A Lifelong Assignment

"You're not born in the year of the dog — you're born in the year of the rooster. And you're not seven, you're eight. Got it?"

Was that when the practice of hiding something about myself began. My mother would stand me in front of her and make me promise, over and over, now that I was entering elementary school a year early. Sometimes my aunts would join in too. My mother and aunts seemed to find it somewhat amusing, this business of training me to conceal something about myself — they would laugh among themselves — but for young me, it was full of questions. Why did I have to hide the year I was born and how old I was, and why did I have to practice in advance so I wouldn't slip up in front of friends. At the root of that practice must have been love. A love tinged with worry, hoping I wouldn't be mocked or left out among friends simply for being a year younger.

There are things I may have said to someone only once, but that person has likely heard many times over the course of their life. I have those too. Your birthday's in March — how are you early? Can you spare me five centimeters of your height? Are you just naturally quiet and reserved? Most of them are things I simply laugh off, but there are words that keep making me turn back and look at myself. Words about how I don't often share what's inside me — words that sometimes carry a trace of hurt. The frequency has lessened compared to before, but whenever I still hear them every now and then, I realize I'm still hovering somewhere near that place.

Ours was not a family that showed each other what was inside. I have no memory of sitting across from one another, listening to each other's stories, offering emotional understanding, or saying I get it, that makes sense. Whenever my mother discovered something about me that differed from what she had hoped, she would let out hurtful words without hesitation. Was that how she felt she had to fill the silences in our conversations. Wouldn't it have been better to leave them as empty space. The combination of the two words family's embrace feels unfamiliar to me. Someone who has never had the experience of being fully understood within their family goes fumbling for the warmth of the word embrace somewhere else entirely. Timidly wandering from place to place, the destination I kept arriving at was, more often than not, myself. There, with no one to lean on — cold, yet somehow safe — I hid deeper, further inside, and hid more of myself.

What I needed was practice. For someone like me, whose experiences of fully revealing pain — and myself — to others and being understood had been faint. Whenever I caught myself still hiding, still afraid like a small child, I felt sad that I was still here in this same place, but I decided to give myself a little more time. Giving this process its own name, for myself: a lifelong assignment. And so I practice, diligently. I tell the person sitting across from me about the parts of me that fall short, I take out the parts I had tried not to show, and I try, in small ways, to make choices that differ slightly from old habits. I remind myself that becoming vulnerable is the way toward becoming better.

"One becomes the other."

I am taking an online yin yoga teacher training course. It was during a lesson on tendons — the part of the body that connects bone and muscle. Our bodies, he said, don't divide so clearly — up to here is bone, from here is tendon, and then muscle — as if cut with a knife. A similar example he offered alongside it was the rainbow. Just as we cannot clearly distinguish the boundary where red becomes orange and orange becomes yellow, one thing gradually becomes another. Connection, and process.

I endure the process of becoming a different me. I repeat it, and sometimes pause to offer myself a little compassion. When you observe someone for a long time, there are moments you notice that the words they used to reach for — words with a negative undertone — have somehow grown faint. To witness a positive change in someone, and to realize that we have spent enough time together for that to be possible — there are times I want to tell them, with a kind of excitement, I saw this in you. But I hold the words quietly, in case they cause the other person to think too many things. It is an affectionate swallowing, mine alone. I would like it if someone could notice my changes too. I would like there to be someone watching — me, finally letting out words I nearly swallowed back down; me, slowly correcting old habits; me, working through a lifelong assignment over a long stretch of time. It is something made possible only when several things align: observing each other closely, over a long time, with affection. Becoming someone worthy of staying beside another in just that way — that would have to come first.

Lee Sang-eun, "The Secret Garden"