Fourteen years ago on this day, I completely broke ties with my birth family - ba, mẹ, and anh - dad, mom, and older brother. I spent weeks drafting a final email with the help of my then therapist. As soon as I received confirmation that my parents made the last payment for my university degree, that was it. I hit send, and a very-long process of extricating myself from my abusers was formally complete. About nine months earlier, I was offered a great job that afforded me financial independence. I started building community with other survivors of child abuse, and I let myself focus on the basics of life.
My biggest concerns at the time were to finish my Bachelors degree, and make enough money to pay for therapy, rent, and food. I spent at least three nights a week and one weekend morning attending peer support groups, I journaled as much as I could, and I wrote cathartic poetry for a class I was taking. I went to the gym early in the morning and I was at work by 7am. I wore a sleek pink Razr cell phone around my neck like a necklace, so I could call or text anyone for support at any minute. I wrote an “Emergency Plan” for my colleagues - I still do this - just in case any members of my birth family showed up.
Nearly a month later, I read one of my new poems to a group of my peers at the Southeast Asian Student Graduation. This was a graduation to recognise the unique struggles that Southeast Asian refugee communities overcame in their journeys to establishing new lives in the USA. I read my poem to a room of my peers’ families and to a large group of my friends, many of whom became like second family to me. Listening to my poem was probably the first time that many of them were hearing of my family’s abusive treatment. And although I received empathetic hugs, kind touches on the shoulder, and many congratulations, my parents’ absence was a constant presence in my heart and mind. Each and every one of my graduating peers thanked their parents for supporting them throughout their lives. And for me, I was freshly celebrating that I would no longer need to suffer at my parents’ hands. I was making sense of the intense grief I felt about losing them - losing the people I had to love even if they didn’t love me back. I was trying to understand - what does it mean to be Southeast Asian, when my connection to being Vietnamese comes through my parents?
Fourteen years later, I am still grieving, making sense of my identity, creating a self whom I can love and be proud of, and attempting to build community with others who understand the value of shared purpose. Below are some new lessons I’ve learned in freedom, particularly in the last two years. I write them in general “you” terms, but I understand this might not be true for a lot of folks. It’s been true for me.
1. Freedom requires rebuilding trust in yourself, not just trust in others.
2. The experience of having to fight for your freedom gives you a different starting point/baseline assumption about many things. For example, you might feel grateful for things that others feel entitled to, and/or take for granted. Or, your tolerance for challenges in relationships is maybe too high and you do more adapting than asking others to adapt. Often, it can be really hard to recognize that you are starting from a different place than others, and it’s hard for them to recognize too.
3. Freedom includes immense joy from the ‘smallest’ things. Since moving to England, I often have moments of gratitutde for my life when I’m food shopping. There’s something about having enough money to buy what I want and need, that is such a simple pleasure.
4. Building an identity from scratch appears to be harder the second time. (a) Because you aren’t totally sure if you are building from scratch or if you want to salvage or carry anything over, (b) You have a sense of what it was like last time and constantly compare your processes, (c) You probably didn’t think you’d have to ever build an identity from scratch again. (d) You think it should be easier because you have done it before and you can’t tell if it actually is harder or it just seems harder.
5. The experience of freedom lives on a continuum and each of us has our own scale.