Suspended Fight-or-Flight

Spending days with my younger female cousin taught me that I have never been treated like her. Like I was a young, female girl. There is a particular kind of gentleness whenever her mother speaks with her. The kind which a parent knows how to speak to a young teenage girl. Her mother can be tough and stern, but she would often speak tenderly to her daughter. 

Unlike her, when I was growing up, I did not experience the same gentleness and tenderness. I can't recall the time in which my parents would speak gently and tenderly to me; the way, I have just realised recently, parents should do to their daughters. Don't get me wrong, they have provided more than enough for my physical needs, but I don't think they had the means and measures to provide my emotional and mental ones. Therefore, I had to find and fulfil these needs by myself. 

I think being left to fend on my own made me being in a constant suspended fight-or-flight mode. This mindset bleeds through everything that I do, even the daily mundane things. Ever since I could remember, I often carry heavy-duty bags that contain everything that I could possibly need to face any type of emergency situation. From foldable umbrella to skin ointment, you could find them in my bag. I'm not sure if it's a prolonged trauma response for growing up alone and lonely, but this value stays with me. Even until now. I always have to make sure that I can survive alone—that I can rely on myself to get me through the extremes. And I still do carry heavy-duty bags everywhere.

Deep down inside, I also think that even though I have always been ready to flight to an elsewhere sanctuary, I can only come home to myself. However hard it is. However awful, unpleasant, and tiring. I can only come home to myself. As she knows my worst and she knows my uglies. But, unfortunately, she can't provide sanctuary. Her delusional, ignorant, hopeful mini-self thought that someone could provide a sanctuary one day. A home to rest her tired soul in. Someone with tenderness and gentleness. But who could want to do all that? Who would?

So knowing that, now, I can only rest within myself. As spiteful, dark, unholy, thornful, as it is. She is all I have.