I went to the pharmacy the other day to pick up my meds, duh. I made the chitchat with the person at the counter, which, as we live in Minnesota, was about the weather. It’s a balmy 41 degrees, but it’s going to dramatically drop soon. There is a severe weather warning for sudden drop in temps and gusts of wind up to 40 mph. The teller was saying, “That’s what we get for living in Minnesota” while I sympathetically said it’s time to get the heater going. I know the right words to say in this situation!
Never mind that I love cold and that I am grumpy with 41 degrees. Never mind that we do, indeed, live in Minnesota, which is notorious for its cold. We are in the middle of a Wind Chill Advisory at the moment with warnings that it could get down to -35 windchill. That’s pretty cold, even for me.
Anyway! I have had a version of this ‘it’s so cold’ chat many times while paying for my groceries. There was a period in my life when I’d try to say that I liked cold or something to that effect because I wanted to put it out there that not everyone hated cold. I gave up on that rather quickly, however, because no one wanted to hear that. Also, the cashiers don’t need that in their life. They’re just making small talk, not trying to get to know me and my philosophies.
I don’t feel the need to make my uniqueness known to people I’m not going to interact with on a meaningful level. I have to admit that I was irked after getting out of the hospital because my mother would blurt out my life story to anyone who would listen. She would use it as a way to get what she wanted, which made me very uncomfortable. I was venting to my brother about it and he said, “Remember, no one will think of you at the end of the day.” Which, weirdly enough, comforted me. He was right. These people would go home at the end of the day and not even remember they met me. You are never as big in someone else’s mind as you are in your own.
I am a weirdo, I will cheerfully admit it. I revel in it and have no problem with people knowing it. I am known to be oppositional, but I come by it honestly. It started when I was a fat, gawky, Taiwanese American girl in a lily-white St. Paul suburb. I didn’t know anything about pop culture and I had no idea how to fake it. Seriously. We didn’t go to movies and the first pop song I ever heard was Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant in sixth grade. That’s probably an apocryphal story rather an actual memory, but it sums up my childhood experience rather neatly.
It didn’t help that I had a shitty family life. My parents should never have married and became parents. They were ill-suited for either endeavor, which only became more obvious the older I got. I was a tomboy who preferred climbing trees to playing with dolls. My mom put me in dresses and skirts she made for me, which I hated. I was told over and over again by the women in the Taiwanese church that girls didn’t do x, y, or z–everything I liked, coincidentally. Girls didn’t climb trees or laugh loudly or run around. It got so bad I used to pray every night before falling asleep to a god I didn’t believe in that He would make me a boy.
This was decades before Asians were considered exotic and chic–we were aliens in those days and our food was weird. In addition, I was deeply depressed as a kid, even as young as seven. I used to babysit my niece and nephews when they were young. The middle child, the older boy, presented as neurodivergent at a very young age. I had a hunch he was on the spectrum, but my brother didn’t seem to want to hear that. One time when he was four, we were playing a board game. I don’t remember which, but he was irritable and moody as we played. At one point, he heaved a big sigh and said that it was so hard. I asked, sympathetically, “What is so hard?” He sighed again and said, “Everything!”
That broke my heart–shattered it, really. Not only because I did not want him to feel that way, but also because he reminded me so much of me at a young age. I first realized I was going to die when I was seven, and I both feared and coveted it ever since. I never understood why I was such a freak when I was young. There were so many things considered normal that were an anathema to me. In addition, I didn’t realize at the time that I had a whole host of issues that made daily life tedious.
First of all, I have sensory issues and I have since I was a kid. I hate clothes. I hate anything touching my skin. I have gotten used to and can tolerate clothing now, but I still prefer to wear as little as possible. I can only wear cotton and other simple fibers as well. A t-shirt and shorts/sweats is my usual combo. And while I love my long hair, I can’t stand it touching my face so I pull it up and/or away from my face most of the time. I am allergic to all scents, including (and especially) essential oils. My brother loves them and told me to smell one once. I did without thinking and my head snapped back in agony. It was lavender, to which I am extremely allergic. Which is not fun when I was trying to find solutions to my sleep issues, I’ll tell you what. Lavender is the universal answer to the question of how do I sleep better and trying lavender bath bubbles was…very not good.
I also have to be the one in charge of modulating sound s around me. I can’t stand anything above a certain level and there sounds I simply cannot tolerate. I have food sensitivities, too, and oh let’s not talk about bright lights, especially when I have a migraine. Of course, I thought all this was normal as a kid because I didn’t know any better. I got picked on a lot because I was Asian, fat, a freak, and a brain. I read a lot and had a big vocabulary, which did not endear me to the other kids.
It was a miserable childhood, one I would not wish on anyone. I had no real friends because I didn’t know how to relate to other kids. Because I was so weird. Also because of my terrible homelife and all the thing s I was taught by my parents–not good things, I mean. My brother and I talked recently about our childhood and he said he didn’t remember much of it. He and my mother don’t remember negative things, which is frustrating. My brother said he did remember some of the things I mentioned after we talked about it, but he hadn’t beforehand.
I will say that much of what I learned from my parents has marked me. I know my mom feels that my life is a rejection of hers. And, she’s not entirely wrong. It’s not a spiteful thing or retaliatory or anything like that. It’s just that I’ve seen the toll it’s taken on her and I want no part of that. I have more to say, but I’m going to wrap it up for now and pick it up tomorrow.