My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life

I suppose that I should explain why, even though my parents had caused me so much pain and were actively opposed to everything that I did, I did not break off contact with them much earlier. In retrospect, I wish that I had run away from home in high school. Not having done so is the biggest regret of my life.

I had actually discussed in high school with some friends my intention to run away from home, but I was talked out of it. It wasn’t that they had given me reasons not to run away; they were the reasons not to run away. Having a very supportive social network in high school went a long way towards helping me to avoid the fate of some of my peers who likewise had abusive authoritarian parents.

In elementary and high school, I had several schoolmates who were suicidal or exhibited self-injurious behaviours. When I probed into their backgrounds, the cause was inevitably social isolation. Either they had abusive parents but no peers in whom they felt they could confide, or they were bullied at school but did not have parents who helped them deal adequately with the problem. Often they faced both problems at once. I was very fortunate that, when I first arrived in Canada and had to face bullies at school, my parents were away in Hong Kong. Otherwise I am certain that I would have been punished for getting into fights at school, which would of course have hobbled my ability to defend myself. Instead, my teachers were very sympathetic and understood that I was acting in self-defence.

By the time my parents had joined me in Canada, I had learned how to avoid getting into fights (I found that my words can be far more intimidating than my already impressive physique). But there was one incident in high school which gave me a glimpse of how my father might have reacted. For gym class, we would occasionally play flag football. One day, the regular teacher was away, and the substitute was either clueless or indifferent. The class voted to play “real” (i.e., tackle) football instead. I had carried the ball for a touchdown while two or three guys were hanging on to me. My gym clothes were completely shredded in the process. When I came home, my father saw my ripped and bloodied clothes and screamed at me about them for the rest of the evening. He demanded that I ask the people who had ripped them to pay for them. (How much more stupid about the social rules of high school could a person possibly get? If I had done that, he would have been seeing many more ripped shirts from me in the future.) He expressed no concern whatsoever that I might have been injured. I have no doubt that if I had been involved in a fight, he would have reacted in the same way.

I could see for myself why some of my schoolmates were suicidal or self-injurious. They had parents very much like mine, and they were picked on at school just as I had been. The difference was that they couldn’t defend themselves, because they would have been punished at home for doing so. The only recourse then was to allow the bullying to continue. But other kids will not generally make friends with a kid who’s being bullied, and so an unwillingness to fight back against a bully is essentially a social death sentence. Self-harm was really just a way of getting desperately needed attention from the adults in authority.

My popularity in high school helped to stave off the depression which should have resulted from my parents’ treatment of me. But the fact that they continually criticised my friends — the very same people who urged me to be patient with them and to forgive them — only served to highlight how despicable and ungrateful they were. As I have written previously, my parents would continually try to destroy my social connections and isolate me throughout high school and university. They kept insisting that my friends were “distracting” me, when in fact my friends were helping me to manage the continual distractions from my parents. If it hadn’t been for my friends, I might have cut off contact with my parents much earlier.

Another reason I did not run away from home was that I didn’t think most people would have believed me if I had told them how abusive my parents were. I had the highest marks in most of my classes, the highest average in the entire school, participated in numerous extracurricular activities, and was one of the most popular people in the school. I think that people who don’t have abusive parents typically imagine that abusive parents beat their children for not doing well in school. Mine, on the other hand, were continually attacking me for doing so well that I was practically already in university. My classmates’ parents were always expressing to me what a wonderful job they believed my parents must have done, and they kept asking me what enrichment activities my parents had engaged me in. I was too embarrassed to tell them that not only did my parents dismiss all such activities as “worthless” and a “waste of time”, but would have screamed at me or beat me if they ever found out that I was doing them. My classmates and their parents kept assuming, because I was always doing creative and interesting things when I was around them, that I must have been doing those things at my parents’ encouragement. But the reason that I did so many interesting things when I was visiting other people was that my parents had forbidden me from doing those things at home, and I saw my friends’ homes as places where I could circumvent their prohibition.

I suppose that if I had run away from home, it wouldn’t have really mattered even if no one believed me when I explained to them that it was because my parents had been abusive towards me. Probably very few people would have even asked. But I always felt as if I had to provide satisfactory explanations to everybody, and I think this is the outcome of having been constantly interrogated by my parents throughout my life.

I didn’t seek professional help, even though I saw my high school guidance counsellors somewhat regularly for other reasons, because I didn’t think they would have believed me either. In retrospect, they probably would have, because they’re trained for this kind of thing. In any case, my story has only gotten more preposterous over the years. Who would believe that a Ph.D. student was researching a topic that his parents had threatened to disown him for studying when he was in high school?

Another major factor in my decision not to seek help was that my mother kept pressuring me not to discuss my father’s threats against me with other people. Now that I think about, this was very selfish of her. It meant that she knew that my father’s behaviour was wrong, but chose to silence me rather than to protect me. Even in my last telephone conversation with her, she was far more concerned that my housemate hadn’t overheard my father’s ranting and threats than she was about my well-being. And it had always been this way. After every single time my father had blown up at me throughout my life, my mother would come in afterwards and beg me not to tell anyone.

One might think that the reason I didn’t seek help was because I had internalised her shame at my father’s lack of self-control, but that wasn’t it at all. I felt that the situation was shameful, but I never felt that the shame should fall on me. I’ve always thought that it was my father who should have been ashamed of his behaviour, and if shame had anything at all to do with my decision not to seek outside help, it was because I had wanted to spare him the humiliation of having his shameful behaviour made public. On the other hand, when I came to Waterloo, I was ashamed of my biological connection to my father, because he had insulted so many of the people whom I would be working with or around.

There are actually more rational reasons why I did not run away from home. I thought about the consequences, and, while there were mostly positive ones for myself, there were a number of negative ones for any children I have in the future.

It is difficult enough to maintain certain aspects of one’s culture as an immigrant even with the support of family, but without them it is likely impossible. I would like, for example, for my children to be able to speak Cantonese, to read and write some Chinese, and to have firsthand culinary experience with Chinese cuisine. My cousins who were always surrounded by Cantonese-speaking adults could mostly understand what was being spoken, but could barely speak a word themselves. Nor could they write anything in Chinese but a crude imitation of their names, and reading was entirely beyond them. Without any Cantonese-speaking grandparents and extended family, it is certain that my children would not be able to manage even that. My parents had deprived me of enough, and I did not wish to deprive my own children of anything. Also, I think that the chance that my parents would be as abusive towards my children as they had been towards me was not that great. My observations tell me that, for whatever reason, people are often much kinder to their grandchildren than they had been to their children. But now that I have been through the experience of having my interests continually dismissed as “worthless” by my parents, I would never want to expose my children to the possibility of being told that by their grandparents even once.

Another reason I did not run away from home to go to university was that I did not know what my parents would have done to my brother. My father’s rage had always been focused primarily on me, and there was a possibility that it would have been transferred to him if I had left. Now that he is an adult with his own life, this is no longer a concern.

In some sense, the way that things have transpired is actually the worst of all possible worlds for me. If I had run away from home in high school, I would have been free to be a pioneer in quantum computing, when the field was just beginning to get busy. (Of course, even if I had been studying quantum computing at that time, there was no guarantee that I would have been successful at it.) The price would have been the lost of my family. But I have had to pay that price anyway, after my parents had already deprived me of numerous career opportunities with their interference.

I think that coping with abusive parents is very much like negotiating with political terrorists: they treated every concession as a vindication of their methodology and only pressed for me to comply with their further demands. Once they began to use the threat of disowning me while I was in high school to coerce me into doing what they wanted, there could only have been one of two possible outcomes: either they destroyed my life so thoroughly that I was no longer able to function, or I reached a point where being disowned was actually better than the alternative. My biggest regret is that I hadn’t realised this in high school and run away from home before my parents could cause all the damage that they did.

– davinci