I am back, at a home in which I’m not entirely sure I belong in. I got a break like I wanted, a time to clear my head and organise my thoughts. I did return with some perspective about my life, but I don’t feel any more relaxed or any less stressed than I was before I left.

I am so not cut out for holidays.

No matter how long or short my holidays are, I somehow find myself being stressed, angry, frustrated and upset. It happened when I went on my first long holiday with the boyfriend. It happened when I went on a 3-day trip with newly made friends. It happened on my most recent holiday with the parents.

Somehow, for some reason, I am bad at having a good time during a holiday. For the past two weeks, I have fought with my mum, get yelled at by my parents, got irritated by rude passerbys and harassed by a stranger. I have cried too many times, got angry and moody too much to forgive-and-forget, and found myself wishing that I had never agreed to go on this holiday.

The very last day of the trip was the worst. There was already tension in the air, and all I wanted to do was go back to the apartment and binge on ice-cream. I just wanted to throw myself on that crappy, thin sofa bed pull-out mattress and sleep the day away. I was already upset and my nerves were fried. Then this strange man kept following me around. I walked closer to my parents, thinking he wouldn’t dare try anything with them around. And when I actually walked slightly ahead of my parents, he actually touched me. Not that he actually did anything – all he managed to do was touch my back with his dirty hand. Normally, I’d ignored freaks like these and walked away. But I was already so angry and tired and stressed. The moment his fingers laid on my back, I turned around and growled, “What the FUCK do you want?!” I thought my parents would defend me, tell him to stay away, or at the very least, stare daggers at him. They did none of the above. They yelled at ME, asking me why I would say that to the stranger. The bastard started calling me names, insulting me with words that barely hurt me, but as I walked away, I gave him the finger and told him to fuck off. As a result, my parents yelled more at me, telling me off for asking for trouble. I cried all the way back to the apartment, and continued crying as I laid in my makeshift bed.

It was a horrible last day.

How glad I am to be finally home. Although things are not the same anymore. I view my parents with different eyes. I already try so hard to accept my parents despite who they are, who they were and what they did. When I told my sister about the incident, she wasn’t surprised. When she was much younger than I am now, her tuition teacher put his arms around her when she was on the phone. When she got home and told my parents, they told her it was her fault, because she put herself there in that position, so she had no one to blame but herself.

When I was a kid, I always thought my parents would be my security blanket, that they would protect me and shelter me from any harm. How wrong I was. Instead, they are now my model of what kind of parent NOT to be when I have my own kids in the future. Everything they’ve done wrong, I’m determined to correct. I was once passionate about having kids of my own, but now I am dubious about being a parent. I am worried that I will commit the mistakes my parents made. I do not want to be like my parents. I do not want my kids going through life the way I had to. I do not want my kids to see the ocean and want to drag themselves in with stones tied to their feet. I do not want my kids to imagine what the impact would be like to fall off a building everytime they saw a high-rise building. I do not want my kids to be me.

So yeah, I got some sort of perspective after this trip, but no, it was not a real holiday or a break. I did have some good times, but sometimes, I still wished I never left home for that supposed holiday. But what happened already happened. There’s nothing I can do to change that. Life doesn’t allow for rewinds or deletes. And so I live with it. And I am, surprisingly, okay with that.