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Essay: The Orphan
When I was much younger, an NGO used my service to ghostwrite stories of individuals that had survived violence in their childhood by interviewing them and putting their stories down on paper
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span>When I was much younger, an NGO used my service to ghostwrite stories of individuals that had survived violence in their childhood by interviewing them and putting their stories down on paper.
The project stalled. Most survivors got too overwhelmed by their own traumatic responses as they joined this project.
I, too, was triggered by one survivor’s story: a grown man who was accompanied by her mother. His experience was way too similar to mine. I began crossing the boundary of a professional writer by trying to be Mr. fix-it-all, because I had not been able to process my own painful experience at that time and my desire to connect with him began to morph into a desire to fix him as I inadvertently projected my own life experiences onto his.
It has occurred to me that we can never fix somebody else; we can only fix ourselves. Being aware of this, many survivors begin to turn the need inward and take care of themselves before they can truly connect with other people.
After losing contact with these people for so many years, I recently began to have recurrent dreams in which I see this man sitting next to his mother. They never say anything to me. They just sit in silence, as do I. But we are aware of each other’s presence. I know this man’s story and I know his mother’s suffering as well. They haunt me endlessly.
My recurrent dreams reflect my orphan complex. If I have one regret in life, it is not so much that I have been abused or bullied, but because I did not grow up with at least one functional parent figure who could teach me how to become a functional adult.
The connection with that man and his mother? Well I was, and always have been, yearning to be a part of his family (not including his abusive father, obviously). But my insecurities and fear-based responses have driven us apart. As you know, neediness and dependence always blow relationships out of the water.
Furthermore, I am also jealous of him. Yes, he was bullied severely in school and his father was somewhat abusive but — he has his mother, who has supported him to make his way through. I did not have such a luxury. My parents were alive back then, but they were abusive and neglectful (which is kind of the same thing, really). My aunts and uncles also did not like me very much and they blamed me for the bullying. Fortunately, I had my grandparents.
But still, the orphan pity ploy remains strongly embedded within my personality. I got agitated when I read about the poor orphan boy in Thrity Umrigar’s The Weight of Heaven (2009). Similarly, I cried tears of sorrow when I read about the little boy in Yu Hua’s Chronicles of a Blood Merchant (1995). And I cried for Jude St. Francis in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015). And on and on the story goes.
The most destructive thing a person can do, Caroline Myss, an author, argues, is to define oneself through victimhood. Instead, she continues, you should endeavor to define yourself through the love you have to give, your talents and creativity.
Enter my female friend, “Emily”. All her life she has been carrying the orphan archetype saliently; her parents died when she was way too young. Then she met this older writer who then became a sort of father-figure substitute for her. This man also mentored her. Eventually, her sense of neediness for a parental figure, along with this man’s need to feel powerful by controlling younger people, entangle them in a toxic dyad. This older writer has become Emily’s “father figure” all right, but he traps her in a highly controlling and painful relationship.
I remember several articles written by the film critic Eric Sasono, in which he criticizes our society’s prevalent “ideal family” myth, particularly its manifestations in pop culture. Lucky you if you have loving and supportive parents because you will grow up healthy. If you come from a broken home or abusive family, though, brace yourself, you are screwed for the rest of your life: that is the basic premise of this myth. I have seen films in which these orphans have grown up to be psychopaths or even murderers. Seriously, this is an exaggeration.
This myth can be true in some ways, but it does not represent the truth. Humans have an intrinsic reservoir of resilience and survival. Yes, your parents might mess you up big time, but you sure can absorb a lot of lessons and love from other people and/or sources as well, which help you grow up into functional adults. Perhaps the “perfect family” fairytale, no different from the “true romance” fairytale, is none other than patriarchal society’s attempt to fool us into believing the illusions on the sanctity of these institutions, thereby strengthening the power and control that these patriarchal institutions (marriage and family) have over individuals in society. It is hard to break their hold.
My saving grace was my grandparents. Their love and kindness eventually helped me to receive the same thing as an adult (I was not totally a lonesome orphan, after all). There are many people, some of them strangers even, who embrace me with a level of compassion enough to fill my reservoir to cope with life when things get tough, helping me become a functional adult. Once I begin receiving compassion from others, I begin to be able to give myself some of it, trying to nurture myself and re-parent myself. Then I have a reservoir big enough to give love to other people as well.
This kind of reparenting and how it can help us connect with other beings is what Irish singer Sinèad O’Connor, herself an abuse survivor, tries to convey through her songs “This is to Mother You” and “I Am Enough for Myself”. These two songs equip us with enough optimism that no act of violence is cruel enough to severe our connection with that timeless compassion and connection with other people.
“Probably this is also what this man and his mother both try to show you through their appearances in your dreams: that it is possible to still reconnect with that kind of love with people who don’t necessarily have to be with your biological parents,” my English mentor told me this evening after I recounted my strange, recurring dreams.
I keep seeing them because they also think kindly of me, wherever they are now. After all, seen from up above, we are just tiny dots, no different from the twinkling stars we see in the night sky; our presence as human beings is so meager that the sole reason for our presence on Earth should fundamentally be to exchange compassion with one another.
