Becoming the role model I never had

Last night we got to a very poignant scene in the Chinese drama we are watching, The Hope. It’s an episode thar deals with both suicidal thoughts and the greiving a teacher and parent go through after a student kills herself.

It’s one of the hardest hour of media I’ve ever sat through and it was so completely worth it. It brought up a lot of diffiuclt feelings from my days in school that I’ve never once been able to talk about.

I was so distracted by my thoughts during the episode that I had to rewind and rewatch a bunch of it. I hadn’t realized that I had contemplated this stuff so much as a kid because unlike everything else that caused me pain and joy, I never once talked about it.

There are certain things I had to be careful not to say because I knew they would alarm people around me and make them feel responsible for helping me when I knew they weren’t equipped to and neither were the doctors that I met.

The problem wasn’t the doctors or teachers themselves but the system that they operated inside of. It was and is a maze of protocol and rules and I could see that none of the adults around me had done the kind of intense work on themselves that would have been required to convince me of their qualifications.

No degree or certificate is a substitute for real life experience, not experience measured in years but in love and pain, and in self reflection and trial and error.

Obviously it is not measurable, but when you meet the real deal, someone who has stared their fears in the face and keep going, you can feel it.

I needed a role model like this as a kid, not someone with qualifications or reputation but someone who had done the work on themselves. There was no one like that to be found. The adults around me were not bad people and many of them tried their best, but no one was equipped to guide someone like me, someone who felt so deeply and was aware of everything that was left unspoken.

As a result I am still recovering from the damage I did to myself, through the stories I told myself, from the habits I built, through all the self-sabotage.

It is what it is. Thanks to all that, I am becoming the role model I needed as a kid, so nothing is lost.

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