Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: trauma

Family dysfunction: the gift that keeps on giving

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I have pretty much given up on Slate advice columns because I don’t like most of the columnists and, to be frak, the commentariat is….not my cup of tea in general. Or rather, I never know which way they’re going to swing, and it’s frustrating to me. For the most part, I can guess which way they are agoing to go, but every once in a while, they take me by complete surprise. Most of the time, though, I know what they are going to say. I’s usually pretty pragmatic, except when it comes to anyone who is a minority, then pragmaticism goes out the window and all kinds of isms come flying in. The only time when they actually acknowldege any ism is when it’s sexism–probably because more than half the commentariat are women.

We all know that people are self-centered. This is a given, and not even a bad tihng. Of course you’re going to thnk about things from your own point of view–that’s what being a human is. But, the problem is when you (general you) can’t see why/how someone else would think differently. and you assume that they are wrong/weird/crazy for thinking the way they do.

I really don’t like Doyin Richards from Care and Feeding because he relates everything to himself and because he’s, well, mean to his kid.s Such as telling them that their things are not theirs because he bought them, and he’s just letting them use them. That’s not tough love, that’s just cruel.

For whatever reason, I decided to read his column today. Much to my surprise, I actually agreed with his answers for the most part. But it might be because the first two questions were just so out there, anyone could have answered them easily. It’s the second question that really grinded my gears. The mother who ‘wears her heart on her sleeve’ and doesn’t want to stifle herself for her kids. She overheard them talk about how they didn’t go to her for anything because she was so sensitive. This was what she said:

I am deeply hurt that my kids choose to believe that they have to walk on eggshells around me, but this is who I am.

Are you fucking kidding me? Wow. She went on to say more words, but this just smacked my gob. If you noticed, she was fully invested in ‘this is how I am’, but she also said that her children were choosing to walk on eggshells around her. She couldn’t help who she was, but they could, apparently. The two kids (13F and 16M, the latter is the oldest. The way it’s phrased, there are other kids, sadly) were talking about how they she would freak out over little things like no more milk. The oldest son said that he learned in elementary school that he could not go to her for anything.

Now. I am not a parent. But If I were and my kids said something like this, I would be mortified. I would take to heart what they said and work on changing it. She went on to say that she didn’t think it was fair that she be expected to change a huge part of who she was for something as silly as her children’s feelings. No, she did not phrase it taht way, but it was very evident in her attitude.

Doyin nailed this by saying while it was hard to hear, she needed to get a therapist ASAP to deal with it because she was making it unsafe for her kids. he also called bullshit on her saying that she did not ask her kids to change their own behavior. He said, “If you saw them hurting someone, you’d just stand by with your thumb up your ass and not say anything?” Paraphrased, of course, but pretty much what he said.


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My life is not a movie

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About a month after I came home from the hospital, my mother said I should write a script based on my life. I dismissed the idea for many reasons, not the least because no one would care about an Asian queer/genderqueer person. She got angry and said I would be an inspiration to people, as if that meant I was obliged to do it. Which, come to think of it is pretty much the case for her. Martyred service.

It’s interesting because in Ask A Manager today, there are two questions about serving others (in a way). One is the term ‘servant leader’, which is an AGILE term, apparently, but for me, it’s an Evangelical Christian one. In addition, I don’t think ‘servant’ anything should be on a resume. It just invokes old-timey British period pieces, which is probably not what people want it to say. At any rate, there was too much diversity in opinion for people to use the term without checking to see if it’s a valid one in their field.

Side Note: Someone in the discussion was saying she didn’t think it was a dog whistle because she had never heard of the evangelical Christian version before. I nearly had an apoplectic fit reading that comment because that’s what a fucking dog whistle is. Something that can pass for normal to the uninitiated, but that makes a point to those in the know. I mean, what the fuck do they think a dog whistle is?

I am getting angry about it all over again. I know it’s a case of someone is wrong on the internet, but this is the actual definition of the term! For fuck’s sake. I can’t even. It just makes me agog. AGOG, I tell you!

The other question was about making a comment to a student that you ‘know’ has an eating disorder. But you’ve only known them for three days. Sigh. This is something that seems very counter-intuitive for empathetic people, but here’s the brutal truth–many times, doing the empathetic thing is for the empathizer, not the other person. I’m saying this as someone who is a huge empathizer. Oftentimes, it’s the distress of feeling bad that is the motivator to push forward and help someone else.

Eating disorders are really hard to heal from. I’ve dealt with anorexia twice (with a side helping of bulimia once), and I went from that to compulsive overeating. And, at a certain point, I didn’t do any of that, but I still had body issues. As I’ve detailed several times here, it was me dying and coming back to life (twice!) that got me over my body issues.


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The injustice of grief

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When I was a kid, whenever I used to complain about something, my mother would tell me, “Life isn’t fair!” Even as a young child, this filled me with instant rage and I would retort, “Well, it should be!” At six or seven, I couldn’t articulate why that phrase filled me with such fury, but I’ve given it plenty of thought since then. First of all, I know life is not fair. You’re not telling me anything new with that statement. Secondly, it’s shrugging your shoulders and giving up. In other words, it’s a copout. Yes, we know the world is not fair, but we don’t have to contribute to it. We’re not automatons who just unthinkingly do whatever the world tells us to do. We can make decisions for ourselves and one of those decisions could be to make the world better for one person. We can make that decision every day!

If we all had that mindset, there wouldn’t have been the Civil Rights movement or women’s suffragette movement. Or more recently, the #MeToo movement. Or trans rights coming to the forefront of our collective consciousness. Imagine if Martin Luther King Jr. looked at the inequality around him and said, “Well, that’s just how it is. Life is unfair!” Or Gandhi. Or Rosa Park. None of the major societal improvements would have happened if someone hadn’t stood up and said, “This ain’t right. What’s’ more, I’m going to do something about it.” We need the disrupters who are willing to put their lives on the line to be the change they want to see in the world.

On a smaller scale, that’s what many marginalized creative people do with their works. They don’t see what they want to see out there, so they create it. I do that with my writing. I make my protags bisexual Taiwanese American woman-shaped people with black cats. Is it limiting? A bit, but it’s better than writing about boring and bland straight white dudes. Honestly, if I never read another book with a straight white dude protagonist (or watch such a movie), it’ll be too soon. I was in college when I first made the decision to only ready women of color (preferably Asian women) in my free time. In the mystery genre, that wasn’t possible in the ’09s, so I widened it to white women as well. I did read white dudes once in a great while, but it had to be someone highly recommended by someone I respected. A white dude once said to me in a tone of high dudgeon, “Isn’t that just as discriminatory as not reading minority authors?” I looked at him in disdain and said, “I bet I’ve read way more white straight dudes than you have women of color.” He had nothing to say to that because I was speaking the truth.


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