why are we so mean to the people we love sometimes?
being confronted with ugly feelings after reading 'a perfect day to be alone’ by nanae aoyama
As I was reading Nanae Aoyama’s novel ‘A Perfect Day to Be Alone’, I was confronted with a few ugly feelings. The story takes us on a year-long journey in our main character Chizu’s life as she moves in with a 71-year-old woman, Ginko, in Tokyo.
While Chizu is living with Ginko, she’s in a relationship with a boy who clearly doesn’t care about her. When she visits him after moving in with Ginko, a journey that takes “an hour and a half and three changes [on the] train”, he seems irritated by her presence. They had been dating for over two years yet when she finds him half naked with another girl on his lap on her second visit she yells, “You make me sick” even though she doesn’t mean it, and makes the long journey home again. And that’s it really.
Chizu doesn’t play an active role in her life, something I struggled with for a long time. I think deep down Chizu knows this.
“Yohei and I had been seeing each other for two and a half years, but we never went out on dates. The previous year we hadn’t even exchanged birthday presents. We’d usually just hang out at his apartment, and while our conversation wasn’t exactly thrilling, we didn’t get into any spectacular arguments either… I didn’t know how or why we’d break up, but it did feel like the end was coming. And if it was going to happen anyway, I was happy to let things take their natural course. There didn’t seem much point in trying to speed things up.”
She doesn’t introduce herself when she first meets Ginko for fear it will be embarrassing. She watches baseball on TV with Ginko even though she doesn’t like it (Ginko thinks she does though). She waits until Ginko introduces herself at dinner on the first night for her to even say her own name. Chinzu is like a feather in the wind. Wherever it takes her, she will go, so light no one would even notice a brush on the shoulder.
Eventually, all her thoughts come together and she realises the passive role she is taking in her life, and who gets the brunt of it? Ginko. She makes snide comments about Ginko’s appearance, constantly remarking about how old she is as if there isn’t any point in trying at that age. “Why go to all that trouble? It’s not like there’s anyone to look at you.” I wanted to slap Chizu several times. Stop being mean to the old lady! I would say in my head. But I also couldn’t help but feel hypocritical.
I’ve had my fair share of mean moments with a family member. It can almost feel like blacking out. She might say the simplest thing and immediately I felt like screaming. Some harsh tones would be exchanged, some voices raised, some mean words would fly out from each other’s mouths and after a while I’d think, where did that all come from?
Chizu berated Ginko for using up a lot of her toner. She’d spit that Ginko was so old, it was too late for all this skincare stuff anyway. At first, Ginko denied it, but then she simply confessed, “I didn’t use that much,” hardly showing an ounce of emotion. In fact, any time Chizu would come after Ginko, Ginko barely reacted at all, she would “chuckle and disappear” or she was too busy knitting or making miso soup from scratch or getting on with her day, which would make Chizu even more angry. She was “weirdly pleased” when Ginko’s new romance, Hosuke, didn’t show up at the house for a while. Ginko didn’t seem too concerned, “I think he’s just busy,” she says. An unbothered queen. And too right because the next day Hosuke started visiting regularly again and practically moved in. Chizu felt defeated.
This is something I can’t relate to. My ugly feelings would always have a fighting partner and sometimes, like myself watching Chizu say and think undesirable things about Ginko, I would have an audience too. “Why are you so mean to her?” “Wow, you’re really rude to her.” “Maybe you should try being nicer to her.”
But I don’t understand why I do it, so why would they?
It could be a lot of things or maybe I’m just a terrible person. Either way, I know Chizu would hate to answer that question too because it means she’d have to confront something extremely painful deep within her. Something that triggered her kleptomania as a child, something that caused her to have next to no reaction when her mother tells her that she “may” get married again without even knowing she was dating in the first place.
How did she do it? Chizu must have thought. How does this old lady who can barley get up the stairs without white-knuckling the banister have it so easy, and have such a happy, content life? Get a new boyfriend at her age with such ease and have it all work out so quickly when I have been dumped by two guys in the space of a year who have both left me for someone else?
Chizu is surprised when her second boyfriend, Fujita, leaves her for Itoi, the new girl at work. She wonders how Itoi knew Fujita knew how to figure skate within only a week of knowing him. But this is simply because she never asked him. Like you just expect the sun to come up in the morning, Chizu thinks everything in life just happens and that she has no power in her decisions or the outcomes in her life. She thought she could just fall in love and live happily ever after without putting in any work. But along came Itoi, with her smile and genuine interest in Fujita and, to be frank, an actual personality, and whisked Fujita away. And Chizu would sigh and say that’s just how things go in my life; people come and eventually, they get taken away again.
But what does she do to keep the people that she cares about in her life in the first place? What was I doing that made my life feel so insignificant and bland that I, like Chizu, felt the need to take it out on the person I loved the most?
It took me way too long to realise that I was in the driving seat of my life, something that took Chizu a long time to realise as well. I had to stop watching my life go by like I was an audience member looking up at the big screen at the cinema. I had to write the script and direct the movie, decide what I was going to do that afternoon after class instead of being horizontal on my bed, laptop in face, wondering why I was depressed.
If you want a busy schedule, you have to find events and put them in your calendar. If you don’t like your friends, you have to do the tough thing and tell them how you feel and move on. If you want to go out on dates, plan them and get yourself out there. No one will do these things for you. Your life looks the way that it does because of the decisions you have made.
Chizu realised that in order to get the things she wanted, she had to go out and get them. It was time to leave Ginko’s house; take the full-time job offer she received and move into the company dormitory; have a space of her own; go out for drinks with her colleagues after work; set goals for herself and start making decisions of her own instead of letting the wind blow her in whichever direction.
I don’t think Chizu regretted being mean to Ginko at the time, but when she made the decision to move out and take the reigns of her own life, those feelings came flooding in. She realised how unnecessarily mean to Ginko she had been and began to feel sad, missing Ginko even before she had officially moved out. She returned the things she had stolen from Ginko’s bedroom, a habit she still needed at the time to create some illusion of control in her life, and left trinkets of her own around the house (the other things she had stolen over the years) as if to make her mark, to leave behind the person she once was, to leave a part of herself there with Ginko.
I’m more aware of my ugly feelings now. Sometimes they still pop out but they’re there for a reason, and it’s my job to figure out why instead of shaking my fist up to the heavens. It’s funny how we can think there is something else controlling us (all those with a strict religious upbringing say I) but once we let go of that feeling, once we realise we have the power to respond to situations however we want, the less these ugly feelings tend to bubble up to the surface, the more we start to see the beauty of life that everyone else seems to see.
hello quiet readers. i hope you enjoyed today’s piece which is a slightly retouched version of a post i wrote nearly a year ago. i think it’s important to read over old writings of yours. not only can you see how much you’ve improved as a writer but you also can see how much you’ve grown personally too. reading this made me want to pick up this book again, it clearly had a special place in my heart at the time. i honestly feel like reading it and writing this piece healed something within me. the specific relationship i mentioned has changed significantly.
what books have you read recently that have had this sort of effect on you? i’d love to hear about them and your thoughts in general as usual!
here is my last post if you missed it on what a quiet life means to me and here is my latest youtube video on the importance of calming hobby days.
thank you for being here, i’ll see you next wednesday <3
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I think this is such a good point, and a good reminder to be more conscious about how we speak to and treat the people we love. I think (at least in my case) I can be more snippy or snide bc I know they love me, but isn't that all the more reason to be deliberate in my kindness? Thanks for sharing!
I do find since the ones we love are closest to us, and they see all of our cracks and pains, it's easier to project on people who already know who you are, who have already seen you at your worst in some cases. People who see you at a distance, people who you may have an image you want to maintain with, it almost feels as if there is somehow more risk in taking something out on them...
and jealousy, seeing people make decisions for themselves while you are stuck in self-loathing (though, its hard to know that's what you're experiencing at the time) feels like a knife to the heart... then you look down and see you're really the one who stabbed yourself. but I think it's important too, to go through this. jealousy helps put our desires into perspective, good or bad, and shame can help us make better choices in the future (hopefully). Knowing we have the power to choose what to do with our emotions, the less hate hardens our heart!! In turn, the more aware we can be with those we love, including ourselves.
I loved this post and I want to read this book now!! Adding it to my TBR!!