I am a liar. I can admit this here. Not about anything I deem important to people I deem important, which is an important distinction to me. I have said to my friends that I am not a moral person, and they have disagreed with me. They have told me that I’m a very moral person; it’s just that my morals may not line up with society’s morals.
I thought about it, and I had to agree. I have an intensely moral code that I follow, but it’s not the same as society’s. I mention this because my relationship with the truth is part of my moral code. As I was saying in yesterday’s post, I am more about emotional truth than actual truth. And, I care more about being honest with people I love and respect rather than the gen pop or even friends who aren’t super close.
I’ve known this since I was in my twenties. At that time, though, it was more an inchoate feeling rather than a well thought out tenet. And it was heavily wrapped up in my feelings that I was failing at being a good human being. Or any human being at all. I truly thought I was an alien because I had no clue how to be like the other kids. This was in a large part because I was a second generation Taiwanese American with parents who really, really, really, did not want to be in America. Or one of them, anyway. And tried to live as much of a Taiwanese life as possible.
To give them a slight benefit of the doubt, they were fish out of water, too. They didn’t know how American society worked, which meant they could not teach my brother and me how to get along with our classmates.
I didn’t realize at the time that I was neurodivergent (as was my brother, but it was more obvious with him), which would have made such a difference. In today’s Rory and Gav livestream for the producers (a tier of Patreon), it was noted that YouTube gives crowns for people who comment the most and rank the top three. It has to be across all streams because the person who was number one did not comment that much in this particular stream. I was number three for most of the stream, sometimes two.
Gav commented on it, and the person who was number two for most of the stream said how it reminded her of being the kid in school who raised her hand too much (and not in a good way). My friend who was mistakenly thought to be number three said if she had been in the top three, she would have taken it as a reminder that she talked to much. I said that I felt the same way (and so I did not like it).
Gav said it was a good thing and really liked it.
I have spent so many years trying to calibrate how much I should talk in any given situation. When I was a kid, I did not talk much at all in class. I just put my head down and pretended to be invisible. I got picked on a lot, and I just wanted to be left alone. I was severely depressed and very anxious, too.
My mother used to make it so that I lost an argument no matter what. If I did not answer her when she angrily questioned me, then she would berate me for giving her the silent treatment. If I tried to defend myself, then she would either turn things back on me, refuse to acknowledge my points, or just get angry/hurt by what I said.
I learned to swallow a lot, and it became automatic by the time I was in my twenties.
When I was in my twenties, K and I took her child and my niece to the park. I watched my niece act in a way that I could deeply identify was. She was anxious and uptight about doing anything that could be considered wrong by her mother, but she didn’t feel she could tell me the (probably unspoken) rules that she had to live by.
I didn’t realize until years later that I had learned the same lesson. Telling lies when the truth would get you in trouble for really small and insignificant things seemed like an easy choice. And, to be honest, I still think that’s true. Why ruffle feathers or get into needless arguments over things that don’t matter?
Let’s talk about something that is of bigger significance–gender. This is a big social issue that is rapidly changing at the moment. And, in the US at least, it’s an issue that is being viciously attacked by one side of the political spectrum.
For me, personally, I have given it so much thought, and for now, agender works the best. Why? Because I don’t feel any affinity towards any given gender. I feel connected to women for having shared experience, but I don’t feel anything that other women describe associating with being a woman.
I know, though, that not having pronouns appears problematic, and I do not want to give the transphobes any succor. It makes me sad and weary, though, that I am in that space yet again. I am a minority in several ways, and with each one, I’m in the invisible category, or the one in which we are supposed to be supportive of other minorities. In other words, the ‘you don’t have it as bad as ______’ category.
I fully acknowledged that. It still wasn’t easy, though. And it made me feel smaller and not important with people brushing it off, ignoring it, or not even knowing it existed. That I existed.
I feel the same about gender. It’s not important to me, but the lack of gender is important to me. Yet, I don’t feel like it’s something I can bring up/want to bring up. It opens a can of worms that might be best left unopeneed.
I need to sleep so I will continue this tomorrow.