Five months after the worst and wildest night of my life, I’m sitting on my couch, contemplating my navel–and the rest of my life. One thing I’m thinking about is dating. About a dozen years ago, I gave up on dating because I had just gotten out of a horrible relationship that I had rushed into and thought was going to be forever. I am not good at relationships and that one reinforced everything negative I felt about myself. He was abusive (emotionally and very nearly physically) and just a very troubled man. It made me realize that I was not ready to be in a relationship, not by a long shot. And it just wasn’t that important to me. I like to be alone most of the time, which isn’t easy to do in a relationship. Especially when I have a tendency to obsess over my partner in an unhealthy way. I really have no in-between state between utter disinterest and complete absorption. To put it bluntly, I’m I have issues with attachment and decided that it wasn’t something I cared enough about to work on.
A few months before I ended up in the hospital, though, I started to get that itch–for sex. I used to love sex and I was really missing it. After I got my vax shots, I started entertaining the idea of maybe finding a sex buddy or two. Then, of course, I had my medical traumatic experience and ended up in the hospital. After I woke up and came home, I didn’t think about much other than healing for three or four months, obviously. Now, I’m back to thinking about dating and sex.
Here’s my biggest problem right now. How do I explain what happened to me in a way that doesn’t cause a potential lover/partner to run for the hills? K has said quite firmly that it’s part of my life and I can talk about it if I want (when I said that I didn’t want to HAVE to talk about it with anyone or everyone. It’s not the most interesting thing about me even though it’s certainly the most unexpected and shocking). I feel like it’s kind of a one-upper because how do you top that? I was telling my brother about wanting to bring it up in a low-key way. I mentioned that I thought saying something like, “I had a really serious medical issue ,but I’m over it now” and he laughed. he said that was too understated and I should say something like, “I had two cardiac arrests and a stroke,” which made me viscerally recoil.
Yes, that’s what happened to me. Yes, that’s my life and I have the right to talk about it if I want. But I don’t want is the thing. I don’t want to be known as the walking miracle or to be defined by my two cardiac arrests and my stroke. Not to mention the unconscious week. I tweeted flippantly about it:
Am thinking of maybe dating again once things* die down a bit (so not in this year or probably the next). What’s the date number for telling about my serious medical experience. Before or after sex date number?
*COVID. I mean COVID
— Minna Hong (@asiangrrlMN) February 8, 2022
I said it with my tongue firmly in my cheek, yes, but there’s a grain of truth to it. I’ve seen how medical people react to the news, and I can’t imagine normies reacting much differently. in fact, I think they’ll react even more dramatically because they don’t know the ins and outs and would only hear the admittedly shocking details. I’ve written it so many times that the possibility of surviving a sudden cardiac arrest in 10%, 20% if you’re in the hospital. I rarely mention the stroke because it seems so incidental. I’m sure it’s not because having a stroke is a big deal ,but it doesn’t seem to have affected me negatively. At all. I did my due diligence and Googled, but I don’t have any brain damage. A little bit of short-term memory loss, but that’s it.
To be honest, it isn’t as if the cardiac arrests have done much to me, either. And I never add the pneumonia part–which started it all off. That’s the bottom line, really. I am almost perfectly fine now so why should I talk about it? Because it still affects me. No matter how little I think about it consciously, it’s always in the back of my mind. I’m acutely aware of how much time has passed since that night and I think about it often, albeit mostly about the ramifications and what it means to me now. But it’s not something that’s at the forefront of my mind and I rarely talk about it any longer. Except with those closest to me
So. Dating isn’t going to happen any time soon. Even though I’m not obsessed with the COVID pandemic as I was before I got vaxxed, I am not feeling like I want to get Omicron, either. I don’t have my booster yet (let’s not talk about that right now) and I don’t want to end up back in the hospital. I’m not as obsessively fearful as I was about it before I ended up in the hospital, but it’s still on my mind.
I don’t even know how I’m going to find someone to date, but if I do, then I have to figure out when to mention–see, I don’t like online dating. I did it in my twenties and it was a mindfuck. This was before I embraced my queerness in my late twenties, after my online dating days. Looking for dudes in Minnesota who weren’t looking for Asian women because exotic was like looking for a needle in the haystack. I even had written it specifically in my personal that I did not want to date someone who viewed me as exotic because I was about as exotic as lutefisk. I got so many guys who started out with, “I looooooove Asian women” or worse yet, “Oriental girls”. It was an automatic no, but, man, it got depressing really quickly.
K tried to argue with me that I couldn’t paint all white guys with the same racist brush, but I laid it out to her bluntly. This was in the days before Asian women were the flavor of the month and considered hot. In a land full of white women, I was not considered dateable. Therefore, anyone who wanted to date me had already tagged me as different and exotic. In other words, they were objectifying me before they even came up to me as I was not on anyone else’s radar.
I think people are more aware of this attitude these days and not as blatant about it. But it’s still prevalent, especially with the whole Asian women are submissive bullshit. I don’t get how that stereotype still persists because Asian women are fucking badass.
My problem is that even if I find someone to date, I have no idea when to tell them about my medical trauma. It’s not first date material, but it’s what I’ve been dealing with for the last several months. It would be disingenuous of me to pretend it never happened, but it’s really not first date material at all (as I mentioned). Is it worthy of mentioning before the first sex date? I just don’t know. it’s so out of my realm of normality (though it is my norm now), I don’t know what to do with it.
It’s all hypothetical for now, of course, because I have no one to date. I would like to figure it out, however, before the opportunity presents itself.