I’m a weirdo. This is not a shock to me or anyone who knows me. I have been a weirdo all my life, but I didn’t realize it until I was…well, that’s a complicated answer. Here’s the thing. I never felt like I fit in, but I just thought it was because–well, I wasn’t sure. I was depressed from a young age. I was six when I first remember being miserable. I was in first grade and got teased by a much older girl every day on my way home from school. I learned to dread the walk home because she would be hanging out in front of her apartment with a sneer on her pretty face. And she was pretty. To little me, she was so glamorous–why the hell did she need to pick on me? My stomach started knotting up every time I saw her. One day, she started in on me, which made me burst into tears. Instantly, she stopped picking on me and started complimented me. She told me how pretty my hair was as she brushed it from my shoulders. She never picked on me again after that, but it still confused the hell out of me. Why did she pick on me in the first place? Many years later, I realized she probably had a shitty life of her own and was taking it out on me. Did it make me feel any better? No. I’m very sympathetic to other people’s woes–until they take it out on me. But that was an early indication of the cruelty of my fellow kids. Kids are assholes, yo! It most certainly wasn’t the last, though.
I was shunned by others for a variety of reasons. One, I was Asian. This was before we were exotic and/or trendy., so I was viewed with suspicion. My food was stinky. I dressed funny (my mother made my clothes). I didn’t know any of their references because I didn’t watch TV or movies. Everything was wrong about me, and I was miserable.
I first wanted to kill myself when I was seven–right around the same time I realized that death was a thing. That began a decades-long love/hate relationship with death that governed most of my behavior. I wasn’t actively suicidal most of the time, but I wouldn’t have been sad to die if it did happen. Until I thought of what it actually meant.
I just could not figure out how to be a normal kid. I didn’t care about any of the stuff the other kids talked about–and worse yet, sometimes I had no idea what any of it meant. I felt as if I was in a different country that didn’t speak English. Worse yet, because my parents were immigrants, I didn’t have any basis to understand what they were saying. I couldn’t pool the collective hivemind to maybe muddle through what they were saying. I had no reference points and was completely lost at sea.
I had no friends when I was in school. There were kids who put up with me, but none that would actively seek me out. It got much worse in junior high school. I got picked on all the time. My mom tried to smooth it over with the teachers, but she was just as lost as I was. In addition, schools didn’t give a shit about bullying back in the eighties. They were very much, ‘rub some dirt on it and walk it off’. Some teachers even participated in the bullying.
I had one social studies teacher who strongly reminded me of Cliff, the pompous, abrasive, rude, no-nothing mailman on Cheers. One time, we were talking about the Vietnam War. I asked if I could go to the bathroom or my locker or something like that. He joked, “You’re not going to get a bomb, are you?”, which mortified me. It was clearly a racial joke, and he couldn’t even get the race right!
In high school, I didn’t get picked on as much, but I also didn’t really have friends. There were people I chatted with and got along with ,across all different groups, but no one I would call outside of school. I tried to get into drama and other school activities, but I never fit in there, either.
This is the story of my life, really. I get along with many different kinds of people, but it’s hard for me to connect on a deeper level. If I had realized all my oddities when I was a kid, I think it would have helped. Instead of thinking I was a weirdo and feeling bad about it, I could thought I was a weirdo and worked on being more accepting. It’s difficult, though, because both my cultures prize fitting in. Sure, my Taiwanese culture is more outwardly about it, but American culture wants you to be lock-and-step as well, even though it purports to be about individualism. There was a meme many years ago about American individualism meaning that everyone was ‘outrageous’ in exactly the same way. It’s so true. There are acceptable ways to be daring and not-so-acceptable ways.
For me, going to college opened my mind in so many ways. I went to St. Olaf, which is a private Lutheran college. It’s also where I lost my religion (evangelical Christian) after having sex for the first time*. I discovered racism when I was a second-year student in college. I mean, I knew I was Asian, but I never realized what that meant, exactly, until college. I can’t tell you how many people asked me where I was from (no, where are you REALLY from?) and wanted to compliment me on how well I spoke English. The only language I speak fluently. Microaggressions galore, before that was even a thing.
Then, I realized sexism was a thing soon after. At some point, I also realized that I was attracted to more than just men, but I did not want to deal with that. I tucked it into the back of my brain to explore later on. I spent two years being incredibly angry about racial and gender issues. Like, incandescently angry. At one point, I only read women of color, specifically Asian women if possible. I had one white dude tell me that I was just being reverse sexist/racist. I retorted that I bet I had still read more white men than he had women of color. He had nothing to say to that.
I spent several years raging against Christianity. After I had sex for the first time and realized how incredible it was, I completely rejected Christianity. I can’t tell you how much this was drilled in my head as a kid–sex was bad and evil (especially as a woman-shaped person) until you got married and then it was good and holy, but only as procreation. Like many bogeymen, once I actually experienced it, all the scariness disappeared. In addition, using it as a cudgel when it clearly wasn’t what they said it was meant that once I discovered the truth, I could never trust them again. Sex, something pleasurable that didn’t hurt anyone (who didn’t want to be hurt, of course!), was bad enough to plunge my soul into eternal damnation? I did NOT want to believe in that god, thank you very much. That’s one petty god, if you ask me.
This is getting long again; I haven’t even gotten to the main point. I’ll stop here and pick it up in a future post.
NOTE ON THE VIDEO: I wanted to embed the acoustic, cello-filled version, but could not. Here’s a link to it instead.
*I’ve written about this before so I’ll just leave it at finding out what was supposed to eternally damn my soul made me instantly lose any faith I had. Which, to be fair, wasn’t much by that point.