Honor Aside

Chapter 6

Going into my fourth and last year of university, I was already burnt out. I had sleepless nights, physical aches and pains from the stress, and I felt incredibly lonely. We didn't socialize much, as a family or individually. It was seen as virtuous to stay at home, do chores, and pray. I wanted to kill myself more than ever. I had been talking to a counselor for over a year. I had made lots of progress, but it still felt like I was always trying to recover from whatever went on at home rather than work on the things that I wanted to improve. For me, a big part of therapy has been learning to let go of comparisons to others and having compassion for myself. I used to see myself as utterly despicable and repulsive. Still do, don't you? Not nearly to the same degree. I saw myself as pretty much useless, even though I wasn't. Like the feeling of badness, the knowledge of it was also ingrained in me.

Over the course of the next few months, I fell apart. An extended family member passed away and I was inexplicably distraught. It was the combination of knowing this person who I'd known had died and the cold way in which my family handled it. They joked about her death even the same day as we found out. They used humour to cope, but it doesn't work if people use their jokes to test others' reactions to determine if they are grieving or not grieving to an appropriate extent. That kind of emotional surveillance in the midst of loneliness and punishment for acting incorrectly suffocated me. I began to stress-eat again. I worried about what I'd do after I graduated. I knew it would be hard to find a job, and I had never been very social so I didn't feel like I had much of a network to draw upon. Time was almost up. My dad talked down to me many times about marriage. I tried to argue back, but it never helped. My mom would sometimes say that she'd make sure he didn't do anything stupid in that regard, but sometimes she was frustratingly silent.

I burnt out completely. My mind seemed to shatter. When I tried to read papers on biomarkers of disease for a project, I couldn't remember things I had read just seconds before. Nothing made sense. It was about more than just having slept poorly for months. Lack of restful sleep always affects my concentration, but I couldn't focus no matter how hard I tried. It was hard to feel good or rested or awake or alive. I thought at least once every hour about killing myself, for real. I knew my own thoughts were what plagued me, but thoughts are hard to control. You react to them and create your own misery sometimes, without meaning to. I would feel suicidal, try to think about things that could help me focus on the present moment (a trick my therapist recommended) and then I would struggle to avoid thinking about being a massive failure and a talentless loser with no marketable skills.

I still applied to medical school. I had written the MCAT two summers before. I didn't want to apply, partly because I felt unconfident in my ability to stand out through the crowd of applicants. Also, I wasn't sure I could handle the rigors of medical school if I was unable to cope with my undergraduate program. It seemed like something I had to do, and that felt wrong. I tried to convince myself that it was what I wanted, because I didn't want to make things at home even worse. However, I also knew that I could do everything to make my parents happy and it still wouldn't be enough. My world was so small. They taught me the opposite of using my intuition and strengths to choose a career path. My mom nagged at me and dug at me about completing the medical school application for weeks. After I had, she said she had a feeling that I hadn't submitted it, or if I had, then I must not have tried very hard. I wanted to throttle her at times.

The first time I self-harmed was after an argument with my parents. My dad summoned me to his and my mom's room. I had to sit in a stupid old office chair while they talked down to me and played me like a fucking moron. He said I couldn't be like a child anymore, without responsibility. I had to grow up and think about my parents, who had already sacrificed so much for me and were tired of my immature refusal to commit to any one acceptable thing. My mom said she was tired of cooking and cleaning for us and needed to see an end in sight. I said I needed more time, that I had been considering applying to grad school. My dad said it was a stupid idea because so many people with graduate degrees still couldn't get jobs. He wore me down on that idea over the next few weeks and I tried to believe that I would benefit from not pursuing that option. That night, he said I was getting older and other girls in the community my age were already engaged. He said the point of education was not to learn to disrespect and disregard my parents. I felt trapped. In most conversations, he would pre-emptively frame dissonance as proof of my weakness and impressionability in a Western society that taught us to turn our backs on our cultures and families. It was all a big anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic conspiracy and he was the only one who could help us. Things would worsen when I tried talking to friends about him and they responded that he was right, although his approach was off. It was true, apparently, that Western and Eastern cultures clashed. He was just trying to protect his family and our heritage. He just needed reassurance that I was doing what he really wanted, which was finding my place and creating a strong foundation for my own life. He just needed to see the proof, and it was up to me to provide it. Fucking christ. It never worked. I just learned over time to stop trying. Attempting to be honest with my dad only ever hurt me in the end. He'd use whatever information I provided to try to get me to do what he wanted.