After I graduated from college and tried to find something in Japan, if they had just let me be, I might have ended up getting married and starting a family and finding a job and completing my language studies.
After they thwarted that and engineered my return to the U.S., they should have just supported me to go out into the world and find a job. I might have found it to be so unbearable that I might have ended up begging them to support me through law school and becoming a public defender in San Francisco.
When I told them I was considering being a monk, if I had gotten support – highly hypothetical, since I didn't need their support, and the kind of support necessary to be beneficial would require at least a mote of spiritual understanding – maybe I'd be a monk now.
Really?
Under any parental circumstance, can I picture myself married with kids in Japan? Can I imagine myself as an attorney? I tried the simple working for a living thing and even that didn't pan out. Being a monk is the only thing that actually still makes sense, but I stepped off that path on my own for a reason.
Is there any scenario that I could have encountered that would have snuffed out the spark towards suicide that is the hallmark of my life?
No, and any accusative tone I might take towards my parents' disastrous meddling in my life is only seeing things from their point of view. For what they wanted my life to be, they were constantly shooting me in the foot.
Thanks to my parents relentlessly trying to steer me towards an impossible lifestyle as a doctor, lawyer or in business, my life is the way it is. And there were likely no options they could have supported as hypothetical "good parents" that would have made my path any different.
Suicide was never going to go away. I was never going to be "satisfied" just living a life. So the way my parents are is perfect, almost like they were part of a grand plan to help me towards some perceived, possible spiritual breakthrough. I look down on them, I pity them and wish them the best. I'm separate from them.
But if they were parents who supported me and who I loved and was a part of, this would be even more difficult than it has been, maybe even impossible. I'd probably suffer from depression.
But if they were parents who supported me and who I loved and was a part of, this would be even more difficult than it has been, maybe even impossible. I'd probably suffer from depression.
If my thesis is correct, which is a matter of faith – I'm not trying to convince anyone about it, nor do I myself believe there are any universal truths that we can understand involved – then the act of suicide may be the "bigger" worth I would want out of my life. Seeing behind the reality of the "roads of birth and death and earthly desires", as the Lotus Sutra puts it.
And maybe that's why they're my parents. I was pondering before the sense or the karma in having such spiritually bankrupt parents. It would finally make sense if I realized they have been crucial, if not essential, to my goal.
Bonus points for being totally bizarre and self-fulfilling.
