Love Song, Part 2: Why Try To Change Me Now

In this three-part series titled Love Song, actor, writer and producer Victoria Loke deep dives into the idea of love through a series of literary essays. This series inspired by classic love songs takes the reader on an explorative journey through the three ways in which we tend to experience love: romantic love, platonic love, and self-love. Each essay combines her personal experiences with universal lessons about the nature of love and seeks to inspire you with ways you might bring more love into your own lives, whether in your relationships with others or with yourself. By inviting you to fall back in love with yourself, each essay can be described as a love song to the self.

Part two explores the idea of platonic love through the song “Why Try To Change Me Now” by Frank Sinatra (Fiona Apple cover)

“Look at her, Victoria, she’s so pretty!”  

I can hardly recall a time from my childhood when my mother said that I looked pretty.  

I recall her gushing over her friend’s daughter, also named Victoria, and how  much bigger and prettier her eyes were than mine. I recall her giving my new  swimsuit to my cousin, telling me it fits her so much better because I just looked too  fat in it. I recall dressing up to go out and being chided for looking “slutty”, then  dressing down to go out and ridiculed for looking “frumpy”.  

A part of me thought that one day I would finally reach this mythical  moving goal of physical perfection and receive the love I’d always wanted from my  mother, so I declared a ceaseless crusade against every physical flaw I could find.  My body became my enemy, and the joy of my teenage years was burnt away in a  bonfire of self-destruction.  

As girls, we are often taught to assess our self-worth based on our appearance  in comparison to others, passed down each generation like a stubborn hereditary  disorder from the days when a girl’s sole purpose in life was to make a pretty bride  and then fecund mother.  

“My mother would have never let me leave the house dressed like you,” my  mother had once said.  

I recall my maternal grandmother sneering at me when I was 5, the two of  us alone together in a hallway as she hissed at me about how poorly I was raised. It  doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to see the cage of cruelty my  mother grew up in herself.  

And so mothers do this to their daughters because that was how they were  raised, insult after insult disguised as “well-meaning” advice, and the factory line of  misery churns on until a daughter finally decides to say no.  

It was only when I turned 19 and flew the coop, a farm animal valiantly  jumping off a truck bound for eventual slaughter, that I ventured out into the world beyond my chainlink fence and saw how other people, unconditionally loved and  loving people, could live. People who weren’t raised with criticism like a cattle prod,  who didn’t have a critical voice in their head surveilling them 24/7, barking orders.  

I realized that the distorted prism through which I’d seen myself all my life –  the nightmare hall of mirrors that made me look at my reflection and see someone  ugly, flawed, unworthy, unlovable – was not reality at all.  

I learned that love, real love, wasn’t something that any of us had to earn. All  we had to do was receive.  

In a stroke of bittersweet karmic fortune, I have a paternal grandmother  who is as loving as my maternal grandmother is biting, her words as sweet as the  other’s is venomous. She also lives in another country, while the other lives in my  family home.  

Still, my paternal grandmother and I have always loved each other deeply,  even though we would only see each other once or twice a year. She would sleep in  my bedroom whenever she came to Singapore to visit, reading me poems at  bedtime from her favorite collection of Li Bai’s work and patiently letting her feisty  little granddaughter try to teach her English.  

I didn’t quite appreciate the magnitude of her influence on me until I  became an adult, however, when I began to fly to Ipoh to visit her solo. It was then  that I began to regard her not just as a child lovingly regards her grandmother, but  as a woman exploring the world admiringly regards another extraordinary woman  who has explored it all.  

For one, she has never blindly accepted any stodgy old beliefs about the  inferiority of daughters, as is common in Asian households: in fact, she believes  that you should love your daughters even more because they will one day marry into  another household, and you won’t be able to show them as much love after that.  

And yet her love for me as her granddaughter, is only a small part of the  immense love she is capable of holding for just about anyone who meets her. I didn’t quite believe in superpowers until I reckoned with her preternatural ability to  make you feel loved, just as you are.  

When her best friend excitedly wanted to go on a historical boat tour of  Vietnam together but she didn’t, she went anyway and she said, “It’s not about  where we’re going, it’s about having fun with my best friend.”  

When my cousin switched career paths for the third time in ten years, she  said, “As long as he’s happy doing what he’s doing, that’s all that matters.”  When I told her I’d decided to go vegan, she very simply said, “I don’t eat  seafood either,” and ordered up a bunch of vegan dishes for me at dinner.  

Love never needs anybody to explain themselves.  

In the fresh air of freedom, I found myself a lovely new plot of garden space  where I was able to take a kernel of that love I’d received from her, tuck it in  warmly in the soil, and blossom it into an ever-growing forest of my own, teeming  with life. I watered each plant with a memory of even the most tiniest of  interactions with my grandmother, with whom I never really got to spend much  time with growing up, yet who never once questioned why I did what I did.  

Not when I ate so much cotton candy I threw up on my new dress, not when  I showed up to her house one day with my hair bleached blonde, not when I sulked  from one room to another as I went through the more dramatic stages of teenage  angst.  

The beautiful thing about the seed of love, is that once your first tree grows  and bursts to life with its own fruit, you are free to give away as many of its seeds as  you want. Just like how you never needed to earn it in the first place, no one you  choose to give it to ever has to earn it either, because there is never scarcity in its  supply. Love grows and multiplies with such exponential ease, and we are tasked  only to receive it with joy, then to tend to it with earnest. To weed out any criticism  that tries to worm its way in, telling you that you need to change (“Why can’t yours  be more like hers?”), telling you that you cannot be exactly who you are.  

Your garden is perfect, whether it is tall and unruly, organized and  manicured, or upside down and inside out. It is perfect because it is yours. 

I spend as much time as I can with my grandmother now, each new  conversation with her settling upon my heart like fresh rainfall upon my forest. My  favorite thing to do when I visit her in Ipoh, is to spend every afternoon chatting  with her in the sweltering heat of her living room where she still staunchly refuses  to install any air-conditioning.  

As we sit on armchairs fanning ourselves with an old calendar, she tells me a  story from when I was 3 or 4 years old, when she took me to the hospital to visit my  father who was recovering from surgery at the time. As we waited with him for his  lunch to be served, some of the nurses who’d taken a shine to me came in to sneak  me some snacks from their pantry. Instead of eating them, however, I insisted that  my father ate them instead because they hadn’t brought him his lunch yet, and  began force-feeding him with all the grace of a power shovel.  

She chuckles at the memory.  

“When I saw that, I knew you were good.”  

As soon as she says those words, I feel myself well up in tears. I can’t  remember a time when anyone had ever said those exact words to me before. The  words my inner voice had become used to, words like I’m flawed, or misbehaved,  

or difficult, or troublesome, or any of the other negative adjectives I’d internalized  about myself along the way, begin to break apart like boulders dropped from a  height.  

I am good.  

It’s as if “good” was a key put in my hands, one that opened up all the other  adjectives I could now begin to feel about myself: I am loved, I am worthy, I am  perfect, I am whole.  

I am good.  

I look at my grandmother sitting across from me, as she looks down at the  wrinkles decorating her hand like rings of time. She smiles to herself as she says,  “I’ve always known you were good.”

Victoria Loke is an actress, writer, and producer, as well as founder & CEO of Venus Vibes, a creative agency empowering women’s voices and consulting women-focused businesses. She divides her time between Singapore and Seoul, and she is currently working on her debut novel.