I gave up Twitter some years ago. I still tweet from time to time, but I rarely check my timeline any longer. Why? There are many reasons, but a big one is how quick people are to jump on you for anything you say. I don’t mean the big stuff that should be jumped on, but the smallest thing can be called out. For example, I like snow and cold. Every winter, I will tweet excitedly when we get snow.
Every damn time, there will be someone who points out that I don’t have to shovel it (which I make perfectly clear and that I would feel differently if I had to shovel it). To which I say that I wouldn’t like to shovel it, but that doesn’t dampen my enjoyment of the snow itself. It doesn’t matter how much I preempt my declaration of enjoyment with caveats, I still get negged about the fact that I don’t have to shovel.
And yet.
I hate the heat with a passion. It makes me grumpy, lethargic, and as it gets hotter, drained, sick, and nearly catatonic. But I don’t go around bleating about how I hate the heat when other people are enjoying their days on the beach, am I? No, I am not. I am not yucking their yum as the saying goes, but I’m supposed to grin and bear it when others slam me for liking snow and cold?
It’s partly because what is popular/considered normal. Most people do not like cold and snow so the fact that I do is weird. Heat and sun? Liking that is normal and, indeed, even welcomed. I’ve learned to diss the cold with the best of them for daily Minnesotan chat, but is it too much that I be allowed to enjoy the snow? Who is it hurting?
Another example of this is Christmas. I used to hate it. I used to hate all holidays except Halloween, and, yes, that includes my birthday. When I joined Facebook, you had to put your birthday and they advertised it. I lied about my birthday and would be surprised every year when I got birthday wishes on the wrong day on my FB wall. Fortunately, they no longer require that your birthday be mandatorily visible on your page.
Anyway, Christmas! For many years, I hated it. And I would make my hatred known on my socials. I’d use profile pics of Grumpy Cat dissing Christmas and post about my hatred. Not a lot–but at least once a Christmas. And without fail, I’d see people posting about how they hated their joy being dimmed by other people posting about our hatred for Christmas. We should just shut up about it and not diminish other people’s enjoyment! Except, I’m allowed to say that I don’t like something on my own goddamn FB wall or Twitter feed. Why should I have to hide that?
Again, I wasn’t going to other people’s feeds/walls and trashing Christmas. That’s not my style at all. I don’t yuck other people’s yums, but I also don’t pretend they are my jam. I admit, I don’t like most things that other people like. I keep my mouth shut most of the time. But, on my own socials, I’m going to say what I think. That’s the whole point of social media. It’s not meant to be a sycophantic circle jerk–oh, wait. What am I saying? Of course that’s what it’s for! And it’s why I’ve backed way the fuck off.
I am a contrarian and I’m able to see many different sides to the same coin (tortured metaphor). I don’t like sweeping generalizations, either. So I’m going to bring up an angle that other people don’t see. I think a kinder way to put this (kinder to me) is that I’m holistic. I don’t like to chop things into bits and then just look at that one bit. I used to have trouble in school because I would challenge teachers on their views in a way they didn’t appreciate. When I was in World History in high school, our teacher asked what we wanted to learn. I brought up the internment camps and he said we didn’t have time for that. Well, why ask? In college, I was in a feminism class and asked about racism in the feminist movement. Nope. We couldn’t talk about that. In an Asian group I was in (also in college), nope, we couldn’t talk about sexism.
I can’t chop myself into discrete pieces and I can’t concentrate on one part of me at a time because I’m an organic being with every part influencing the others. And, yes, I know that it’s easier to deal with issues on a limited basis, but my brain doesn’t think that way. And, with the proliferation of the term interdisciplinary, I had hopes that others would come to see my way of thinking. But I soon found out that interdisciplinary was limited to the issues that were deemed as important to a select group of people.
In other words, we’re all still limited, flawed human beings. We all can only see our own point of view, even though we can try to expand it. But we can never truly understand what other people have gone through, especially those who are not like us at all. I am very aware of this because I’m a freak. I’m a weirdo in almost every way so I don’t have the luxury of ignoring how different I am.
My mom once said in frustration that just because something was tradition, it didn’t mean it was bad. Probably after I tore down something traditional. She’s not wrong. But, also, just because something’s traditional, it doesn’t mean it’s good, either. That why I push so hard at times–because I just want to be a voice for the different, the weird, and the unwanted. I’m sure my mother feels like I’ve rejected everything about her–and again, she’s not wrong. But it’s not because I chose to reject her; it’s just not me. This is the hardest thing to explain to people. Yes, I’m a contrarian. I’ll fully admit it. But I’m also just out here trying to live my life. My early days of being a freak came accidentally. I didn’t want to have kids. I discovered I was attracted to people of different genders. I didn’t want to get married. I was apathetic when it came to religion–and then, later, to gender. I got tats before it was trendy, and I was perceived as an Asian chick before we were considered exotic.
So, yes, taken in whole, it would look as if I deliberately spent my life poking sacred traditions and deflating them. That’s not how it went, though. It was just me realizing things about myself that I mostly kept to myself. Again, I want to emphasize that I don’t go around bleating about these things to people who just wished I would shut up. Yes, I muse about them on my Twitter from time to time, but it’s by no means constant. And it’s usually not, “I can’t understand why anyone would have kids”, but more, “This is why I don’t want kids and how I got there” in a ten-tweet thread.
Then, of course, I had my medical trauma. That made me see what was and wasn’t important to me. And more to the point, I suddenly cared less about–well, a whole lot. Mostly about what others thought about me and my life choices. I died twice and came back twice! What the fuck do I care about anything else? Seriously.
I beat death. Twice. I’m grateful for every extra day I have. Why waste one minute being ashamed of who I am or wishing I was someone different? What a colossal waste of my bonus days.