The One Who Did Not Exist
The first time I met G, she came through my door clutching her canvas bag tightly and greeted me with alacrity. She dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, and her hair tied up in a bun with loose strands sticking out messily. Her plain appearance sharply contrasted her eloquent and unaccented speech.
“Hi, it’s nice to meet you!” she exclaimed. Her eager smile disarmed me briefly, for her eyes seemed to tell a different story.
G sat across from me and took glances at me from time to time, as though checking if I was still there. She recounted her recent frustration with her parents who rejected her boyfriend.
“They think he’s not good enough for their daughter. They said I’m drunk in love and childish, and that I don’t realise he won’t be able to afford the comfort of life that I’m used to,” she said indignantly.
G’s father worked as a businessman and her mother as a PR director. While her father provided a luxurious life for the family, G remembered him as angry, demanding, and absent. On the other hand, her mother was affectionate and warm but turned critical and cold whenever G deviated from her desires. Both parents had expectations for G to fit into the high society of Singapore and encouraged niche careers like in art history. Any protest was shut down with guilt, anger, and rejection.
“Mom always tells me to be poise. You must be elegant, shoulders straight, you must speak like a lady, you must articulate,” she explained with a calm vehemence. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to complain or convince me.
Although G shared critical childhood memories, protested, and cried during our sessions, I often experienced her as a gust of wind. Her presence was as transient as the hours we spent together, there was no sense of continuity once she walked out the door. And unlike the wind that usually leaves signs of existence behind, I struggled to hold her in mind, even when I tried. Ironically, she gave me her diary the first time we met, as though she already anticipated that I might forget her.
For the first few sessions, I couldn’t shake off the confusion, incoherence, and intangibility I felt every time I saw her. Something about her kept slipping through my fingers.
Then one day, she told me about a conflict with her partner.
“When he did that, how did you feel?” I asked.
She paused, her shoulders hunched, and she looked away.
“Like I was invisible,” she said quietly.
“This seems to stir something in you,” I reflected. “I wonder if this isn’t the first time you feel invisible.”
“No, it’s not.” Her voice broke. “It reminds me of dad and how I feel so invisible around him,” she started sobbing. She recounted memories in childhood when her thoughts and feelings were repeatedly shut down, sometimes with violence.
She wiped her tears and straightened up again, smiling. “You see, in order to be the palatable daughter, I must not exist.”
In that moment, I finally understood the strange absence I had been feeling about G. It wasn’t that she was emotionally detached or indistinct. It wasn’t that she lacked depth or distress.
She had never been permitted to exist beyond her parents’ reality.
For her to truly exist (to have her own mind, desires, personhood), she would need to loosen the enmeshed filial bond with her rejecting parents. She would need to risk becoming an individual. In a healthy parent-child relationship, that risk is supported, knowing your parents remain whenever you look back. But if you have spent your entire life learning that your existence threatens the love you depend on, separation can feel like death. Choosing yourself feels like death.
Children who experience their parents as rejecting don’t stop loving their parents. Instead, they learn to reject themselves. Sometimes even to the point of semi-existence like G. In the safety of a healthy attachment figure, whether a partner, a friend, or a therapist, they can begin to rediscover their own existence. And for a therapist, this is often where the work truly begins.