The Beauty of Reliance

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So much of our lives, or at least my life, the message was to not rely on others. Be strong. Be autonomous. Be sovereign. Don’t be dependent. Don’t be needy. I, for one, internalized that sentiment. Ended up feeling offended if I relied on anyone for shit… in my fucking teens. Thanks, dad!

I truly grew striving for self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Any deviation from that objective, from that goal, that path, that trajectory, was intolerable to me. No matter how I look at it, I was destined to go there. From the teachings of my dad early one, to societal implications of perfection, to self protection and self preservation, all pushed me to the same direction.

I never thought there could possibly be a downside to gravitating towards self-reliance. I could/would connect to others, even choose to rely on others, and revoke that anytime I wanted. It is a powerful notion, quite literally.

Throughout my life, I have consumed a lot of music, shows/series/ and movies. But I’ve only watched a handful of animes. Not even two-digits. So I’m not an expert in that space by any calculations. The most recent anime that watched was in 2024 and inspired me with something beautiful. Something I had never seen or felt as strongly and clearly as I could have and maybe should have.

The name of the anime is Haikyu. Here’s a little background, and it contains spoilers:

The show is the story of a short boy with a colorful personality who is in love with Volleyball. In his journey, he joins a team in high school. One of his teammates is called “Tsukishima” or “Tsukki” for short. Tsukki’s character development in the show is most brilliant, but I am not going to talk about that part. As he (Tsukki, not the main protagonist character, I am not going to talk about him) gets better at volleyball, his primary skill grows to be blocking the spikes from the opposing team. He becomes an incredibly smart blocker. At some point in the show, his team is playing against a team, one of whose spikers has a sophisticated way to hit the ball which makes blocking him practically impossible under ideal condition of spiking.

There is a scene in the show where the setter of the opposing team makes a pass to prepare the ball for this sophisticated spiker, and Tsukki jumps to block him. But he knows that he can’t block it. He know any way that he go for the block, the sophisticated spiker alters his spike to avoid the block. He knows he is defeated before he reaches full height of his jump. The fact that succumbs to the reality that he cannot successfully block his opponent is incredibly beautiful to me. I find the idea of submission, to give up, to surrender, and acceptance of defeat poetically aesthetic. This would be a tangent, but I’ll explain it here.

Since I was 8, if not earlier, I get migraine headaches. It’s a part of my life that I had to come to terms with. For a long while, the process was that 1) my migraine headache would start, 2) it would get worse, 3) it would start to destroy me inside my head, 4) I would puke and 5) eventually pass out, 6) and wake up the next day, typically headache free. For some reason, and I really have no idea about the background here, early on, no one bothered to give me pain killers. After a few years or more, I was introduced to the idea of pain killers. However, by then, I had internalized a lot of toxic beliefs. As a result, I had become a hard-head, meaning that I would refuse defeat of any kind. In this context, I would not acknowledge that the pain was greater than my tolerance. I had to be stronger. So I rejected to take pain killers. Consequently, I imposed self destructive torture on myself and the 6-stage process continued to be my reality. In hindsight, my dad’s toxicity had effectively stripped me of my intelligence. I do blame him for it because I was too young to be accountable for all of my actions, including the way he programmed me with intent. It’s not how I would view my decisions or lack thereof in later stages of my life, and I deem myself as the primary accountable one.

Fast forward to age 19, one evening, I am having one of the worst migraines of my life. I lived in university residencies back then. My flatmate is putting clothes on to take me to the hospital. I didn’t mention, but sometimes the pain was so immense that I would lose some agency and lose the ability to resist being treated in ER. I remember vividly. I am lied down. They were standing above me. I said: I give up, this is greater than me. I’ll take in pain killers going forward. To this day, that memory of me giving up and accepting defeat is one of my most beautiful memories.

Going back to Tsukki, his acknowledgement that he can’t stop the super spiker is in itself gorgeous to me. But that it not the main point of that scene to me. Here’s how it goes, and note stuffing in basketball means to block someone:

“if I could stuff him right now, I’m sure the whole team would lose their minds. But I can’t.”

Right Afterwards, his next line blew my mind. As someone who strived to be self dependent, as someone who resisted to ever rely on others, as someone who could not put the outcome of someone that would affect me in the hands of someone else, I witnesses a kind of beauty that brought tears of joy to my eyes. Tsukki knew that he cannot win against the super spiker with his block. So he chose to block in a particular angle and allow the spiker to successfully hit the ball in another direction. And in doing so, as the ball is passing by his failing block, all Tsukki said, in his heart, referring to one of his teammates was: “So you better be there…”

Watch it for yourself.

The truth is, I had never noticed the captivating beauty of reliance. I never passed a ball to my teammate in soccer and thinking “The fate of this game, the outcome of my efforts, it’s all up to you now, so you better score” while I have already accepted the outcome, no matter what it is. If I ever passed the ball, it was because I am heavy on maximizing likelihood of success by optimizing team work. I never felt the beauty of accepting fate and putting 100% of the outcome in the hands of someone else and relying on them. When I saw that scene, I felt, with every inch of my body, how much I miss having that in my life. Someone(s) to rely on. Someone to defer the last call to. Not to maximize utility. Not to optimize operations. Regardless of outcome. Just to feel that there is someone whom I can rely on, even if we fail. Even if we lose the soccer game.

I realized what I was yearning was not to never ever rely on anybody. It was not to be super reliant either. What I wanted was to be able to, from time to time, close my eyes and leave my fate in the hands of a trusted friend. I realized that I needed that experience before I died to feel the I lived a fulfilling life.

But that is not all there was to it. There is an appalling side to this sentiment. A force, rooted in trauma, that would make me feel I hate this thought. So far, I have only told you one third of the story. Now, I am going to tell you Part II and how much I resent the idea of reliance. But this time, not from the perspective of the one who relies. But from the perspective of the one is relied on. It’s disgusting. It’s gross. It’s ugly. It’s provokes my hatred. It brings out my resentment with a fire made of dark passion.

You see, growing up, I was witness to adults around me. I saw how notions like love are used in their most manipulative and controlling forms. I saw how often adults were trying to make others do work for them. How consuming others’ bandwidth as much as possible was a norm. For years, every time someone talked to me about how disconnected we are in North America and do not have a sense of community, somewhere deep inside, I was like “thank goodness, otherwise, everyone would have been pressuring me all the fucking time to do shit for them.”

Don’t read too much into. So many cultures in North America have the same characteristics. I had friends from East Asia, South Asia, to cultures heavy on an Abrahamic religion and beyond with similar characteristics. I would have hated growing up in any one of them. The common denominator is that individualism shrinks and you are diluted in the identity of the group, and that comes with what you are pressured to do, and how you are pressured to be. That never sat right with me, and I don’t imagine to ever be content with it. In fact, I fucking abhor it with disgust. In fact, that experience in my upbringing pushed me develop severe avoidance attachment. On top of that, I deemed the notion of was love repulsive as all I had seen about it was pressure, coercion, manipulation, and control. “Relying on each other” was romanticized and the legitimacy of being an individual not a part of the family/community/society/nationality/etc was severely attacked. In junior high ear, I was observant enough to realize it was all to serve whoever held the power. Whether it was the rich class, whether it was the older generation, whether it was the parents, whether it was the monarchs and religion leaders, it was always to serve someone else. Over years, I saw myself fading, my conviction dying, and my hatred grow. And do not underestimate the bottomless well of hatred that exposure/experience created in me. That is the origin story of the trauma that drive me to hate reliance. If my inclination to be ultra independent and not reliant was coming from internalized toxic beliefs, my hatred towards being relied on was rooted in trauma. The thought of being pressured to do something because someone wanted to rely on me would have made me sick and agitated.

Many years later, while going through a 1.5 year long process that is the subject of another post, I started to realize that without the notion of love and its associations, my life and my language were lacking. I started to think that love does not have to be the way I was exposed to. Started to question my pre-exposure to love. Over time, during that 1.5 year process, as I was working on other things (courtesy of not being in survival mode and being in living mode aka not being poor), I completely redefined my version of love, my approach to it. Likewise, I redefined my approach to being, fakely, strong. To acknowledging a weakness. To always being self sufficient. To ask for help. To rely on someone else. To be fucking real. To pretend being all right. To mask. To lie out of shame, out of fear, out of guilt. To feeling inferior. Though it wasn’t as simple as I make it sound here. I’ll write all about it later in another post. These days, as far as I know, I am the most romantic person I know <3

Even tho I stopped believing in strength the way my dad wanted me too, I never thought as relying on someone as a beautiful concept. If there were beauty there, it was the beauty of being real and accepting the reality of needing someone. When I saw that scene and heard Tsukki’s inner thought, I immediately realized that beyond the satisfying beauty of being real, there is something incredibly gorgeous in relying one someone else and leaving the rest to fate. Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of contexts in which I would never leave fate to someone else. Just because I saw beauty in reliance in one place, it doesn’t mean I’ll close my eyes, rely on others, and jeopardize my life and future. #duh

But that change of perspective on love, strength, and reliance does not address the other problem. To rely on someone in a forceful or coercive way, to this day, makes me puke. And that brings me to the last part of this post. What would resolve that problem? The answer is, two components needed to come together, without which I could never feel comfortable relying on someone else.

  1. They need to be willing and enthusiastic to support me. If it is not clear to me that they are enthusiastically willing to be there for me, I will never ever ask them to help me and would not relying on them one bit beauty.
  2. They need to be able to maintain the balance between the value of being reliable with the magnitude of the effort proportionate to that value. Balance my experience with their own self care. In other words, they must have the bandwidth, the capability, the means, and whatever it takes to be relied on without them having have to go out of their way in a way to the extent that the harm to them disturbs that balance. In simpler terms, under normal circumstance, I would not be comfortable with a close friend to go through tough times to do something for me. It would pain me. This component would require me to believe in their judgement to maintain that balance.

When I tell you I am one of the luckiest people in the world, believe me. I have someone in my life that meets both components. I trust her when she tells me she cares for me. I believe in her judgement to balance it with self care. As some of you may have guessed by now, that person is my best friend, Sadie. My friendship with her taught me that if someone has little to no bandwidth for me, my connection to them will never reach the highest levels of its potential.

Raven #brutalism
July 24, 2024

169 thoughts on “The Beauty of Reliance”

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