Repression

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash

Freud said that disregarding our desires and instincts can make us saturated with our own agony and guilt.

The more we suppress what we want, the more we become aggressive.
The bomb is ticking — we’ll soon explode, and let our agony flow freely, like when a balloon full of air blast and all its air freely abandons the premises of its past captivator.

One of my main concerns is being labeled and defined by the society we live in, or perhaps I live in.
I’ve written about my fear of being labeled, but I hate being labeled as much as I fear it.

My story begins when I was merely 6 years old.
That’s when my parents decided to immigrate to another country so that I could have a better future.
At that time, my parents were younger than I’m today.
This fact made me contemplate — would have I acted the same? would have I been able to make such a choice?

I’d never forgotten my first day in our new country, everything was brand-new to me. The language was different but it didn’t bother me.
Later on that day, we arrived at my relatives’ house and my mom called my grandmother and was crying hysterically when she told her we were ok.

I got enrolled in a school, and became a first grader a few weeks after our arrival, on January 1998.
I couldn’t even grasp what was really happening.
On my first day in class, I saw kids my age speaking in an unknown language.

I was relieved to find out that there were girls in my class that spoke my language so I could talk to them.

The adapting process went well — that’s at least what I thought, I was learning the language — soon could speak and write, it took time but I managed.

Yet, no matter how well I tried to adapt, I was forever labeled as the immigrant, the strange kid. I was not discouraged at first and tried my best to become friends with others and used the techniques a kid would use.
I was leaving gummy candies on the kids’ tables hoping for them to acknowledge my gesture, but it’d never worked.

I felt alienated, and it was hard because there were times when I was an outgoing and a talkative child. but the previous events made discouraged and sad.

By the end of elementary school — the native kids had never become my friends.

I felt secluded, my only friends were immigrants like me.

I was wondering what had I done wrong.
I was speaking fluently and I excelled in my studies — so why did I feel as if there was a black hole?
I was doing my best to disguise my native language, but my accent had never disappeared.

During the early 2000s, my name was popular among female immigrants. There was this program on tv, it was a humorous skits show.
There was this one skit where they used my name and mocked it. People remember this skit to this day and make sure to remind me.

It felt like people constantly made fun of me — never realizing how hurtful it was, how it made me tremble with hatred.

I’ve spent so many years trying to make myself like everybody else, I tried to disguise my roots. But I was failing badly — people continued to remind me that I’m different, made me feel bad about myself.

When I was a teenager that is when I realized that my “religion” was not the same as of the other residents. People in my country made me feel ashamed of myself for not being the same as others.

My entire life I kept being labeled for being different, for having an accent, for having a difficult European last name.

At my previous job, a client told me to get married to someone with an easier last name, as a joke of course, and I laughed. But inside I felt deep rage, a rage I couldn’t explain.

Freud also said that the root of our discontents lays in our past.

What have I done? I have repressed my feelings.
Nevertheless, I kept looking for approval in the eyes of people around me, and what I sensed was a sheer judgment.

Now, I’m full of guilt.