Post 6: Paper Planes Bring Signs of Hope

My brain mocks me. It speaks words to me I wouldn’t dare speak to anyone else. My brain sits smug in my head, knowing it possesses complete control of me. My brain has made me hate everything I create. I have never felt accomplished. No amount of A’s or pats on the back could make me feel any different.

I struggle to accept my imperfections and my limitations. I have never once been proud of who I am and what I have become, yet I strive for perfection in every avenue of my life, working toward some unattainable goal that will always be just out of reach.

This past week had been especially hard for me. My life felt like a marathon, and I was being pushed beyond my physical and mental capacity. I was heaving while my lungs were struggling to support my breaths as they became shallower and shallower. My whole body ached in pain, yet I convinced myself to push even more, to tap into my reserves when they had already been depleted. I kept chasing and chasing, trying to not let life get away from me, but no one was on the sidelines to cheer me on. It was just me and my menacing brain telling me to give up as I was almost across the finish line.

As I watched my classmates throw their paper airplanes from the Zoom meeting, I clicked on the airplane icon to send my message in the chat. “It is all going to be okay, everything I am working toward is worth it, and I am enough.” Although the action of pressing a button on my keyboard was not as fulfilling as it would have been to throw a paper plane, it gave me a release that I didn’t know I needed.

I had been really struggling that week, specifically with writing my WP3. It was a vulnerable piece that required me to further tap into all the pain associated with my relationship with my mother.

My mother is one of the smartest people I know. In fact, sometimes it feels like that is what comprises her entire identity. However, she is extremely emotionally immature, lacks the ability to empathise, and does not know how to show her love. She is very analytical, and has approached her responsibilities as a mother the same way a scientist does their experiments, emotionally detached from their subject.

While many parents desire to have children so they can love, support, and care for them, my mother wanted kids to “pass on her genetic material.” In this sense, I was her experiment, her way to create a studied, manufactured, reproducible subject. This was how she measured her success as a mother. She lived vicariously through me in order to see the results of her work. Because of this, expectations were always high. I always had to excell because there was no room for failure. I had to live up to the idealised image my mother had set, but there was never any winning.

My life was spent in my mother’s purgatory where I would be judged and my achievements would be weighed against my failures, and she was the one who ultimately decided my fate. Inevitably, this meant I would be punished because my mother hates herself and she hates me, I am her creation after all.

I hate my creations because they are an extension of myself the same way I am an extension of my mother. Why would I feel satisfied with with anything I do if the one person who is supposed to love, nurture, and protect me unconditionally has already decided I am not worthy.

But as I watched the paper planes fly across my computer screen and heard my classmates reading each other’s messages, I realised in that moment, they were the cheerleaders I needed. Their words, their affirmations, the encouraging messages they wrote that they needed to hear, made me see how much I needed to hear the same things. Their paper planes gave me the strength and hope to keep pushing just a little longer, to cross that finish line. “It is all going to be okay, everything I am working toward is worth it, and I am enough.”