Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: societal norms

In My Ideal World, I can just breathe

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Still talking about being a weirdo is a very straitlaced world. Here is the post from yesterday. Sometimes, I get jaded when I hear other people talk about things they consider ‘weird’ because it often falls into what I consider to be mildly diffreent. Or even if it’s more out there, it’s not super out there.

It’s hard to explain, really, but as someone who is on the fringe of everything, I don’t assume that anything about my life is normal. Not my hobbies; not my beliefs; not my traits/identities. One fairly tame example is when I worked at the county as an administrative assistant. I was on the floor with all the executives of the different departments. That meant that there were people from very disparate departments on one floor. There was a researcher who was roughly my age and also a woman (as I identified as at the time). We would casually chat about this and that, and it was fine. I only saw her once a week or so, so it was certainly not a steady thing.

Somehow, we found out that we were both bisexual. She was with a male partner in what she thought might be an abusive relationship. That was an interesting discussion to have, but it’s not the reason I brought her up. Once, we were talking about sex. Yes, wildly inappropriate for the workplace, but not surprising with that particular workplace. Somehow, the question of attraction came up. I said that I would walk down the street, see someone hot, and think about how they would be in bed.

My colleague looked at me as if  Itold her I was streaking on the streets on the regular. Or as if I had said that I was punching people in the face randomly and for no good reason. I asked her what was wrong and she said that women don’t think like that. My brain screeched to a halt because she was telling me, self-identified as a woman at the time, that something I had just said was something that ‘women’ didn’t do/think. She was completely serious and did not see how fucked up what she was saying was.

Side note: This is human nature, by the way. We think/believe things beyond all ratinal belief. If something threatens our sense of self and what we believe, we will go to ridiculous lengths to explain it away. That’s why it’s so hard to get someone out of acult, for example. Or why conspiracy theorists are impossible to reason with. They will simply dismiss anything that doesn’t fit into their preconceived notions/ideas/beliefs. Again, we all do this–it’s just to what extent any given person will do it.

I looked at her and told her I, a woman, was telling her to her face that this was something I did. She said that she had talked about this with all her female friends (ten! Ten women! All the women!) about this very thing, and all of them said they could not imagine doing that. Therefore! No! Women! Would! Ever! Do! That!


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In the in-between In My Ideal World

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In my last post, I intended to talk about the little things around the big things in my life, but ended up talking about writing–which is a big thing. It’s not one of my identity issues, though, except that I’m struggling with writing fiction now in a way I never have. Before my medical crisis, I had stories in my brain all the time. I had one writer’s block that I could remember, and it was for a month. That was very tense for me, but it went after that month or so with no problem. Now, however, while I still have ideas and fragments in my brain, I don’t have the stories I used to have.

I have been mulling over an idea for a trilogy for the last year. I’ve been refining it as I go, but I can’t make it gel in a coherent whole. Acutally, I have a few different ideas (for different trilogies), and I’m trying to find a way to bring it all together. I don’t want to talk too much about it before I start writing because I find that the more I talk about my writing, the less I actually write/the worse I actually write. That’s not unique to me, by the way. A lot of writers find that if the talk too much about their writing as they’re writing, it takes the verve out of said writing.

Here’s the thing. The big things such as sexual orientation, race, gender, etc., are important, yes, but so are the spaces in between. Or the things that don’t quite fit into any one character. And they’re all connected–at least in my mind. Which I’ve discoverered might be because I’m neurodivergent.

Side note: It’s refreshing to know that I can still learn things about myself at my old age. Refreshing, but also daunting. Daunting because there is so much about myself that I would like to fix. Refreshing because apparently, you can teach an old dog new tricks!

This is one of the reasons my writing has stalled. I think that since my medical crisis, my brain has become even more wedded to the idea that everything is related. If I want to write about one thing, say, my medical crisis, then I have to start with my family dysfunction. I have to add in my Taiji practice, not to mention just my life in general.

When I start thinking of all the things I need/want to add to the story, my brain mentally gives up.

Side note: After Elden Ring came out, Ian urged mo te pitch to his editor a story about FromSoft games and my medical crisis. See, before my medical crisis, I was so hyped for Elden Ring. It was announced….before the pandemic? Or at least rumored, and then it didn’t come out. And didn’t come out.


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I keep my mouth shut

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So I’m continuing on with my musings about family dysfunction, how difficult it is to be so different, and how I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut. And, yes, I’m going to tie them together somehow (or not). I’m not too fussed either way. In the last post, I talked about family dysfunction mostly. I will touch more on that, but I want to start by musing about masking. I didn’t even realize to what extent I did it until I talked about it with A. It’s such a part of me by now, it takes conscious effort to take it off.

I am on my guard almost any time I interact with someone, online or in the real world. I am constantly monitoring the temperature around me to know if what I am saynig in acceptable or not. In the Discord I’m in, there’s an in-group and an out-group. Or rather, there are a few (cishet white) guys who are pretty dominant and others fall in line behind them. It’s not deliberate and they don’t mean to be, but god grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man.

Not that they are mediocre, but they are cishet white dudes who have no problem just stating their opinions like they’re facts. It’s really irritating when it comes to pop culture because I don’t feel that there’s room for disagreement. For example. Sekiro. Many people consider it the best From game ever. People will blather about how once it clicks, it’s like a dance/rhythm game and soooooo easy. They don’t want to hear anything about it not being true for everyone. Or that for some of us, it never clicked. I had a hard time finishing it once–a really fucking hard time. When I tried to go back to it after my medical crisis, I could not beat Owl (Father) who was my nemesis, and who I needed to beat again, unfortunately, for the plat. I say unfortunately because I did him on my first playthrough, thinking I would not play again and wanting to do all the bosses on this path. The only reason I would go back is to do the plat, and that would mean doing him again.

No. Not going to do it. Also, cannot do Isshin again. Oh, and you have to do all the bosses (the ones you get a trophy for) on one save, so I would have to do Owl (Father) on NG?. And then do the Shura (bad) ending on NG++? Nope. I wasn’t going to do it, anyway, and now, I can’t do it.

That’s a word that Americans don’t like: can’t. We have been told since we were kids that we can do anything! We can be anything! It’s horseshit. Everyone has limitations, and that’s not even remotely controversial. Or it shouldn’t be.


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Differing vantage points

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I’ve been talking about family dysfunction and abuse in general. It’s difficult to talk about because in order to have a conversation about something, you need  a common starting point. You have to have agreed upon boundaries as to what the conversation will entail. In discussing families and abuse, the person listening has to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of such things happening.

It makes such a difference. If you are someone from a  happy and well-adjusted family who does not have any friends who have dysfunctional families, then that person, let’s call them Alex, may not be able to understand where I’m coming from. In the last post, I talked about how my mother has no boundaries, and what’s more, she feels that it’s her right as a mother to meddle with my brother and my relationship. I’ll get back to her later. For now, though, I want to talk about my father.

I have a story I tell about my father to indicate his narcissim. It’s the one about when I was a kid, I never got cold. We found out when I was a teenager that I had hyperthyroidism (Graves’ disease). That was why I never got cold. My father would say, “Put on a coat because I’m cold.” People either didn’t get what I was trying to emphasize (“Why are you mad at your parent for caring if you’re cold?”) or said I should do it to placate my father.

The first is vastly more common, and they don’t read/hear what I’m actually saying. My father doesn’t say, “Put on a coat because it’s cold.” He said, “Put on a a coat because I’m cold.” Meaning, beacuse he’s cold. Not beacuse I’m cold. It never occurred to him that I would feel differently than he would.

In addition, he came up with a different narartive of his own as to what happened. He said that he would tell me to put on a coat, and I would refuse because he didn’t ask nicely. That I wanted him to say ‘please’. That’s certainly possible that I threw that out there because knowing him, he probably ordered me to put on a coat rather than ask. However, that was never the main reason. The main reason was because I wasn’t fucking cold!


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Dyfunction dysfunction, what’s your function?

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One thing rarely talked about when discussing abuse is how coping mechanisms that have been developed to deal with the abuse are faulty in healthy situations. It’s something that comes up on Ask A Manager on a regular basis because she talks about how being in a toxic work environment can warp you to what is ok and what isn’t. The wildest example I can think of is the letter writer who bit a coworker and in the update, said it was considered ok by her colleagues because the guy is a jerk. The LW’s conclusion was that people with normal jobs found them boring and hated it, so, yeah, her work environment was toxic, but, hey, at least it was interesting. Many commenters pointed out that the LW was getting warped by the toxic environment.

I bring this up because abuse does the same. In the last post, I mentioned that I was resigned to managing my parents because they weren’t going to change. The way I deal with them, though, is not something that would work well with healthy people. Basically, I just placate them and get through a conversation as painlessly as possible. I keep it as surface-y as possible as well. The goal is to not say anything of importance unless I absolutely have to.

You can imagine how this would not work well with people I actually want to be close to. You can’t shine off a friend and expect them to be happy about it. A true friend, I mean. Not just an acquaintance. When the tragedy happened in February, I told my close friends about it. I was devastated and needed the comfort/support. I would not think about holding back with them, which is the normal and healthy way to deal with it.

The longer you’ve been in an abusive situation, the harder it is to recalibrate your thinking. I am low-contact with my parents, but it’s still enough contact to keep me off balance. I have a shield up around them that I can’t afford to let done. Explaining that to other people is futile.

I’ve said it before, but it’s a matter of context. For people who have loving parents, it’s nearly impossible to imagine parents who don’t love their children. Or rather, it might be imaginable, but it’s not something that can be understood if you haven’t been in the situation. Like anything else that is the outlier, really.


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Being weird should be the norm

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Here’s the thing about being weird. Yes, I’m doing a cold open. Here was the last post about me being weird if you want to catch up. I think this is four? Something like that.

I don’t want to be normal, whatever that means.

Side note: (Yes, this early!) I was complaining to K several decades ago about how I was such a weirdo and didn’t want the normal life. I was complaining in the context of how I wished I could be normal and not such a freak. She said, and I’m paraphrasing, “But Minna, you don’t want to be married and have kids. You don’t want to do any of those things. You would be miserable.”

She is right. I don’t want any of that. None of it sounds appealing to me, and I realized that what I wanted was a sense of belonging–not the actual markers of being ‘normal’. I want to be able to be me, more or less, and not have to explain my thought process all the goddamn time.

Side note II: I love the word heuristics. I love the idea of a heuristic. We can’t function without heuristics because it’s impossible to analyze everything every moment of the day. For example, when you reach a stoplight, it would be difficult if you didn’t know that red means stop, yellow means caution, and green means go. If you had to figure that out every time you reached a stoplight, you would not be able to drive.

That’s a silly example, but it’s an easy one for people to understand. Heuristics extend to societal norms. We greet each other warmly when we meet, and we are civil unless we’re given a reason not to be. Societal norms dictate our interactions. Again, I’m not saying we should get rid of them all. What I am saying is that they shouldn’t be so rigid that people who aren’t a part of them can’t fit in at all.

Unfortunately, it’s very common for a group to close ranks. I am a lifelong Democrat, but that doesn’t mean that I approve of everything they say and do. This is my issue with groups in general–it’s too easy for the rules to become calcified. And for them to quickly close ranks. This is my issue with the weird epithet being hurled at Trump and Vance by Harris and Walz. It’s drawing a line I’m not comfortable with. I get that it’s signalling who’s in and who’s out–but it doesn’t do anything to make me feel like I’m in.

The probem with talking about ‘normal average Americans’ is that I’m not one and have never been. I’m on the fringe of the fringe, and it’s not even close. I’m weird, and I feel alienated by people in my party who are denigrating the weirdos.


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I can’t NOT be weird

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I’m weird. This is my third post about it. I have plenty to say, so I’m going to keep going until I am done. I ended the last post by asking whether I would be normal if I could. My short answer was, “I don’t know.”

For the most part, I like who I am. Well, let me phrase that a bit differently. I like the components of myself that are usually problematic to other people or ‘not normal’. Asian, bisexual, agender, nonmonogamous, aromantic, etc. I love my hobbies of writing, From games (well, that’s love-hate, but more love than hate. Just), and Taiji/Bagua.

My immediate thought was that I would change things about myself if I could in order to be normal. After a second thought, though, I changed my mind. When I thought about each individual aspect of my being, I couldn’t think of any that I would change. I’m not talking about my flaws, by the way. I have plennty of those that I would give up in a heartbeat. The different aspects of my personality, though? Let’s go through them one by one.

Taiwanese American? I like being Taiwanese American. It’s a unique perspective that not many people share–especially since my parents are pro-independent Taiwan. It does get irritating when Chinese people want to say we’re the same–we are not. And, no one knows anything about Taiwan, but I ain’t mad about that. It’s such a tiny island, and I don’t know much myself. I will say I appreciate that my Taiwanese genes are keeping me looking young. I look at least ten years younger than my age–if not more. no one thinks I’m in my fifties, which is funny because everyone thought I was older when I was a kid.

Bisexual? I’m not keen on the term, but I love being one. I also don’t like pansexual or omnisexual. They both are just a bit too precious to me. I would prefer just to say sexual, but that’s precious in and of itself. Plus, it gives out the wrong message. I prefer queer, but most people think that just means gay. So until I can find something that feels better, I’ll stick with bisexual. Some bis have taken it to mean, “I’m attracted to people like me and people not like me”, which will do for now. I like having the choices, though. I like that I can be attracted to anyone. What can I say? I like having my choices.

Agender? This one is iffy. I would be fine with being a woman if it didn’t feel so restrictive. Gender roles are still so rigid in this society. You would think in 2024, we would have moved forward in this aspect–and we have! But just, sadly, not that far. Or rather, not far enough for me. If I were twenty years old, I probably would have chosen nonbinary, but it doesn’t feel right to me.


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When the mask cracks and/or slips

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In my attempt to write about how I’ve struggled to be normal all my life, I got massively derailed into delving into my family dysfunction. It’s related, but not what I really wanted to talk about. I ended the last post by noting that old people sometimes cite their age as an excuse for retro behaviors/beliefs. I mentioned how I hate that because they neatly skip over the fact that they’ve been alive in the decades since that birth and have had every opportunity to update their beliefs.

That’s not what I want to talk about, though. One reason I realized that I might be neurodivergent is…well, let me take you through the steps.

I am extremely adept at reading social situations. As I have mentioned before, this is because I had been groomed by my mother to be her emotional support person. She expected me to listen to her complain for hours at a time about my father and to soothe shattered emotions.

I was talking to A about how I was way-too-empathetic, but it wasn’t natural. I explained how my brain worked when someone told me something highly emotional (or just any big event). Let’s say it was getting a new job. This is how it would go.

Friend: Hey, Minna. I have news.

Me (thinking): News. What does that mean? How do they sound? Happy or sad.

Friend: I got a new job.

Me (thinking): New job, new job, new job. Is this a good thing? A bad thing? Have they mentioned this before?

(My brain frantically trying to remember if friend has mentioned anything about their job in the last few months while not showing any outer turmoil.)

Friend: It was rather sudden. It only happened in the last three days.

Me (stil thinking): Am I supposed to know about this? It happened suddenly. Does that mean good or bad?

Me (out loud): That is quite sudden! (Hoping they will reveal more.)

Friend: It comes with a 20% pay increase and double the PTO. And full insurance! I’m so thrilled.

Me (in relief, scrambling to come up with an appropriately enthusiastic tone): Oh, that’s great! I’m so happy for you. What thrilling news!


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What gaming has taught me

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I got bored with my way of titling (and numbering) my posts so I’m switching it up. I will be talking about the same thing I was talking about yesterday, but I slapped a different title on it. Here is yesterday’s post. I was musing about how gaming helped me realize (agonizingly slow over time) that I had actual disabilities rather than just flaws or something wrong with me.

Side note (yes, already): It boggles my mind that it took a friend gently mentioning that several of the things I had told her sounded like autism to her (not that directly, but that was the meat of it). Why did it boggle my mind so much? Because I had never even considered that I might be autistic. ADHD, yes, but autistic? No way! I had the stereotypical image in my mind that everyone has: male, jittery, constantly stimming, not able to make eye contact, not emotionally connecting with people, not liking to be touched, etc. In other words, my brother. Who, ironically, I must say, did not realize he was on the spectrum until I pointed it out to him months before I ended up in the hospital. I just assumed he knew because he fit the stereotypical description so neatly and his son was also autistic.

But for me, I never considered it. I’m highly empathetic (because I’ve been forced to do it since birth), don’t stim, can look people in the eyes, and I am good in social situations (mostly). My friend, A, and I have several long discussions about it, and what she said really opened my eyes. I had mentioned how as a kid, I felt like an alien among the humans. I paid close attention to everyone around me to see what they were saying and doing. And reacting. I couldn’t know how they thought, but I tried to estimate as best as I could, anyway.

She said it was common for autistic people to feel as if they weren’t part of the human race. She mentioned masking, which I knew about. I hadn’tquite made the connection, though, between masking and feeling like an alien. I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t automatically intuit what I was supposed to do in all and every situation. I felt as if I hadn’t been given the manual on how to human that everyone had gotten. A told me that was a common feeling for autistic people.

Side note: I get why Harris and Waltz are emphasizing the weirdness of Trump and Vance, but I wish they (and the other Democrats) would give it a rest. I’m weird. I have been weird all my life. I feel somewhat diminished when the Dems harp on how weird Trump and Vance are (especially Vance. The word you’re looking for there is ‘creepy’). And I get it. It’s pushback on Trump and Vance (and the Republicans in general) trying to portray Harris and Waltz as weird. Which the Republicans have been doing ever since I started following politics. Trying to portray the Dems as out-of-touch, elite, limosuine liberals, etc. Weird, though, is a new-ish one. Yes, they pulled it first on Harris and Waltz.


So I get it. And it’s a smart choice. Doesn’t mean it’s not alienating. I have been a weirdo all my life. I don’t want to have to give that up, damn it. Even clarifying good weird and bad weird doesn’t really sit right with me. Yes, it’s a small thing, but i’s emblematic of what it’s like to be in the minority in almost every category.

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Neurodiversity and me, part five

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In yesterday’s post, I was musing about how stereotypes of autism blocked me from realizing that I might actually have it. Another one that really tripped me up was how autistic people miss nonverbal/social cues. I have read and heard it said so many times that if you want an autistic person to understand your hints and cues, you have to be explicit about them. A look, a grimace, a tilt of the head–none of that would actually get through to an autistic person. That’s one of the constantts I’ve heard about autistic people–they don’t understand nonverbal cues at all.

“Just be direct with them!” That’s what I constantly hear as counsel for dealing with people with autism.

Now, let me say, I’m not arguing for direct communication. I don’t think it’s a bad thing in general to just state what you want. Well, except that it’s not the way things are done in Minnesota. Here, you have to duck, dodge, and feint your way during a converastion. You can’t directly say no because that would hurt the other person’s feeling. I’ve had to explain to other people that if they extend an invitation and the answer is anything but an enthusiastic yes, it’s a no. “I need to check my calendar!” = no. “I have to talk to my husband!” = no. “It sound s great”, but with no actual affirmation = no. Only a yes is a yes.

Anyway. I can read facial/bodily cues just fine. In fact, I can read them better than some allistic people can (many) because as I’ve said many times that I’vee had it drumed in my brain since I was a little kid that I was responsible for other people’s feelings. Also, that there feelings were more important than mine. Also, that I should not upset anyone and if I did, it was of utmost importance that I did what it would take to make them feel better.

Side note: I’m not saying one should not be aware of one’s effect on other people. One should! It’s part of living in a society of disaparate people who need to get along. However, it’s usually non-male people who are made to feel resonsible for male people’s emotions.


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