Underneath my yellow skin

Keeping it to myself, part three

I want to be clear. When I talk about knowing I’m intelligent and wishing I could mention it without being a jerk, I don’t mean I want to be able to go around bleating about it willy-nilly. Just when it has relevance and in a thoughtful way. It’s not as if I want to rub everyone’s face into the fact that I’m soooooo smart. But, I don’t understand why it’s verboten to talk about it–or being empathetic. Here is the post from yesterday.

I’ve said this several times, and maybe it’s apocryphal at this point. I am a huge Poirot fan (which is not apocryphal). He is a pompuous, arrogant Belgian (NOT French) man who is not averse to tooting his own horn. In one of the novels, he is saying how great he is while Captain Hastings is dying in very British embarrasment next to him. Hastings says something about how Poirot should not say tihngs like that. Poirot says (paraphrasing), “If I met someone else with the abilities that I have, I would be impressed and say how great they are. Why should I hide it when it’s me?”

Again, that’s paraphrasing and I’m no longer sure it’s something I’ve actually read. Meaning, it could be something I have retconned into existence. But it’s something that Poirot would say, so I stand biy it. Meaning, he had no qualms about talking of his intelligence, though he preferred when Hastings bigged him up rather than when he had to do it himself. What else was a lapdog for? (He’s said things similar to that, too.)

I thought about that long and hard because I was raised to believe that saying anything positive about yourself was not only verboten, but blasphemous and rude. It’s Taiwanese culture in general, but especially for women/girls. Add to that the deeply misogynistic church we belonged to, and, well, it took forever before I could see anything positive about myself, let alone say it out loud.

I am better about it now. Dying (twice) really helped with that. It stripped away a lot of the bullshit that I had grown up with. Unfortunately, some of it has come back because I still live in this world and not some ideal one. But, I know my worth now. I know that  I have worth, which is something I could not have said before my medical crisis. Not with any confidence, anyway. When I came back from the dead (twice), it was as if all the filters had been stripped away.


I have hated my body since I was seven and was put on my first diet by my mother. She was obsessed with being skinny and thought it was the biggest sin for a girl–to be not skinny. Not even ‘normal’ weight, whatever that means, but bone-showing skinny. That’s because Taiwanese culture in the ’50s was even more toxic than American culture when it came to sexism, and my mother’s family was the very worst of the worst. My grandmother was one of those women who thought women were trash while she also excelled as a woman.

My mother put me on my first diet when I was seven and constantly harped on my weight well into my thirties. She only stopped when I explicitly told her she was not allowed to bring it up. Then, she tried to switch to “I’m worried about your health”, which I also shut down because I saw through that bullshit. She did not show any worry when I was anorexic. She said nothing other than once commenting enviously that my waist was thinner than hers. So, yeah, it’s not my health she’s worried about. Oh, she’s four inches shorter than I am and has a smaller frame than I do. I’m a mesomorph and thick AF. So me having a smaller waist than hers was not a good thing.

When I started Taiji fifteen or so years ago, it was my first step towards letting go of the body hatred. By the time I had my medical crisis, I had moved to studiously neutral about it. Which was a complex mix of emotions. It wasn’t neutral, but it wasn’t hatred, either. I still did not looking at it, but I didn’t feel the ‘burn it to the ground’ flames either when looking at it.

Then I had my medical crisis and all that disappeared. Literally. And I mean that in the truest old-school sense of the word ‘literally’. My body got me through a horrific situation with barely a scratch. Let me reiterate. I had walking (non-COVID-related) pneumonia that triggered two sudden cardiac arrests and a stroke. They had to use the paddles on me for one of the cardiac arrests and an EpiPen for the other. Or maybe both of those were for one? The cops found me unconsicous and not breathing in my front hallway and administered oxygen until the EMTs came. That’s when I had my first sudden cardiac arrest. All of this happened in a 20 minute ambulance ride (well, plus probably five minutes before with the bagging and the first cardiac arrest). I was unconscious when I reached the hospital and put on ice.

After nearly a week, my medical team talked to my brother about pulling the plug. Just as he was walking to his car to visit me, they called him and said that I had woken up. What they did not tell him was that I was pissed as fuck and ready to fight someone .I didn’t know who needed fighting, but I knew someone did. 

After that, you could not say shit to me about my body. It was a fucking wonderland, damn it, and you better bow down to it! No, I did not say any  of that, but I certainly thought it. I don’t think I can overemphasize how well my body did during that crisis. I mean, I shouldn’t be alive in the first place. Not after two sudden cardiac arrests. And the damage a stroke usually does to the body, especially one as serious as the one I had–it’s unfathomable that I walked away (literally, again) without a (metaphoric) scratch.

I can still walk and talk, type and do my Taiji/Bagua. My memory is shot in a way it never was, and my reflexes are even worse. Those are such minor things in comparison to everything else, though. Plus, I’m having trouble with my fiction writing. That is more of a concern, but still a trade-off I would make every time. I mean, there really isn’t anything that trumps coming back to life, is there?

 

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