Battling with My Inferiority Complex
I’ve been in my own head a lot lately. It doesn’t help that I fill my days on lockdown with Netflix shows, virtual events, and bombastic music, only to unplug for a second and feel incredibly empty inside.
I’m not sure what it is — if it is because now I have all the time in the world to face my own self, that I’ve self-inflicted unemployment at the wrong time, and that maybe my whole life is in limbo while everything continues to rotate on an axis. I feel connected to my community, but also lonely at the same time here in Singapore. Every morning in GMT+8, I wake up to 30 messages on Messenger, LINE, Instagram, iMessage, etc. and I lie in bed, texting back to all of them before I begin my day.
I realized, maybe I am not comfortable being by myself.
I constantly use noise, music, and people to distract and numb what I need to feel and process. I reach out to people and ask them how they are, how they are feeling, and what’s new in their life— helping others makes me feel (for a brief moment) that I am worth something, but I don’t think I’ve asked myself these questions recently. And I found that there’s a bit of resentment that I have held against my own community, for not showing me that they care. Why doesn’t anyone ever ask me how I am? My friend texts me to see which Instagram photo she should post, my roommate dumps his friends-with-benefits issues on me, and I feel exhausted mitigating situations and sorting through everyone else’s mental blocks.
I wonder if I did not reach out anymore, would they ever try and reach out back? Am I someone worth putting effort in for? And that pains me, knowing there is a possibility they would not reach out and that my efforts of true friendship would have been in vain.
I battle with inferiority complex — I have many doubts about my decisions and my worth, and more recently, it’s been even more so as I examine deeply.
I can only think of these reasons why:
My relationships with past boyfriends. Both relationships ended amicably. The first more painful, because I realized how fragile love really was. He was the first one to break it off and my self-worth was shattered. The second was a mutual decision, but it stung when I realized it was really over. I cannot help but think that perhaps to them, given some time, they realized I was not a person worth fighting for.
My relationship with my own father. My most painful moment with my father was the summer before senior year, and I had spent most of my weekend hours at Elite SAT Testing Academy. I waited for him to come home, with my recently tested high scores in a manila folder and I watched TV to pass the time. He came back from work and began to yell at me for not studying. I storm off and cry in my room. My mother tells him I was waiting for him to show my scores, and he apologizes to me. In that moment, I vowed that I was done trying to impress my father.
Throughout my childhood, he would joke and call me beauty without brains and never acknowledged the times I wanted to make him proud. He never showed up to any of my speech & debate competitions nor my tennis games in high school. I had been ASB class president, tennis captain, yearbook editor, and gotten my first job at 16 — it wasn’t enough. He didn’t even attend my college graduation. My father has made me feel incapable throughout my youth years and until this day, he doesn’t even know what my career is. He thinks I’m an admin assistant. He diminished my jobs to nothing because he never was interested in what I was doing. I know he doesn’t mean it, but my relationship with my father is complex — we are working on it.
My relationship with myself. Thus, probably the most complicated relationship I have. I am hardest on myself, but because a part of me refuses to be seen as someone who is incapable, dependent, and weak. In Bay Area, where the most talented, intelligent, and well-rounded group of people are herded into one region, that is where I feel inferior. I have no Ivy League pedigree, I feel that my ambitions are half-assed, that I lack the technical and leadership abilities, and that my lack of judgement always gets us in complicated situations. I romanticize things — I build up my expectations of how my life and how I should be, and once it doesn’t live up to those standards, it all comes crashing down.
I’m honestly not sure why I am writing this at the moment, particularly on Medium.
I feel caught in a storm of a hurricane, and intentionally do not want to leave. I want to brood and feel what I am feeling. These emotions of anger and sadness is something I have not felt in a long time, most likely suppressed for a while. Writing is me self-soothing.
I write this — perhaps it is for future Emily down the line to reread this, and remind her that there is a lot of depth to us, more than we allow to share, and that we must address the pain somehow and it is quite unhealthy to suppress it. But to also remember exactly how I feel in this moment and that I should allow myself to be human and feel. Being human is OK — we can be just as capable and independent as we’ve always been. It’s okay to be sad and vulnerable, we must reflect inwardly to find why we are this way, and that this was an abandoned dam that had been overflowing for a while and it has erupted. So yes, we have time now— we can process everything and sit in our feelings for a while.
Emily is a US expat currently living in Singapore to learn about the tech communities growing in Asia. She has worked 4+ years in dev relations, community management, and event marketing within the tech and travel industry. Her time at OmniSci, Google and Booking.com gave her cross-functional expertise. In her free time, she runs the volunteer community initiatives for Singapore Women’s Network and CMX Hub Singapore, as well as promote and write on the importance of early investing and financial literacy at Fangfinance.
