They said I was a grumpy baby—one who cried more often than she smiled. I remember that even as a young girl, I had bursts of tantrums that I myself could not control, no matter how hard I tried.
When I entered my teenage years, those tantrums slowly transformed into depression. I loved life, yet life itself felt suffocating. During those years, I poured all my emotions into writing. My first novelette was a ghost love story—ironic, considering that at the time, I had never experienced falling in love. Still, I wrote it as if I already understood longing.
My first love, when it came, was explosive. It was the kind of love I believed I could not live without, yet it quietly drained happiness from the inside. At seventeen, I had never heard the term toxic relationship. My mind had been conditioned to accept emotional pain as normal. I was simply told—and eventually believed—that I was “just being emotional.”
Looking back at my childhood and young adulthood, I now realize that the separation anxiety and clinginess I displayed for years were rooted in unresolved emotions from early life. Without blaming my parents, I understand that they belonged to a generation where tantrums were met not with understanding, but with discipline. Later, as an adult, when familiar patterns repeated themselves—when I spoke up and my partner did not listen, when I was dismissed as a drama queen—I became agitated. Subconsciously, I was being returned to the moments when my voice had been shut down as a little girl.
In the early to mid-2000s, another relationship entered my life. By then, I had begun sharing my emotions with friends. Yet once again, my feelings were brushed aside, dismissed in the same way I had grown accustomed to. The aftermath was subtle but lasting: I became harder. I showed fewer emotions. I learned to be more logical and less expressive. And perhaps my friends, too, could not be blamed—they were likely raised by parents shaped by the same generation as mine.
It is reassuring to know that today, people are becoming more open to understanding emotions rather than invalidating them. With greater access to information and resources, we are now able to ask why instead of rushing to criticize. And perhaps, in learning those whys, we finally make space for emotions that were once silenced.
The World of Second Chances 