolate room, all those years ago. This journey will be ongoing and embed itself in ways I have yet to discover.
This is the first step towards recovering my voice and taking back my own agency over my body. I still have a ways to go, to feel whole again, to feel anew. The layers of shame and guilt may lace my skin from time to time, but I will no longer be a silent citizen of victimhood. Words heal my soul and help my spirit find its rhythm again. And in a world that can be so cruel and throw storms my way, I am learning to dance in the rain. Like a soldier back from a grueling war, I am back home, in my body, though battered and bruised, not defeated. I have arrived and my journey has just begun.