Jalouis’s Journey into an Identity Crisis

Written by: Jalouis 
​Email: [email protected]

​When I think of my childhood, I have this tendency of looking at it with rose colored glasses. Still to this day, I feel like I kid myself into thinking that I should only focus on the good things; the privileges above all else, because if I don’t, I’m simply an ungrateful bitch. 

As the youngest of 3 sisters, born into a family of immigrant parents, making me a first generation American, I know and am always made aware of my upper hand. Trust and believe, I choose to lead my life with gratefulness every single day, but as I get older, and can no longer be ignorant to the real world, it’s becoming more difficult to be a generally and genuinely happy person. All this context to say that, I really do love my childhood and have beautiful memories attached to it, which in itself is a pleasure that many will never have, unfortunately. Now obviously, life wasn’t perfect back then either. School became unbearable the older I got. My parents were my greatest source of stress in my teenage years, and that zest and lust for life was slowly but surely disappearing. I s truggled severely with my mental health (bipolar II) in high school, especially an after having been taken to a mental hospital at the age of 16, in February of 2019. With all this being said, I don’t remember even the worst of times back then being this bad, like how life feels right now. That’s why I’m constantly asking myself; what the fuck happened? How did life get this way? It’s what I’m trying to figure out, in this 22 year old brain of mine. Inside of a body that feels 55, but with an under-developed mind that hasn’t aged a day over 17. This is the not so brief story of my life these last couple years.

My father disowned me for the first time in my life at the age of 17, in 2019. We took a summer trip together, just him and I, where I met his new wife for the first time. I won’t lie and say that this entire trip was god awful, because it truly wasn’t. I have some of my favorite moments of life take place from that time, but the hurt and sorrow that came with it stains and overweights everything for me. I try not to think too much about that summer, as it was mentally brutal, and that’s including the fact that I was also being groomed then. The second time being disowned hurt even more. I was 21 years old, in October of 2023. Being told to not speak to this man, although we were living under the same roof, was perplexing at best. This was when I really started isolating myself, hearing awful things being said about me, as if I wasn’t there to hear those same words sting and cut through my skin like bullets. To this day, I repeat those exact same words back to myself. How absolutely cruel. The final nail in the coffin occurred in January of this year, 2025, at the age of 22. This time around though, it’s been set in stone. We haven’t spoken a word in the past 4 months, and he no longer lives with me. I haven’t experienced a heartbreak before; not until this one, and I’m still in the middle of processing everything. I’m having a hard time understanding how I could have loved this very person before, as a child. I’ve put him up on so many pedestals, just to find out later in life that his ideologies, beliefs, and values are all based on bigotry, which I can only see now. Who I am in my most real sense, deep down inside, to my core, is the exact opposite of who he wants me to be, and he despises me for that, precisely because I REFUSE to change for him. This is a heartbreak that will linger for a lifetime. It’s the wound that never heals.

Ever since I can remember, my mom was always older than the moms of all the other kids my age. She had me in her mid forties. Around my mid to late teens, my sisters and I started noticing some concerning behaviors coming from her. She’s always been a hoarder, as many immigrant parents who came from nothing tend to be. The disturbance though, became the amount of things that she was misplacing. Thousands of dollars would go missing at a time. Special documents and letters would be on top of the table one day, and gone the next, with no recollection. Everything bothered her. She would always catastrophize all the minor mishaps of life, living in total extremes. Maybe who I am currently was a result of all this learned behavior? I always have that question floating around in the back of my mind. Living like that was infuriating and scary, to say the least. At this point in life, I don’t recall who my mom was prior to this. As much as I try to remember her when I was little, I just can’t, which is made all the more strange when I can vividly point myself out in childhood. Bizarre, isn’t it? Her condition worsened as she aged, and I later came to find out that she was developing Alzheimers. I know now, things I didn’t know then, and with that, I try to extend myself grace, for my awful behavior towards her in the
past and sometimes even now in the present. As I still live with her, I know that she’s got to be tired of holding and carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, but specifically now, as a woman with a disease that she can’t admit to having, because it hurts her pride. The difference from then to now is that I know she’s hurting. Here’s the thing, the world doesn’t appreciate or compensate caregivers in the way that it should, and mothers above everyone else know this. I’ve learned that the hard way, having been my mom’s primary caregiver the past couple months, with no compensation. Now, please don’t mistaken this statement as me saying that I wouldn’t do this without pay, because I have been and will continue to do so, as her daughter, but it’s frustrating to think that if I was a young man, the world wouldn’t put that responsibility onto me or make me feel guilty for not wanting it. I sometimes blame myself for feeling resentful towards my situation. How many people wouldn’t want to spend more time with their aging parents and loved ones while they still can? It’s another one of those “ungrateful bitch” instances I find myself having.

To conclude, adulthood hit me like a ton of bricks, which is why I’ve been living on escapism ever since. I’m walking the fine line between contradiction and an identity crisis waiting to happen on a daily basis. I bet you couldn’t even tell that my real name isn’t Jalouis. She’s just the coping mechanism I pretend to be. As of right now, I don’t think I know who I am, nor who I want to be. I’ve lost the plot in my life, and it feels like I’m giving up on myself, yet again. Things I thought I knew about myself back then are now uncertain. I blame the accrued trauma for that. All in all, I think I’ll be fine. At this point, I can only hope for that to be true.

Thank you for reading my story thus far.



​© 2025 Anonymous