About the Book

When I first set out to write this book, I thought I was writing a different book.

I thought I would write about my journey through clinical depression, how I was helped by medication and psychotherapy, and specifically, how the strange dreams (often spiritual with animal themes) I was having played a large part in the healing process.

I started out writing a “synopsis”. I wrote predictably, about how depression affected most of my adolescent and early adult life.

But as I kept writing, something happened.

Other stories started coming out. These were stories before I knew that I had depression, stories about my childhood, specifically, the anger and rage that slowly built up over time until I could no longer contain them.

Instead of writing a personal story about depression, I wrote a memoir about a child. This memoir is about that child’s experience with emotional abuse, how that wove into a life-long struggle with depression, and the long journey home to reclaim her self. It is a memoir about confronting ghosts she has never met, ghosts of domestic violence that echoed through generations of a family’s descendants.

It is a memoir about a child who has found her voice. In telling her stories to the adult that this child has become, the child has found her peace. This child can finally begin to rest.

It was only through writing this memoir that I understood that I couldn’t have written this book when I originally had an urge to write it, back in 2002.

In 2002, I had the impulse and the inkling that this book needed to come into being. But in 2002, I had neither the completeness of perspective nor the emotional fortitude to pull it off.

But it didn’t mean that I waited around, doing nothing. No… in the 9 years since I felt this book call to me, I worked very hard.

I asked myself all the important questions that I had never bothered to ask before about life. How did I want my life to be? What did I want my life to mean? What was more important to me in life than success, or was success what was most important? Who was I, really, and how did I know that this person that I was and had become, is really the person I’m supposed to be?

I wrote copiously, practicing my writing skills, all the while asking, “who am I writing this for?”

I always had a sense that when I wrote something, part of its purpose was to get it out of my head and off my chest, for myself to see and scrutinize and question. But I also felt that I was writing for someone else. And I can never tell which part of what I’d written was for whom. My words had become a voice that had been silenced in someone… and I did not know which words matched whose voice. I only knew that different people had found parts of their voice in different pieces I’ve written, because they had told me so.

This is why I can no longer hoard this writing for myself. Someone else out there may need this as a stepping stone to reclaim his voice, to reclaim his true self.

In these 9 years I went through jobs in a quest for success, only to give up those high-paying jobs to pursue an ideal that was exactly that – an ideal. I didn’t even had “an idea”, I only had an ideal. My ideal was to be the voice of those who dare not speak up for fear of retaliation. To get to that breaking point, I went through several months of employment hell, which, in retrospect, was what depression had prepared me for. If I had survived decades of hell made by my own mind, I could survive hell made by men. So I did. And that experience became another fiber in the muscles of emotional resilience. I can honestly say that today I feel only gratitude to men who had made my life hell, that I wished they would not feel so afraid when they hear my name, because I have no desire to harm them. I understood that they too, were pawns. I now know that courage does not always come when we beckon.

Then I became a mother. It did not make me condone the actions of my mother, but I began to understand. I understood that even the best of intentions is a guessing game parents play, with potentially devastating consequences. Parents tried their best every day, but they prayed that the mistakes they made will pale in comparison against their children’s inner strength. They prayed that their children will grow up to be good human beings because of – and in spite of – the role models that their parents had laid out for them. They prayed that they could never extinguish that light of life from their little ones.

I looked at my three year old son and my eyes asked, “Are these the secrets of the world you have been teaching me, little boy?

“Were these secrets meant to make me dive into the darkest recess of memories and, in seeing them through wisdom, I bring darkness into light? …That I would feel the same light of life, once again?”

I won’t need an answer from my little boy, though.

I’ve already heard the answer from The Youngest Light; The Youngest Light that once lived through me, and has been calling out to me all these years of my life.

Dear Reader, I wrote this book for you too.

May this book help you reconnect with The Youngest Light that you are.

Jane Y. Chin
April 29, 2011