forever, RP

in cartoon, love alarm, it’s described that in the basement of every soul, there is a box. in the box, there are things that you should never show anyone. because there are consequences of showing people the box.

For the main character, the thing inside the box was her past and how she was involved in the death of her mother. The fact that she let the house burn and watched her mother die in front of her was something that she never told anyone – actually, she might have told one person and the person completely switched up on her and told her that only monsters are capable of things like that.

I read the cartoon when I was in middle school, and I would say it’s one of the things that genuinely changed who I am as a person and how I operate as an individual in the relationships I have with others. I don’t want to tell anyone about my past, I want to be understood as someone that they see, they know, not with some type of a tragic background or whatever the past of me might reveal. In my philosophy, this is a perfect alternative to talking about the things that bother me from my past – if I’m already a silent combination of everything in my past – and my personality is constantly altered and shifting through everyone that has passed me, changed me, had a deep relationship with me or hurt me, and you happen to like my personality and being around me – why should it matter who was I before you?

It took me 6 years to tell my mother that I was domestically abused by my first host family, because it took me 4 years to fully process, compartmentalize and categorize it as abuse. Now, if people asked me who I was living with in high school, I just said family friends. For the people who met my second host family, I would just say I had lived with them all through. If it’s someone unfamiliar, I avoid talking about not living with my family as a whole. I tell people different timelines of coming to the states and tell different people different things, because I know that no one cares about small stuff like this and even if I corrected them every time, or tell people the same thing, what good does that do me? I don’t want to explain the timelines of everything and the beginning and the end because it’s all bad – I hate living with another family, no matter how good they are to me. I hate looking and observing and worrying about the family’s perception of me because it’s all too familiar and all too triggering. I haven’t felt like I have a home anywhere, not because I don’t think I could stay at any place for the long term, but because living with other people, being in commonly shared spaces with other people, reminds me of things and leads my brain into imagining deviations of events that is deeply uncomfortable to me.

That’s my box. When people ask me why I’m always trying to live alone and when they think living alone is too lonely, too quiet, and my friends call me “rich” or “loner” or “enjoy being in my own world too much,” I just laugh and go along with whatever version of whatever excuse of whatever circumstances of RP they have going on in their head. I’m tired of explaining, I’m always pushed to explain why my last name is Piao, if I’m Korean. I’m tired of explaining when I came to the states, who did I live with, where are my parents now. I’m tired of explaining my family, my life, to irrelevant people that are just nosy, rushing to form some type of opinion. With friends and best friends it’s certainly different, but my uncomfortableness with explaining and justifying and covering up some parts of my past that bothers me so much, always gets in the way of myself being completely honest.