Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: alien

A freak like me

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I’ve been talking about gender for the last few posts and how I don’t get it. Now, I want to get more broad (heh) in general because that’s how I feel about so many things.

A few years ago, I started chatting with someone in a Discord I’m in out of the main forums. In private messages, in other words. She and I have a lot in common, and we clicked once we started DMing each other.

She and I got to talking about neurodivergency because I had struggled with fitting in all my life. After we messaged back and forth for a length of time, she asked if I had ever thought that I might be autistic. That never occurred to me because I had the stereotypical image of autism in my mind. My brother? Yeah, he was on the spectrum. Me? Hell, no!

It was only after talking with her and simultanuously watching a few videos on autism that I slowly realized the stereotypes weren’t right. Or rather, they only depicted a very narrow kind of autism, which, not coincidentally, centered on young white boys.

(Lengthy rant on sexism in health issues inserted here.)

The biggest thing that shocked me to learn was that it’s not true that autistic people are not empathetic/don’t feel emotions. I mean, there are autistic people like this, true (like my brother), but there are also plenty of autistic people who feel too much emotions. Or, they feel other people’s emotions, but don’t know what to do with them or misinterpret what those emotions are.

There’s a saying when it comes to autism–if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism. There are throughlines and shared traits, yes, but every autistic person is diferent. In my case, I had to deconstruct the image of a person with autism because it was getting in the way.

There are some common traits, of course, such as hyperfocus on certain interests, stimming, and  uncomfortableness in social situations, to name a few. The problem is that for non-male people (women and others), those traits are liable to get overlooked, chalked up to something else like anxiety, or used against said people more harshly than they are against autistic men (which is already harsh).

How often do you now hear about men acting badly, “Oh, maybe he’s on the spectrum” as a way of excusing his appalling behavior? And yet, you don’t hear it about women and other non-male people hardly at all if ever. They don’t get the same grace and/or amused tolerance.

Side note: By the way, you want to know if someone is acting badly on purpose or if he’s ignorant about it? Look to see if he’s acting the same way with people who have power over him or with men in general. If he’s trulyy autistic, then he’ll be awkward around everyone–not just grossly so around the women he wants to fuck.


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Figuring out I was neurodivergent

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I’m in my mid-fifties and just coming to grips with me being neurodivergent. I spent most of my early days thinking there was something seriously wrong with me, which I touched on in past posts. In the last one, I talked about how my mother’s very old-fashioned Taiwanese expectations of gender really messed me up. Add to that the fact that I was a weirdo to begin with, and my childhood was miserable.

I remember when I was six or seven, I was on the playground at school during recess. I looked around me and realized that I felt like an alien amongst the humans. Everyone else seemed like they knew what they were supposed to do whereas I was floundering at everything. My parents had no interest in American culture, which meant I was clueless about it as well.

I was also whip smart, which was not a good thing when I was trying to fit in.
I may have been book smart, but I was very people ignorant. I did not know what to say to the other kids, and I was miserable all the time. I had two teachers, one in the fifth grade and one in the sixth, who were really kind to me. I didn’t like the attention at the time, but in retrospect, they were examples of good men.

I had no friends as a kid. I didn’t know how to talk to American kids, and they did not know what to do with me. I got teased for being Asian, and when I brought food to school, I got made fun of for that as well. I was one of maybe three Asian kids in my grade, and that did nothing to help my low self-esteem.

I was good at school, and I was beaten down emotionally by the time I was in school, so most teachers just ignored me. Except the two I mentioned above. I was also bored because I learned very quickly, and back in those days, no one paid much attention to the smart kids.

I did have a reading class in the first grade that was just me and another kid–a boy who was also very smart. We read books that were way above our grade level, and that was my one refuge during the day. I was a voracious reader and tackled War and Peace in the sixth grade because it was the biggest book I knew of. I made it halfway through before realizing I had no clue what was going on because everyone had so many nicknames, so I gave up.

I also read The Scarlet Letter around that time, and even though I did not know much about sex and gender, I was appalled that Hester Prynne took the brunt of the blame. That never made sense to me, and it makes even less sense to me now.

I wasted so much time as a child and teen filing off all my rough edges, watching the others around me, and trying desperately to fit in. I didn’t realize that it was a fool’s errand because no matter how blunted I made myself, it was not going to matter in the long run. I could not twist myself into a tight enough pretzel to fool the normies.


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I aM hUmAn

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I was talking yesterday about being able to fit in (which I can to  certain degree). And just about societal norms in general and how being the weirdo means that I’m expecing things to be suited to me. The upside to that is that I’m rarely taken by surprise when something terrible happens. I know that always being prepared for the worst-case scenario is probably not the most healthy thing in the world, but it does stop me from being as shattered as other people by things like the pandemic.

Here’s a little secret–the pandemic wasn’t terrible for me. It wasn’t great, mind, but it wasn’t terrible. I’m mostly a solitary person, anyway. The biggeset adjustment was attending Taiji classes online rather than in person. Oh, and since my medical crisis, I only attend one a week rather than three. I do want to start adding them back, but I haven’t been up for it yet.

I will say that I have been expanding my home practice quite a bit. Back when I first started taking classes, I had one a week. I could not make myself practice at home, not for love or money. That’s why I added a second class, to be honest. If I wasn’t going to practice at home, then I could at least make myself go to another class.

I can’t remember if I added the third class first or started practicing at home. I do remember that when I did start a home practice, it was only five minutes of stretches. It was sa weird that while I loved Taiji, I just could not force myself to practice at home.

It’s funny because I really had to make myself do anything related to Taiji in the beginning. It’s partly beacuse I had a horrific first experience with a teacher who was a sexual predator, a creep, and a fraud. That’s a long story that I no longer care to discuss, but it made me wary about my second go at it.

I was a brat, I’ll admit. In the beginning, I mean. I questioned everything my teacher told me, and I wasn’t always polite about it. I was raw and ready for a fight–and she was really patient with me. See, one of the issues I had with my first teacher was that he was full of shit. He had all these really lofty sentiments, but he did not live up to them. Also, he was creep. I can’t overstate this point. He creeped on his students and he was very inappropriate. He gave this big speech about how intuitive he was and how he would not touch people who did not want to be touched. Yeah, right. He touched me without permission, which as a Taiji teacher, I might have tolerated except he had JUST made a big deal about not doing that.

When someone does something that goes against what they explicitly said they were about, that’s a huge red flag. I stayed with him only because I had a good friend at the time who was so into the classes. I should have walked, but I felt protective of this friend. We had bonded over trauma, and I could not in good conscious leave him to the teacher I so clearly saw as a predator.

Until the day that the teacher as we were talking, reached over and flicked my hair behind my shoulder. My whole body recoiled in revulsion, though I kept my face perfectly still. I’m really good at that. Not reacting externally, I mean. The reason I reacted so violently (internally) is because it was so needless. At least with the  other times, it was barely excusable because it was with the intent of adjusting my posture during a movement/position. In this case, it was purely something you did to flirt with someone, and it felt so invas-ive.

I walked out of that class and never went back. I found out later that he was not paying taxes on the house he owned because he was claiming it was a church while he rented out rooms to his students. My friend was doing his accounting, and the others were doing various jobs for him.

In addition, he was dating a student. He was in his mid-to-late forties, and she was 27. Not that the ages mattered, but it was really gross. He was just a gross guy in general, and I remember that when he went bonkers for the movie The Matrix. He gushed on and on about how it embodied the soul of Taiji and how it’s important to step out of ‘the matrix’.

I was rolling my eyes as he was talking. Even though I had not seen the movie, I knew the basics of it–and it was hard to believe it was that deep. Also, it was easy for him to say that it was important to be outside society (above it, I think he said) and not get involved with politics and such.

I wanted to punch him in the face. “Politics” is often a code word for social issues that don’t affect me when people like him say it. He was acting like he was above it all, which, again, easy for him as a white straight man.

I found out later that he started dating someone from a Caribbean island and started smuggling drugs into the  States fraom said island. It did not surprise me in the least. Also, that ex-friend started teaching his own classes and dating a student in his class. That wasn’t why we stopped being friends, but it certainly did not help. He was following in the footsteps of his mentor/teacher, and I was not here for it.

In addtion, he wasn’t even a good teacher. The mentor, I mean. I was in a basic class, and in the year I studied with him, he did not teach us more than half the Solo Form. He claimed it was because there were new people always starting, but that didn’t make sense. I mean, yes, there were new people starting, but those of us who weren’t new were students, too.

By the way, I finally saw The Matrix many years later. It was a decent action film with hotties, Keanu, Carrie-Anne, and Laurence. At least the eye candy was filling, even if the content was very light. But then at the end of the movie, Keanu dies and Carrie-Anne kisses him to bring him back to life. I stood up in the theater I was in and loudly announced that was bullshit. My then-boyfriend pulled me back down in my seat and murmured at me to hush. Fortunately, there were only like four people in the theater, but I was so indignant.

The whole movie is about being outside the matrix and living an authentic life. It’s about resisting society and breaking all the rules. So what do they do to resolve a plot point? Dredge up the hoariest chestnut of all time and have a kiss be the answer to all the problems.

I was done with that movie, and it just underlined how much of a crock my first Taiji teacher was. No idea how I got here, but I’m done for now.