■Being a gypsy

I finally understood something. A cliche, but something that is important to me.

I've seen nine counselors and four psychiatrists since I was eighteen. I've been sexually and verbally abused by my family, had eating problems, both anorexia and bulimia, and have also been abused by two of the therapists. I'm also a returnee, as the Japanese label me, so I've been bullied at school, and never really felt like I fit in anywhere, including my family. Yes, I had a whole lot of problems.

I always though about killing myself, and it was a ritual to think about whether to die and how to live at the top of a building on my birthday night. The air was always cold and clear, and stars just seem so near. Up there, rationality just seemed to blur, and wrong or right became so dull with all the pain. As a person who believes Christ, or perhaps in any other religion, suicide is a sin, but it literally felt like living in hell.

Nevertheless, now I finally understand. It was the sense of isolation and hunger of being accepted, that had been eating me after all. It's such a cliche, but I guess it's true. It irritates me because not one of the therapists were capable of handling a bilingual, abused and wounded person, and I myself never realized how much trouble I had when the other person was only capable of handling Japanese, although I am as good as a native after living here twenty years. Some of the therapists were trained and licensed in U.S. and spoke English, but I also didn't notice the huge difference of them and myself -- I can't give an explicit example, but I guess being a returnee and a natural interpreter gives people a different sense. Now, I clearly see the difference is not ignorable. And, it's almost unbelievable that it took me so long to come to this point.

I hate myself. I hate myself for not realizing all these years, for all the money I spent on therapy, for being abused, for being abused again by a therapist, for not being able to communicate my feelings and for even ignoring my own senses just to be accepted by my therapists themselves.

Perhaps being bilingual to me is much more troublesome than others say. Hopefully I can now be more comfortable by accepting that I'm like a gypsy. I've always been an outlaw, anyway. And I hope I can be able to connect with people and have real relationships. All the things I wanted from a therapist are the same things I wanted from normal other human beings. I know there are things that need to be covered by professionals, but now that I realize even professionals can't help, and I can't be really accepted by any professional, as long the relationship is kept "professional."

I hope I can sometime make a real relationship, accept and be accepted, by another person, maybe another gypsy.

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