Dear Iris:

I will retell your story using the information you knew at the time, not correcting the information to fit what you found out at a later time:

You grew up in the Philippines with your parents. When you were 8, your parents left you in the Philippines and moved to America. You then lived with your older brother and with one of your older sisters who worked on a cruise ship with a second older sister.  Your second older sister married a man with whom she has a son, and you lived with her and her family.

When you were 12, your second older sister took you with her and her husband and son out of the Philippines and to Manchester, UK. At 13 you came across your birth certificate and found out that your second older sister, he one you were living with, is actually your mother, and that you didn’t know your biological father. You kept this new information to yourself for two years, during which you were “so unhappy and irritable”.

At 14 you moved with your redefined family out of Manchester and to a very small town within the UK. You hated living with your redefined family in that small town. At 15, you finally told your former sister, now mother that you found out that she was your mother two years earlier She told you that she was a single mother when she had you and your grandparents pretended to you and to everyone that you were their daughter, their “last child”, because they were ashamed, afraid of being negatively judged by society for having an unmarried daughter with child.

At 19, you moved on your own back to Manchester. At 21, you moved back to the small town and lived with your redefined family, the relationship with them was better than before. At 22 you moved to Sydney, Australia, where you lived with your UK born boyfriend. You “loved it then hated then loved it”.

By the age of 25 (your current age), you and your boyfriend, now fiancé, moved back to the UK and currently live in a city in Scotland, close to his family. One of his family members is his grandmother whom he sees often. You are annoyed about her asking him to do simple things for her, things she should know how to do on her own, like turning on her laptop. You have arguments with your fiancé regarding him attending to her too often, for simple things. “every time she texts him or calls him I get a little bit annoyed/ paranoid because she might go and ask him to go to hers”. She paid for part of the wedding you plan to have next year, and she is nice to you, but you feel that she is overinvolved in the wedding planning, and you feel indebted to her and guilty regarding how you feel about her.

You feel lonely, somewhat anxious and depressed, and lack direction in life. You wrote: “I have felt this in Sydney and also everywhere I move to which makes me think it’s not the place, it’s just me. My childhood history caused me to have anxiety and depression but traveling for me was great as I felt like I was running away from my problems”, and regarding meeting your boyfriend, now fiancé: “before I met him I was a mess I had no direction in life, I just wanted to travel and runaway”.

I don’t know if you are still following your thread and therefore, I don’t know if you are reading this. If you are here, reading this, please let me know if I retold your story accurately and if you would like, we can communicate further.

anita