This is an essay my friend wrote for her school. In one word, it's amazing.
Strong
I was fourteen years old with scars snaking up and down my arms and a bloodstained razor that lay by my bed, ready for whenever I felt especially fat or ugly or stupid or for whenever my mom and I fought, all of which were often. I hadn’t meant to end up that way—it was a genesis that had come about as an experiment to see if it could make me feel better. It did, and I was baptized into the blood then and there. It felt good to be able to punish myself for all of my wrongs. For being a disappointment, for being the one that always made my mom cry, for the fact that I was still too shy, too scared to speak in anything louder than a whisper in any of my classes. And as ironic as it was, I punished myself for being selfish, for letting myself fall asleep, for hiding in the dark, for being so weak.
I had always been the different one in the family. The middle child. I was the only one named by my dad, and the only one that really took after him. I looked like him, I thought like him, and from the very beginning I learned that it was weak to show others my emotions—I had to be strong like him. I was labeled the “smart one” of the family, and my one great ambition was to please him, to be good enough for him to be proud of, to be perfect enough to somehow earn that “I love you,” that I never once in my eleven years of life with him heard. Every grade I made in school, every song I learned on the piano, every little competition I ever entered was for him. But I was always second place. Honorable mention. Not enough. Weak.
I thought I had finally done it when I managed to win the fifth grade D.A.R.E essay contest. I was to read my essay at the graduation ceremony. He was at a doctor’s appointment that day, so I had it recorded. I took a deep breath, ignored my fear, fought the “Your daughter is too quiet!” comments my parents had been getting on my report cards since the first grade, and read it loud for him.
He never saw the tape. He never heard my essay. Seventeen days later, he was dead, and I was weak.
He used to brag about me to his friends, playing that game that all Asian parents seem so compelled to do—or so I was told after his death. The only hint of pride that he ever actually showed me was in his habit of coming into my room at night and telling me to be humble, and even then he would always pull on my nose to stretch it out, for he thought it was too flat. Regardless, I had always been his passport into the privilege of Asian Pride, and to maintain this, I was constantly reminded that nothing short of the absolute best should be celebrated. When I got my first pair of glasses and the imperfections in my viewing abilities were recognized, I came home happy. They weren’t as bad as I had expected, after all. He told me I was ugly.
Time passed and I couldn’t remember how his voice sounded anymore, but his words still echoed in my head—only they were my words now. “Why can’t you be thinner? Prettier? Smarter? Better? Don’t be weak.”
I started with just one. One, because my piano playing wasn’t getting better. One, because I had a B in Algebra II Honors. One, because despite all the meals I skipped and the five hundred sit-ups I did a day, I was still ninety-one pounds. One, because I simply wasn’t the perfect that my dad had so rigidly demanded. And then one wasn’t enough, and I went to “one for.” One for every problem I had missed on my latest math test. One for every year of my existence that I now so despised. One for every insult I had heaved at my mom in our last fight, one for every one she had shoved back, and then a few extra, just for being that weak.
I liked the way I bled. I liked the way my blood flowed in streams down my legs—for I had long since started my activities on my hips, too—Tigris and Euphrates joining to form one drift, one current, around an Eden I could not achieve anywhere else in my life. I liked the way it flowered out next to my foot, bloodied serpents gliding through the cracks between the tiles on my bathroom floor—I crushing their heads, they striking my heels. I liked how, when I was satisfied with its course, I could still bleed through the six Band-Aids I had stacked on top of each other as a covering for myself, and how I would sometimes go to sleep bleeding and wake up still bleeding just a little and feeling somewhat weak.
I liked it, but I hated it too. I hated being in the dark. I hated how I needed more and more to feel better. I hated how it was my release, but it just trapped me more. I hated how I was disappointing almost everyone I knew. I hated how, no matter what I did, I just couldn’t stay away from that Tree in the middle of that Garden. And I especially hated how I felt in church when my youth minister would talk about how much God loved us each and every one, and how our bodies were sacred temples made in the image of the great God Almighty Himself, and how I couldn’t listen, how I couldn’t change, because I was too weak.
And then sometime as I was lying on my bed staring at the ceiling with thirty-seven angry new slashes on my body, I woke up. I could see. I sat up and opened my Bible to the pages I was supposed to be studying to teach at a Vacation Bible School in Taiwan that summer. The Creation. The Start. The Genesis. “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.” And with the knowledge that this creation would somewhere down the line beget someone as imperfect, as incapable, as weak as me, He still said the words, “Let there be light.”
And there was my “I love you,”—not from my dad on earth, but from my much greater, much stronger Father in Heaven. And it was more than enough.
My eyes crossed the words again. “Let there be light.”
And then I was strong.
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