Awake - JIN
Resentment.
For me, it starts in the ears and settles like stone behind the eyes. It changes the way you see someone and creates a barrier that makes sound unbearable. A voice that should be familiar instead vibrates at a pitch that physically hurts my head, a sharp ringing that disrupts my thoughts. It brings me shame to see them in that light, even if it is just occasionally, but I can’t help it. Something in me changes, making the people I’m supposed to love become the worst versions of themselves in my eyes.
For a long time, I blamed that ache entirely on my parents. I trapped myself in an exhausting, defensive loop every time they demanded something of me, spinning a web of unanswerable questions. Why do they do the things they do? Why do they make me do these things? Every expectation they voiced felt like a tightening knot around my chest. In the moment, the calculus of survival always favored submission; it seemed infinitely easier to swallow the hot spike of irritation, paste on a neutral expression, and comply just to keep the peace. But the mind is a meticulous accountant. Without my consent, it opened a quiet inventory in the back of my brain, logging every forced obligation and every moment I felt entirely unseen. I treated this mental inventory like a protective shield, foolishly believing that cataloging their unfairness somehow kept me safe from their control. Everything I do, there’s always a voice in the back of my head that thinks: what would they think of this? I hate that voice, but it’s still there. Whispering to me the new things that I’ve done that would be the source of disappointment.
But lately, the fog of immediate anger has cleared, leaving behind a much colder reality.
The ledger I have been keeping isn’t an account of their failures. It is a meticulous record of my own. When the room goes quiet, the confrontation ends, and the physical headache finally settles into a dull throb, the questions stop pointing outward. They pivot mid-air, sharpening their edges and landing squarely on me: Why didn’t I just do that in the first place? Do I always have to be the object of disappointment? Why can’t I just do better?
It is incredibly easy to resent a grating voice outside of yourself. Victimization is the easiest way to lie to yourself. No matter how smart you are. External blame is a warm, comfortable cloak; it casts you as the tragic victim, them as the unyielding transgressor, and makes the emotional math perfectly neat. It requires zero accountability to be angry at someone else. It is infinitely harder to look into the mirror and realize that the anger you are experiencing is actually a reflection. The grating sound tearing through your head isn’t just the tone of their voices; it is the friction of your own compliance. It is the sound of you giving in, over and over again, abandoning your own borders before a shot is even fired, and then bitterly punishing yourself for not being perfect enough to escape their disapproval.
I want to be better.
We keep this internal inventory open because we are obsessed with figuring out how to stop being a disappointment. We balance the sheet daily, calculating the exact metrics of our failures, wondering what impossible standard we must meet to finally cross the threshold into being “good enough.” But resenting your own boundaries makes you both the jailer and the prisoner. You end up drinking the poison of your own self-critique, waiting for your perceived flaws to finally die off so you can emerge as someone who performs better. You become the architect of your own entrapment.
But knowing the anatomy of a trap doesn’t automatically generate an escape route. I sit here with the persistent, exhausting desire to do better. The blueprint for who I want to be is perfectly clear, drawn with precise lines in my mind. But wanting to change and possessing the actual momentum to move are two entirely separate realities. Right now, the internal fuel is completely spent. The motivation is gone.
Instead, I am left quietly musing over my own familiar shortcomings, watching myself fall into the same compliant traps, nodding my head while my jaw aches from clenching.
The ledger stays open.
It stays open simply because I lack the energy required to close it.