The Strength in Truth
Written by Alecs Kakon
Photos by Jen Fellegi
At one point in my life, not so long ago, I lived a life of feigned strength by repressing my pain. Pushing down all that made me feel scared or weak, I never had to confront my demons, my reflection, my suffering, because it all got buried deep, deep down, and went unacknowledged. Although it felt safe, I knew that this supposed safety was fear-based and probably making things worse (well, not probably). It stifled my potential to live a meaningful life, because every experience was fuddled with inauthenticity. Incapable of deriving genuine pleasure, I kept things tepid, monotone, basically, unidimensional. I had an immense fear of opening up that proverbial can of worms, and so, most of myself went unexplored. In one fell swoop, a few years ago, I finally said to myself that the veil had to come off; I had to start living in the openness of vulnerability, I had to start practicing self-love, and I had to accept all that I am even though that meant I had to accept all that I had been through. As I started to unpack all of my experiences, the bubbles in my stomach slowly began to subside. I slowly started to understand what informed my decisions, what triggered my insecurities, what felt right and what felt very wrong, and how to disentangle it all so as to make sense of things. To take the cliché image a little further, I stepped out of the darkness and I started to live in the light, in the fullness of my life. It was scary, but it was honest. Sitting down with Panida was like a time warp for me. There I was, staring at a strong, beautiful, young woman with a smile on her face, yet I could see that she was wrought with sadness behind those eyes. Trying to tap into the locus of her pain, Panida (aka Jeab), has barely scratched the surface of her three-dimensional self for fear of what she may uncover, but the yearning in her body language dictated that the journey has begun. She’s had a little glimpse of what could become if she were to stand in the strength of her truth, and now that she’s started delving in, there’s no turning back.
Born in Thailand, Jeab lived in a small village all of her life. Surrounded by a loving family, she had no intentions of ever leaving her pocket of the world. She got a great job as a Thai massage therapist and felt fulfilled in her work as she offered people the gift of relaxation and peace. “I love my job,” Jeab explains. “I make people happy and calm. In turn, it also keeps me strong.” Referring to the physical strength her job demands, Jeab’s emotional strength would be tested at the young age of 22 years old, when she learned that her first husband had cheated on her. Giving him the option to straighten up or move on, he had opted to walk away and Jeab found herself alone with her young child. “I was so young, and I had a daughter to support. But I told myself I could do it. I could be strong and be a father and a mother to my child.” Never delving into the intimacies of her past, Jeab contained the details and the impact of her divorce within her. Recalling a time in her childhood when she had experienced a similar way of dealing with hardship, Jeab described the pressure she felt to stay strong and never stray from the path of perfection so as not to be a burden to her mother. She took on the role of caregiver to relieve the workload in the house, and she suppressed any pain she felt to show her family that she could be depended on because of that very strength.
Scared to explore how all that pressure might have been too much to bare, Jeab remembers that there was never any room for her to make any mistakes, but “how come my sister and brother can make mistakes? Even now, if I do something wrong, I am scared to say anything. I always want to show that I am well, I’m good, I can take care of myself.” Jeab knows with logical certainty that her mother would be proud and accept her regardless of how “good” she is, but some triggers are there and we just can’t explain them. But, the truth is, we can explain them if we allow ourselves to dive deep and explore the place where we’ve buried the source of the pain, the first experience that coloured all the ones that would follow. “Whenever something bad happened to me I wouldn’t talk about it, because I didn’t want to make people sad,” Jeab remembers. “Also, in Thailand, whenever something bad would happen, we never talked about how it made us feel. So I’ve learned to keep it all in. I might be upset inside, but I stay strong and just smile because I’m used to not thinking about it further than that.” Tears so intimately tied with a sign of weakness in her Thai culture, Jeab’s stoicism has been hard learned; it was the way of the land. She had to appear strong for all to see, but she always felt like that was a performance “I show the outside world that I’m tough, but it really just feels different inside. I’ve started exploring what all of that means and I’m not scared about what I’ll discover anymore.”
Jeab started working in Thailand for a spa as a massage therapist and that’s where she met her current husband. Cut to a few years later, they married, had a daughter, and moved back to his hometown of Montreal. With transcontinental travel, comes priceless education. Jeab had never left Thailand, and so landing in a multi-cultural city like Montreal was an eye-opening experience, not just in cultural rituals, gastronomy, and dress, but in a social context as well. Jeab noticed that people, most markedly women, were more connected to their emotions as they opened up more, talked about their feelings, and shared life experiences. “I never talked about my feelings until I moved here. I didn’t know how I felt about anything, I just knew some things didn’t feel good, but it stopped there. I learned all about boundaries when I came here. I see how people talk about their feelings, share and connect in an emotional way. The world here is so different,” Jeab explains. “I may never have known that there was this part of me that wanted to go deeper had I never moved here, but I think I would’ve always felt something was missing.”
The growing pains of finding out that her strength is located in standing in the fullness of who she is has been a hard lesson to learn. Easier to bottle it all up and smack a smile on your face. But, how sustainable is that smile if it isn’t energized by full acceptance of your true self. In her profession Jeab spends many quiet hours alone with her thoughts, in the stillness of her mind; she meditates the present to offer peace to others. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if that peace could abound in reciprocation? As her husband encourages her to confront her past and reconcile it, Jeab is beginning her introspective journey toward self-compassion and authentic self-love. With an unrestrained ability to identify her truth, Jeab is starting to finally connect to the inner strength she’s been searching for. As she starts to fine tune her power, she acknowledges that strength is not a veneer we put on, but the veil we take off.
