Growing up Asian and Christian, I was not allowed to do many things. Watching television shows such as the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was one of them. So naturally, when Fresh Prince became available on streaming, that was all that my partner and I did. Mikhail used to tell me all these episodes he loved, and we started watching it from the beginning. Last week, we finally got to the episode where Will’s dad comes back into his life and subsequently leaves again. His monologue afterwards about how he had to teach himself everything and how he will love his kids better than his dad ever loved him hit me hard.
I touched upon my feelings briefly on Instagram, but I feel compelled to share my story on how I cut out the toxic people from my life. It’s a heavy topic, and I often feel that personal stories like these are the ones that have helped me the most. My Instagram post touched on how I also cut my extended family out of my life, but truth be told, telling the story of one toxic person was emotionally draining enough for one post. This post is dedicated to me learning to find the strength to cut my father out of my life, and my hope is that by sharing my story, I can help bring a little bit of peace to anyone who needs to hear this.
Let’s go back to the very beginning.
Even now, I feel awkward calling him my dad. Growing up Christian, my church always taught me that a father was someone who took care of his family through love and righteousness. A father was someone who provided for the family and protected their family. To this day, that is what I think of when I think of a father’s role: a person who loves, provides for, protects, and does the right thing by his family. If I use this as a foundation for a father, my dad was never a father.
As a kid, my best friend was my cousin Chelsea. We lived next door to each other when we grew up in Taiwan, and after we moved to the United States, she still lived only 5 minutes away. We did everything together. We played dress up together, we shared our snacks together, we laughed together, and we cried together. Yet the single most prominent memory I have of my childhood was the constant wish that my dad would let me play with Chelsea. My dad hated my cousin for some inexplicable reason. He called her a bad influence (how could a six-year-old child be a bad influence?).
I still remember one time when I went with my aunt and uncle, and Chelsea to some restaurant for dinner. They had a side-play area (we might have been at McDonald’s), and my cousin and I were playing in the ball pit. Then suddenly, I saw my dad’s angry face staring at me. Without saying a word to my aunt and uncle, he dragged me away, took me home, and hit me with his belt for going outside to play.
One would think that experiences such as those should have made me hate my father, but it never did.
He would hit me, and then buy me a stuffed animal. He would hit me again, and then treat me out for ice cream. It was the most abusive relationship I’ve ever been in, and a reason why I am a huge advocate for domestic violence awareness. Perhaps it was because I didn’t start hating him as a kid that the abuses didn’t stop as I got older. The hitting was still there, but he found a better tactic: verbal abuse to destroy my self-confidence.
He would make me wake up at 4am every day to “study” for 2 hours because “I was dumb enough to need it”, even though I had 0 period (a one-hour class before normal school starts). He would prevent me from getting a job or getting real life experiences because “it distracted me, and I don’t have self-restraint”. He would frequently call me a waste of his money and his time. Being a waste of his time and money (because I had let him down by not choosing a college major in math or science), I had to pay for everything in college myself, which meant taking out huge, expensive loan when I had never even held a job (thanks to his twisted logic that having a job was a distraction).
Going to college was the catalyst for me realizing I could do better than him, but providing for myself after graduation gave me the strength to realize I was a better person than he ever could be.
As a child, we yearn for that most basic desire to feel loved, accepted, and wanted. We are as waves kissing the sand on the beach. No matter how much the waves are pushed away, we always want to come back. That was the single most difficult mindset I had to get rid of. Telling myself that I was better without him, I did not need him, and his approval meant nothing to me was a hard lesson to learn.
When I graduated college and was left with no direction, I can safely say that the years between my graduation up until perhaps last year was the most difficult but most illuminating time of my life. There have been people who scorned me for not having a direction in life, people who have thought themselves better than me, and people who discredited me and my abilities. Funnily enough, the years in college of learning to tell myself that I was good enough, that I didn’t need other people’s approval, and that I was all that I needed helped me see past all the people who would put me down for their own benefit.
Visiting home after realizing for myself that yes, I was good enough, opened my eyes for the first time that it didn’t matter if my dad was related to me. He was no better than the people on the street who would laugh at me behind my back or the people who made judgements about me without knowing my character. He may have been my father by title and by blood, but he didn’t know me any more than a stranger walking down the road.
He never asked me what my dreams were, he never paused to think of my feelings, and he never considered me as a human being. He would treat the waitstaff at restaurants better than he would treat his own daughter, and so what did I owe him?
Nothing. I owed him nothing.
Because I was the one that pulled myself together when I had depression. Because I was the one that supported myself through college and post-grad. Because I was the one that taught myself self-love and self-respect.
My dad never fulfilled his duty as a father to love me, to protect me, to do right by me. His own emotional and psychological problems were not my issue to deal with. His disappointment with how his life turned out is not a statement of what type of life my life will be. Just because he never had the courage to go after his dreams doesn’t mean that I have to sit behind in the shadows waiting for his approval.
I always look back at the strangers who had belittled me over the years as a blessing in disguise.
Their cursed words and their jeers only made me stronger in the end. I can’t lie and say everything is always peachy-perfect. I still have the times when I cry, get frustrated, or get self-conscious about what my purpose is and whether can do it. I still worry about what other people think of me.
But accepting that my dad, though he is my father by blood, has never truly been my father, has given me the push I need to stop letting myself be dragged down by an anchor hoping to drown me.
