I am living my life forgiving the perpetrators alone, all while they do not even know it. I realized that the words "I did it because I love you" were wrong only after distancing myself from those who claimed that their actions were rooted in love for me.
My parents needed to find a scapegoat to relieve all kinds of misfortune and anxiety they experienced in society, and I, being young, marginalized, and isolated, was a convenient target for them to pass their anxiety onto. My mother blamed me for all the misfortunes that happened to her. She claimed that the family was ruined because I was born with a bad soul. My father was always drunk and always violent.
While writing 'An Intimate ‘___’' which unpacked my childhood experiences, I realized that I had closed my eyes to it myself, even while recognizing the difference between violence and affection. Affection learned after birth is often mistaken for love, even if it is full of flaws.
People usually use familiar concepts they already know well to help understanding when explaining unfamiliar and complex concepts. For me, the fact that my parents loved themselves more than they loved me—and that they would ruthlessly abandon and use me if danger arose to their own souls and beliefs—was too unfamiliar and complex. Therefore, I agreed to explain it with the word love.
I visited the house where I lived during my childhood for the first time in nearly 10 years. The house was the same as before, except that it was full of mold. In the process of feeling that entering the house I felt was like hell was better than I thought, I felt as if the sadness of my childhood had somehow disappeared. While feeling that perhaps the present me had saved the past me, and that the huge hole that had formed inside me could finally be filled, the things that happened in the house surfaced at the same time. The sensation I felt before teleported from the past to the present and arrived at me quickly and intensely.
Even after leaving the house, various scenes and scenes continued to overlap in front of my eyes. The scene where my mother forced me to memorize books on honoring the deceased in a room to make me a shaman; the scene where my father drank and committed violence; the scene where I caught fish and cut off their heads to help my grandfather's work when I was an elementary school student. As the images of various places where I lived and many scenes of past time overlapped besides these, the past me became the present me, the present me made the past me okay, and the past me gave pain to the future me. I thought that the linear temporality of past, present, and future does not seem to flow as given when it comes to trauma.
I am leaving records of the places where I lived in my childhood and writing about the things I experienced. It is not that I want someone to recognize the sadness I went through, but I am trying to witness the events of that time again through the act of leaving records. I am looking back at the past time again and throwing questions to the scenes of the past that pop up sporadically.
Believing what is invisible as the truth, and actually feeling and blindly trusting the truth so that one thinks nothing of making others into devils and harming them; a person who is weak to the strong and strong to the weak deciding who can be beaten based on personal standards—besides these, there are so many things I want to question.
Whenever I hear or see stories related to genetics or biology, I suddenly feel a groundless fear. It feels as if the perpetrator and I are already the same person. I decided to admit that I am vulnerable for having these thoughts. I want to accept my vulnerability, not turn anxiety and misfortune outward, untangle the endless questions within me through dialogue with myself, and continue the dialogue with the world.
Therefore, I do not aim to explain the structure of violence or to enlighten the perpetrators. If I continue the act of taking photographs and writing by using the huge hole formed inside me as a pathway, I think that my story might become a certain universal story that can reach people as well, rather than being only my own story.