Chubbicorn80, doxxed - who is the person behind 80?

My therapist asked a hard question, and I struggled to answer it. This letter is my attempt at answering who I am.

I was never happy.

I said that out loud to my therapist.

She had just asked me to look back at my childhood to remember one moment of happiness.

Of course I was happy!

• Playing Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo for the first time.

• Digging a gigantic hole in the backyard.

• Riding my bike to the skatepark.

These were activities, but I was not happy. Smiles were there, but they weren’t real. We were together, but I was alone.

The realization that happiness never existed was hard to accept. It meant that the memories I had were manufactured to justify an existence. I went through the motions, but nothing was ever there.

How do you explain this in a world of positivity?

It was always awkward when the icebreaker is what’s the happiest moment of your childhood. We’re surrounded in a world where you should be happy.

• You should be grateful for what you have

• You should be happy that you’re here

• You should smile more

• You should be having fun

• You should be positive

All the shoulds, all the rules, all the structures in place that says this is what you should be. No where did anyone stop to ask who I was.

If the world had been different, someone would’ve stopped and asked.

Who are you?

I’m not this name. I’m not my job. I’m not what I do.

I was born in a refugee camp #1 in Ga Lang, Indonesia. My parents, in the cover of night, left out to sea in a riverboat with my two aunts. They all went separately and met up at the meeting point to avoid gettting caught by the Vietnamese government. It was five years after the US miltiary exited the war and left those that fought with the Americans as enemy of the state.

Several years early, my dad, like anyone that was a supporter of the American side was rounded up and sent to re-education camp. For several years, he was “rehabilitated into society through education and socially constructive labor.” I’ll leave it at that for now.

And even more years earlier, my parents, in their formative years lived through this war of bombings, shootings, gassing, and destruction. I’ll stop the history at this point, but you can go back further and label out the additional collective trauma of the people of Vietnam.

I was conceived in the middle of this, and my mom three months pregnant with me got on that boat.

The stories of the Vietnamese Boat People are being told today. Most of it appears to be filtered in my opinion. They’re the facts, but it’s missing the emotions.

You hear stories of pirates raiding boats, pulling the gold from people’s teeth. You hear of the gang rape that happened for days, the slavery of women and children, the beating of men, and the impossible and unspeakable things people did.

Even with the knowledge that all this was happening, my parents decided that it was better to take their unborn child on this journey than to remain in their homeland.

I remember growing up hearing the stories of the New Economic Zones. Those that supported the Americans during the war, after re-education, were sent to uninhabited lands, ghettos, and what French journalist called “a prefabricated hell and a place one comes to only if the alternative to it would be death.”

I was born in the refugee camp, away from the support of the village, the family, the ancestors. They had just survive the boat trip that half parished attempting.

I was born to traumatized parents, who themselves never had a childhood, and the little they did have, was deplorable at best.

They brought me into this world, empty shells of flesh.

The world had taken what little they had.

I came into this world empty, imprinting on an apoclyptic reality.

They were “lucky” to be resettled into the US, into a small town where no one looks like them, where the food they were familiar was canned, processed, and foreign.

They were isolated into a small studio apartment, in a system they didn’t understand, in a society that displaced them, then said they were lucky to be here, and then threw all the racist hate towards them.

I grew up with parents who were traumatized, did everything they could to survive in a foreign land, after doing everything they could in a war torn land.

I was not loved.

I was not supported.

I was told to assimulate to survive.

So who are you?

I don’t know.

People share their trauma stories and the moment when they sent their souls away, sometimes early on in childhood.

I thought I could trace my own trauma back to a moment in childhood.

But when my therapist asked me can you remember when you were happy, I now question whether my soul was ever with me at all?

Was it sent away even before my birth?

I am 80, and I am seeking my soul

I love Chubbicorn because it represents the innocent, unscathed completeness I never had. He sits in the middle of the horrific and the most magical moments, between the East and the West, the calm and the storm.

He is pure love, where I am not.

He is complete, where I am parts missing.

He is 80.

Underneath this flesh skin the world calls me is my complete self that hasn’t been given the light of day. I will find him.

80 Ad

Is it an ad if you shill your own products?

Just reminding that I have a few more limited edition candles in my shop. I’m testing out some products and learning ecommerce with the aspiration of creating a line of healing products for your own journey.