In talking about my new series, In My Ideal World, I realized that I wanted to talk about little things, too. Or rather, things that don’t fall neatly into identity categories. Things that are tangentially related, but not necessarily in a category of their own. Such as weddings. They are definitely related to relationships and gender identity (not to mention sexual identity), but they aren’t something I would consider necessary to any of those categories. (Here is yesterday’s post.)
And yet.
This is one of those issues that is so huge in our culture, and yet.
I’m hesitating to write how I feel about it because it’s SUCH a huge aspect of our culture (and most cultures, really). I’ll save the deeper thoughts until I’m going to write about it for real, but I’ll just say that for me personally, it’s not important. Marriage is a positive as long as it serves the couple/throuple/community, but weddings themselves? I hold no truck in them.
I do get the need for ritual and to anonuce to the world your intent. But, I don’t get why it has to be a BIG WEDDING. I know it doesn’t, but many people seem to think it does. Even people whom I consider pretty progressive seem to get stuck on this tradition.
As with many things, I’m libertarian with a small l. I wish and want people to be free to do and be who they are. As long as that doesn’t hurt other people (actually hurt them and not “hurt” them. I’ll explore that difference in future posts), have at life as they wish. Want to be in a monogamous relationship with a person of the traditionally opposite gender? Have at it! Want to have children and watch cheesy Disney movies with them? Have at it! (Well, no, don’t. Don’t support Disney!) Want to go to church on Sunday and tithe religiously? Have at it!
I mean all that, truly. No hate, no snark. Well, maybe the teensiest bit of snark. My biggest issue is that I don’t get the same accord from the normies. Believe me I know all about how being a minority means not being seen–especially when you’re in the categories I am. It makes me cranky, though, when I’m asked to show empathy to someone in the majority because I always have to think about others.
Like with marriage. I have known since I was in my twenties that I didn’t want to get married. That was Not Done, apparently. I dated a guy in my late twenties who said to me, “I know you have said you don’t want to get married, but what would you say if I proposed to you?” He also once got really excited after going to a wedding (or maybe a bachelor’s party? I can’t remember) because the couple got a toaster oven. He waxed rhapsodically about it and said jokingly (but not really) that maybe we should get married so we could get a toatser oven. I looked at him in amazement and said, “We’re adults. If we want a toaster oven, we can buy one.”
One of the weird things about my brain is that I never can just let things be. By things, I mean ideas. Part of it is because I’m heavily influenced by others (though I try not to be), but most of it is because my brain is constantly churning. In addition, I know that I don’t know everything, so there is always more for me to learn.
In this case, my learning is about–well, let’s get there the long way, per usual. My brain connects thins that most people wouldn’t think are connected. Or rather, everything is connected in my brain. It used to frustrate me when teachers wanted to talk about one thing, but not another. Such as feminism (in a feminism class), but not racism because ‘we don’t have time for that’. Which, on the one hand, I get. On the other hand, though, fuck that shit.
I realized in my early twenties that I contained multitudes. We all do, but I am talking about me specifically right now. I was Asian, bisexual, a woman (then), agnostic (then), and just Weird with a capital W. Now, I’m still Asian, bisexual but not liking that label, agender, areligious, and still fucking weird. I’m also aromantic and ethically nonmonogamous. I don’t want a long-term relationship, and I’m more interested in sex than dating at the moment.
I see all these things as connected. I was feeling interconnectivity before it was a thing. In yesterday’s post, I outlined a series I wanted to do called, In My Ideal World, in which I would take a topic and explain what I would would like to see related to that issue. I am verbose, which means I’d spend several posts on each topic. The thing that bogs me down, though, is that I don’t know how to talke about one without bringing up another.
Let me group it like this. Gender identity is linked to sexual identity loosley. Sexual identity is linked to monogamy/nonmonogamy and being aromantic. Gender is related to race. Religion is related to nothing in particular, but it’s something I could write ten-thousand words on. I have some deep wounds because of religion, and it’s taken me a long time to heal from it. I’m not completely there, but I am so much better now than I was when I first left Christianity (early twenties).
I want to find a hook that will bring them all together, but I’m not quite there. I don’t have a problem writing several disparate posts, but I would like to find a throughline.
I have a thought running in my mind that I have revisited from time to time. It’s about how I would like things to be in my ideal world which is very different from how things are actually happening in this world. In the RKG Discord, there are two other people who identify as agender, much to my surprise and delight. There was a discussion happening about gender, and I said I could write a 5,000-word treatise on how I realized I was agender. One of them stated interest in reading said treatise if I ever wrote it, and that’s what cemented this series of posts in my mind.
Even stating the paragraph above, I feel an immediate impulse to explain myself. I didn’t realize I was agender so much as I realized that I didn’t care about gender. That the more I thought about it, the more I got confused about it. How if I had thouught about it thirty years ago, I probably would have called myself nonbinary and been done with it.
Now, however, it doesn’t fit any better than any other gender does. And I would love to explain why that is and how it’s not so much that I chose agender as much as I rejected all the other labels. Which is how I work in general. Nothing fits, so I choose the label that least doesn’t fit. Or to put it another way, I choose the label that fits the least worst.
I’ve had this issue with many different aspects of my being, and I would love to delve more deeply and thoroughly in each of them. Those would be religion (areligious), sexuality (bisexual), and gender (agender). I have thought about each of them quite a bit, and in the end, I threw up my hands and said, “That’s good enough.”
I get frustrated because I think so hard about each of these issues. With religioun, it was pretty easy for me to say that I wasn’t religious, but to which degree? I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I can say for sure there’s nothing out there. Plus, it’s hard to believe there’s absolutely nothing when the fact that humans exist speak to the contrary.
I believe there’s some kind of greater being/entity/collective, but–and I’m going to leave that there because this post is about the structure of the series, not delving into the isuses themselves. Consider that a teaser of things to come.
I’ve been musing about how I would order the world once I am in charge of it. Which will be never, by the way. Yesterday, I veered into family dysfunction and empathy, which were related (hah), but not the main point I wanted to talk about.
In my ideal world or my diversity town, I would come up with a way to show people how they are privileged. I mean, that’s the whole point of diversity town. For those in a position of privilege to realize that what they consider normal is, in fact, privilege.
One thing I remember was being in a diversity training (not as the trainer) in which we were talking about how people of minority are treated on the daily. Microtrangressions, if you will. I mentioned being followed in stores plus other microtransgressions, and several white people tried to argue each incident and why it might not be racism.
One incident I mentioned was that at the Cubs I’ve been going to for all my life, I was once asked to show identification when writing a check (yes, this was in the Stone Ages), and I watched the next several people after me check out. One, a white woman, wrote a check, and she was not asked to show ID. Yes, I made sure to test this because I wanted to make sure the hunch I had was right. I wasn’t going to do anything about it, but I needed to check it for my own sanity.
In the training, a white woman trotted out the tired excuse that maybe the checker was having a bad day or maybe she was checking everyone. I mentioned that I had watched her NOT check a white woman, which shut down that vein of conversation. While maybe the checker was having a rough day, it’s not a coincidence that she chose the Asian person to exert a bit of power on. As I said, I had been shopping there for several decades and had never been asked for my ID before. It was racism, pure and simple.
One thing that is so frustrating about any ism is when a person of the majority simply will not believe the words of the minority. I am not saying never to question someone who is speakng on the topic, but the first thing a non-minority person should do is listen. This is something that is emphasized more these days, much to my appreciation.
I’m back to talk about my ideal world once again. In the last post, I went off on a rant about sexism. I can’t promise I won’t do it again. I have a lot to say about gender especially as it’s becoming an issue again with the expansion of gender as we currently define it.
One thing I got into yesterday was how I don’t get gender. I don’t get a lot of the arbitrary categories we throw people into. I get (even if I don’t necessarily agree with) racial categories. I get religion, obviously, and disabilities in general. I mean, I understand that disabilities are…I was going to say each one was a discrete thing, but that’s not even true. There are things that spill over or are shared between differing disabilities. And the fact that there is such a thing as hidden disabilities–I’m just all over the place, aren’t I?
My point is that it’s not so easy to say someone is abled or disabled when you get past what we think of as obvious disabilities (being in a wheelchair, for example). Nobody is 100% healthy. Well, very few people. But that’s another post altogether.
In my ideal world, I want people to be aware of other people. It’s really that simple. But not that easy to get there. It took me so long to realize that people don’t automatically try to understand people who are not like them.
Side note: I have had to do that all my life. I was taught at a very young age that I was the keeper of my mother’s emotions. She would pour out her pain to me for hours every night–mostly about my father cheating on her. I don’t remember if she mentioned his cheating explicitly, but we all knew that was what was happening.
My father did not hide it, by the way. He didn’t see any reason to hide it because if he was doing it, then it was fine. I’m not being snarky or hyperbolic, by the way. My father is a narcissist in the classic sense of the word, and he didn’t feel the need to justify anything he did. If he wanted to do it, then he did it. Why would he not?
Side note: Here’s the fascinating thing. I used to thinki that my father did not love anyone other than himself. Then, I thought maybe he loved my mother if he loved anyone. Now, howeve,r I don’t think he even loves himself. He certainly does not (or did not) enjoy life. He never had anything positive to say about anything, and I can’t remember many times when he smiled in delight about anything.
When I was in my twenties, my relationship with my parents was very rocky. That’s putting it mildly, by the way. Every time I talked to them on the phone (they had moved back to Taiwan when I was in my early twenties (father) and late twenties (mother). Or maybe early thirty for my mother), I was suicidal by the time I hung up. That’s not me exaggerating, either.
One time, my father was here after a conference in the west somewhere (can’t remember where). We got into a fight about something. Again, I can’t remember, but it’s not important. At some point, he demanded to know if I was grateful for all he’d done for me (home, money, etc. It was a lot. I’m not denying that). I told him that I wasn’t because I was a raging ball of anger at the time. Plus, he had pushed me so hard, I wanted to hit him where it had a chance of hurting.
He looked at me with such hatred in his eyes, I mentally recoiled. He spit out at me, “Then why should I love you?”
I died inside at that moment, but it also was a moment of such clarity. I had a sense by the time I was seven or eight that he did not love me. I knew it by the time I was in my early twenties. To hear him say it with such spitefulness was a blessing in disguise. I didn’t have to question it any longer.
Even though I knew it on some level, and even though I felt numb about my parents at that time, it still broke my heart. I simply said, “You’re my father. It’s your job to love me.”
I could not believe I had to say that to him. But that’s part of being a narcissist–the idea that you could love someone just for themselves is beyond you (or might be. I know it’s not the same for everyone).
My fdather is in the late stages of dementia, and it’s pretty grim. It’s weird talking to him now because he’s more expressive than he was earlier in his life. After I told him that he should love me because it was part of his job as my father, he started telling me he loved me when we talked on the phone, but it was very stilted.
Now, he’ll tell me with emotion in his voice that he loves me. I believe he actually believes it. Or at least that he loves the person he thinks of as his daughter. This was something I figured out after my medical crisis: neither of my parents love me as a person. They can’t because they don’t actually know me. And what they do know, they don’t like. I don’t think there is a single aspect of my personality that they think is a good thing. I made my peace with their disapproval, well, mostly.
How did I end up there again? My point is that I have had to soothe their emotions for all my life. I don’t know if I’m innately empathetic, but I have honed that skill over forty-plus years. Itt’s become second-nature to me, which is a positive AND a negative. Would I have chosen it for myself? I don’t know.
Back when I was in my twenties, it was the rage to say that bad things happened to people to make them have empathy. That enraged me because I didn’t think I needed to have gone through the horrid things I did in order to be empathetic.
I have realized, however, that some people do need to go through bad things in order to get empathy. Mainly, people who have been born into several categories of privilege and have not experienced the hard knocks many of us suffer through.
It’s so hard to explain privilege to people who have it because it’s normal to them. You can’t show the absence of something as easily as you can add to an experience/equation.
I have more to say about my ideal world because of course I do. In the last post, I was talking about From games, cishet white dudes assuming they’re the norm, and a bunch of other things.
Side note (yes, this early): That’s the way my brain works. I have discovered this is a neurodiversity thing, which makes sense. People get very exasperated with me because I can’t keep from going off on a tangent. In my writing, I love a side note, a footnote, an aside, and just anything that takes me down a different road.
Everything is interconnected to me. I can’t compartmentalize, which is to my detriment. I find it funny that I was talking about interconnectedness about a decade before it came a thing. I did not understand looking at, say, race without including gender. Things have an impact on most or all aspects of my life in different ways, and it isn’t as if I could turn off, say, being Taiwanese for a day.
There are some things about me that you wouldn’t know right off the bat just by looking at me. And there are some that you would. In the latter category, the following are included: fat, Taiwanese (Asian) American, AFAB, and old (although I look younger than my actual age).Included in the former are: neurogivergent, agender, and bisexual.
Even though I listed them separately here, I feel them all at the same time to varying extents. Each is a piece of the puzzle that makes up me, and if any one of those pieces is missing–well, it’s just not me.
There are other pieces, of course, including me being a writer, Taiji (especially the weapons) and now Bagua, my passion for FromSoft games, and others.
In my ideal world, I would be able to talk about any of these with ease. I would not feel like I had to hide any aspect of my personality/being. Not to say that I would talk about any or all of them all the time because there’s a time and place for everything, but ideally, I would not feel I could not talk about any of them at all.
I did not begin to suspect I had a neurodivergency until I was in my thirties. Even then, it was just a whisper of a hint of an idea. I have mentioned that the fact that I was talking about ADHD on Twitter with a friend and I said that I didn’t think I could have it because I was able to focus on one thing –sometimes, for a very long time.
He told me that hyperfocus was actually an indication of ADHD, which was news to me. I didn’t pursue it at the time, but I filed it away for further reference. Then I didn’t pull it out again for at least a decade.
In the last post, I was musing about what my ideal world would look like. Of course, it’s difficult to say because I can’t account for every issue that we would come up against, but I did mention a few of the bigger ones. Racism, sexism, queerphobia, classism, and ableism. Of course, there are more than just those (religious intolerance and ageism spring to mind), which proves my point that you really can’t fix everything. In fact, even if all these issues were to suddenly disappear, others would spring up in their place. Why? Because human beings love to categorize and to belong to a team. In order to be part of a team, you have to have someone(s) who are not on the team.
Here’s the thing. It’s fine and dandy to say that in my diversity town (instead of my ideal world) it would be cishet white dudes who would go through the experience in order to learn. The problem is that assumes that if someone is a minority in one area, then they would be sympathetic to other minorities.
This is most emphatically not true.
You would think I would have known this ages ago, but I foolishly assumed the best of people back when I was in my twenties and thirties. In fact, when I was in college, I had a friend who was adamant that I was an optimist. I was so offended because I was a cynical pessimist, damn it. He listened to me rant for a good five minutes before calmly saying, “You expect people to do the right thing and then are disappointed when they don’t. That makes you an optimist.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but then I closed it again. He was right. I did expect people to do/say the right thing. I was disappointed when that didn’t pan out. In other words, I was an optimist. Damn it. I was cynical because I kept getting my expectations dashed.
Side note: The reason I started thinking about all this is because I was getting frustrated in the RKG Discord when a few people would not acknowledge that Sekiro was not for everyone. Though no one would be so mean as to say ‘git gud’, it pretty much is that sentiment.
It’s fascinating as well as frustrating to see people (let’s face it. Mostly cishet white dudes) not be able to see that they are not the norm. And, to be fair, in this case, the Discord was built around From games (loosely), so many of the people who are in the Discord are From fans. I am, too, but I am not good at them. And I am one of the few people who can recognize that.
In dreaming up my diversity town, I got to thinking about how I would want the world to be in general. If I were made the monarch of the world, I mean. I would rule with an iron fist in a velvet glove or a velvet fist in an iron glove….Probably the former. I’m talking about pie-in-the-sky, it will never happen ideal.
So. As is my wont, I decided t o write a post and figure it out as I write. This is not specific to the diversity town I’ve been talking about in my previous posts, but more how I would like the world to be in general.
One. No labels. Not in the smarmy “I don’t see color” way, but in the “I don’t want to limit people” way. Labels are fine as long as they serve their purpose–which is providing a handy heuristic for something more complicated and complex. For example, yes, I’m Taiwanese American. That’s an accurate label, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. A label never can.
The problem is that often, people think the label is the end of the discussion and not just the beginning. What I mean is that, yes, I’m Taiwanese American. But that only tells you a sliver about who I am. I would have to explain to you my family dysfunction, my father’s rampant nationalism, the negative experiences I’ve had in Taiwan, and growing up Asian in a very white Minnesota suburb in the eighties in order for you too have a better understanding of that piece of me.
In general, I am not a fan of labels. Again, not in a snotty ‘no labels’ way that some people use it to avoid taking ownership of their political position. Ahem. That’s a pet peeve of mine, but it’s not my focus. I want to say that I mean it that labels should not be constraining, and I often find them to be just that.
Let’s take another example. Bi/bisexual. This was something I chose when I was in my early twenties–when I first realized that I was attracted to more than just men. I explored other terms such as omnisexual and pansexual. I didn’t like them. At all. They sounded (to me) pretentious and pompous. I didn’t like bisexual, though, because it felt limiting. But I decided it was the least-worst of the choices and went with it.