Hello again.
I recently binged the Steven Universe Future series. I loved it as much as I loved the original series, but for different reasons. It dredged up a lot of memories for me, and complicated emotions that I haven’t worked through or examined yet. I’ve been writing the memories down as they come to me to process them (and I’m processing my feelings privately in my journal). So, here is an incomplete list of memories my brain has been fixating on lately, presented to you in minimally editted vignettes, out of order within the timeline of my life.
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One of the first times I attended a dog park, I hadn’t had much experience with dogs yet (I am very confident and comfortable around “family” dogs of all sizes now—not so much yard dogs or working dogs, but I’ll get there). A towering man wearing all denim, a large embossed belt, a cowboy hat, and cowboy boots was walking a huge, likely-pedigreed Rottweiler. I thought all dogs were the same, that I could play with them all and that the “play” gestures I used with puppies were ok to use with unfamiliar, adult dogs. I made a quick, dramatic play gesture at the Rottweiler. The dog began to lunge at me and started snapping. Luckily for me, the man had trained the dog very well. The dog stopped immediately as soon as the man gave commands.
The man glared at me, but didn’t say anything as they kept pace walking past me. I feel more ashamed when I make bad choices if people are silent and grant me “social grace” than if they tear into me or calmly state their disapproval. From that day on, I never use play gestures on unfamiliar dogs again. I go on to research dog behavior heavily on the internet and volunteer with hundreds of different dogs of all types/ages/sizes in the future over a series of five years—not exclusively because of this incident, I was going to anyway, but it definitely gave me more reason to. These choices don’t make the impact of this memory sporadically resurfacing any less impactful for me.
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I am a young child. I am not allowed to be outside alone. I tried to “run away” from home by disappearing for a couple of hours to see if anyone would notice. I’d simply hid in the backyard, in some of the overgrown bushes. I find two cats; I’m not sure if they are strays or outdoor cats like the cat my family had. They were hissing at each other, but I wanted them to be friends. With each of my short child arms I form an “o” gingerly around the midsection of each cat, hugging them to myself as though they are each a cherished, pampered doll. Neither of them are particularly happy, but I am so enthralled that I completely forget that I was in the middle of trying to “run away”. I simply go back inside once both cats leave. No one noticed my absence, the dirt worked into my knees and sprinkled across my face, or the cat scratches I’d accrued from my friends.
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While sitting in the shade of a tree at University reading a book, a stranger approached me to start talking at me. He asked if he could sit with me and practice talking because he had social anxiety that he thought he could address by speaking to strangers. He told me all about his life and insecurities before I could really get a handle on what was happening and say “no”. He said he had switched his major to business because he wanted to become a "go-getter". He told me about how his girlfriend, or the girl he was interested in—it became more and more clear to me that she had been honest with him and was not interested in him at all—wouldn’t sleep with him no matter how much he begged. She had told him that he needed to become more “man-like”, whatever that means. I think it was likely a deflection because he wasn’t taking the “no”? The older I get, the more I think that primary schools should teach handling rejection appropriately.
Anyway, he spoke about her in that lofty, vacant way that people who deify and/or objectify their crushes rather than get to know them as people often do. I think the me of now, if I hadn’t said “no” and immediately left already, would have told him as such and that the problem was more a matter of developing his own self worth and finding people that liked him for himself. I’m not sure why or how I became a magnet for people like this over the years. It seems like somehow, in a way I still don’t understand, I telegraph that I have poor boundary skills and that I’m emotionally available to strangers. I don’t go out alone much anymore.
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I am taking a small walk around the neighborhood as a teen to get out of the house. A strange older woman, thin as can be but much taller than me, wearing a pink moomoo and a flashy watch, crosses the street mid-block, cheerfully waving at me to head me off from walking away. I’m distrustful and worried by this because I don’t recognize her and the people in my neighborhood aren’t “nice” unless they need something. It’s a local, culturally polite practice to ignore folks and give them their space if you encounter them on the street unless you know them by name or by familial association. Or it used to be, anyway. I hear over and over again throughout the years as people move here from more socially open places that they hate that about living here and actually experience it as rudeness.
The woman points at a house to tell me she’d just moved in there with her son and asks me where I live. I don’t know the family in that house and I can’t remember if I’d ever even seen them outside. I lie about living across the busy street divide down the way. She asks so many personal questions, then finally asks if she can pray for me, with me, right then and there. I am off-put and very uncomfortable, but I let her out of social niceties and a general sensation of unwitting pliability from becoming overwhelmed by the situation. I learn over time that social niceties are a way that many people manipulate other people, especially people that have a hard time understanding intent and context, so I work harder on developing boundaries. I think maybe strangers often see that I’m “lost” in some sense, and simply have different approaches to interacting with “lost” people. She finishes her prayer and leaves with an open invitation to visit her in the house she’s staying at. I say maybe and walk away in the opposite direction of where I live. I never see her again. Her dogged proselytizing style is not unusual to me after using public transit systems for years, but the intensity of her eyes and her whitened TV teeth stick with me.
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My father “yells” into the corded phone because his dominant ear was damaged as a child by one of his brothers shoving a straw into it, so he can’t quite modulate the volume of his voice. I don’t remember which of my uncles it was—we’re one of those excessively large families, and I don’t get to see any of them much. Neither of my parents really get along with their families.
Sometimes I wish I could move to live with any one of my aunts or uncles permanently. They seem happier. Their living spaces are clean and navigable. They have routines and hobbies outside of television. They have other families they spend time with. I wonder what it is like to socialize as a familial unit. What is it like to know your cousins well? I lived with a few of them for a summer at a time while my parents tried to get organized.
Anyhow. My dad doesn’t mean to “yell” into the phone, and I understand that. My mother hates how loud my dad is on the phone but doesn’t recognize that she is just as loud when she cooks or cleans or sings. Neither of them understand why I scream and cry about noises, and neither do I. I just know that noise hurts and can’t explain it any further than that. They argue about it. I hide under my covers, something I’ve realized over the years is a form of self-regulation through sensory deprivation. I make sure my covers are heavy as an adult.
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I’ve thrown up at breakfast again. I’m having a meltdown, sobbing so hard that I’ve made myself throw up a second time. Another meltdown I can’t explain. I’m “too old” to be behaving this way. I’m a “difficult” child in private. The texture, scent, and taste of bacon fat makes me nauseous. I’ve told her over and over and over again—she knows that this is how I’ll react, and yet. Why? Why do I have to eat bacon? It seems arbitrary, like something out of a misguided parenting book or well-meaning advice from a family friend. They have to learn how to like things they don’t like! They have to learn to bear things they can’t do!
I still remember the artificial-seeming rubberiness of it. The fat had also gone rancid; not an uncommon problem in that house. We’re late for school because I was being “theatrical” about my food. It was not theatrics to get out of eating the bacon; I literally couldn’t eat the bacon. There is a difference, a difference I can only explain now as an adult. My whole body is more sensitive than a lot of other humans. I have a harder time processing particular sensory input, and food is one of those areas. My entire mouth and olfactory system are very sensitive.
I’ve learned over the years to enjoy many different foods and give things chances, but there are still textures, tastes, combinations that I struggle with and ultimately choose not to engage with because they’re too difficult for me. Something she would say often is that it’s a decision you have to make to overcome a feeling; but why would I fill my days with that if I know my “safe” foods and I’ve made sure that they meet my dietary needs? Why waste my limited time and energy at every meal, every day? I don’t have to engage with foods I find difficult to exist as a person, and I don’t have to engage with them to seem “normal”—as a sort of performative action to make other people more comfortable with my existence.
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I miss my Grandfather’s funeral because I couldn’t handle the disruption of my school attendance routine. It was one of the only structures in my life and I needed it more than anything. My father understood and didn’t make me go. I’m not sure why. I still have nausea and acid reflux at school because I miss my Grandpa that day and can’t quite process that he’s gone. Maybe going to the wake would have helped, to see him before he went in the ground, to say goodbye to his earthly avatar. I go on to regret this decision likely for the rest of my life.
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I’m sitting on the steps of the hall that my therapist works out of at University, my face a blotchy, salted mess. I’d just finished a therapy session and I’m waiting for my ride. I didn’t tell her that I think I’m bi, or I’m trans? I hint and skirt around it. I never will, and I won’t tell the next one, either. It’s a time when I didn’t realize I can be both, many people are both and so many other things. I’m very confused and angry and frustrated and depressed. I’ve been drawing myself with stubble and a pronounced Adam’s apple in the margins of my math notes. I’m in the throes of trying to be the young woman everyone expects me to be so that I get the social acceptance I crave. I am dressed the way I am for others’ sake and comfort; this is before I dump one man for another over their homophobia and then the second dumps me for homophobic reasons, and I decide to try to inhabit myself as I am in my heart.
A work truck parks across the street from me. The older driver gets out and goes inside the building. The passenger is around my age. He is dressed in construction worker attire. He pulls a pack of cigarettes out of a pocket from underneath his fluorescent vest as he gets out of the truck to rearrange the contents of the truck bed. We are likely of the same socioeconomic class. I’m attending University because of my high school grades and intense pressure from my family coupled with the availability of predatory student loans—I won’t fully realize this until I can’t find a job in my field post-graduation.
I realize that I’ve been staring at the exact moment he puts the lit cigarette to his lips and looks up to make eye contact with me. I’m not sure what this exact feeling is. I’m confident that he communicated something with his stare back. For some reason, I feel like he sees through the show I’m putting on. He sees all of me in a moment, and continues to stare at the real me as he takes a long drag. We don’t say anything, we don’t break the exchange; it feels like time stopped, the sounds around and outside of me faded to nothing and were replaced by a low, rhythmic buzzing in my ears, punctuated by nasally congested breaths in my head.
His driver comes back out, and they both get back in the truck. He gives me one last stare as they drive away into the distance. No gestures, no words. I’m still not sure what happened. My hearing returns. I didn’t feel harassed; I feel like I was visited by a spirit somehow. I’m sure he’s forgotten. Or maybe not? What did he see? Who was he? I know I am assigning too much to this encounter, but it felt like an unreality, a sort of anomalous hole in my timeline. My ride arrives and we drive away with the hum of the radio and the rush of wind from objects passing by the open windows softly preventing conversation from developing, so I sit in my head undisturbed. This memory puts me at ease and disrupts me in equal measure.
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Cis women start talking to me. Cis women have never gone out of their way to talk to me in the past. They’ve generally been exclusionary with me. Or maybe I was imagining that, or maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough, or maybe the walls I put up intimidated enough not to bother. It's likely a frustrating cocktail of all three in varying degrees at different points in my life. Anyhow, I'm dressing how I want to and I've cut my hair how I want it. I might not have facial hair, but I’ve never felt more like myself.
This particular cis woman had nearly nothing in common with me. Something I realize about queerness is that it cuts through many barriers to reach itself in others. We were sitting in the dry, prickly, chemically burned grass, eating lunch in the field adjacent to the building that her queer film studies class was in. She invited me to come with her. It was gray out in a way I enjoy, like it might rain, but it never did. She said that this film class was required, but I knew that she picked it from a list of at least 3 different focus areas. Something about it must have spoken to her.
She asked me why I look the way I do, who am I attracted to and why, how does it feel, things of this nature. She gave me space to flesh out my answers and really deeply explain what it is like to be myself, in a way that I don’t experience much with folks anymore. These questions don’t bother me personally when someone is genuinely curious and seeking to understand me. It’s in the way they ask, if their face is neutral and/or kind, if they are earnest.
This process repeats itself nearly word-for-word with a new cis woman every semester until I graduate. What’s strange to me still is that they all chose to sit next to me initially in classes. Everyone since who’s asked has had a sneer on their face. I wonder where these kinder people that needed to understand me are, if they conformed to the expectations of their families and communities, if their families and communities have accepted them as who they are, if they’ve followed their hearts, if they’ve fallen in love with themselves and other people. I wonder if any of them considered if they too are any of the many beautiful ways of being under the rainbow flag, if that’s why they needed to talk to me. Sometimes I feel really old around people my age, and other times I feel like an unprotected child.
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I stay up all night in a common room, without my parents’ knowledge, to watch a home-taped VHS collection of an anime that one of my classmates lent me. It’s the first time I’ve accidentally stayed up all night. Usually I read a book or play a game under the covers for about an hour before falling asleep if I’m having trouble letting go of the day. I don’t remember how I felt afterwards, but it’s the first time I remember being too fixated on something to put it down to meet my physical needs. This becomes an issue as I become older and have less reprieve from the social demands of the world outside my head. It wouldn’t be an issue if I had control over my working hours so that I could work with my shifting internal rhythms rather than against them. This thread runs through my adult life like coarse rope on a seafaring ship. Chores pile up as the days go by as I fixate on something to regulate myself after social or physical demands on me have been too high.
The anime was Fushigi Yuugi (CW: violence, blood, misgendering, transphobia, and sexual assault). It was the first teen-oriented anime I encountered. It elicited a strange, trance-like wistfulness in me for a more agrarian life that hung in my head like thick fog for a couple years. I wanted to be the queer character, Nuriko, because they got to be strong, beautiful, handsome, and bi (in spite of how horrible their depiction was—insanely transphobic and gaslighty); and I wanted to be the main heart throb, Tamahome, because he was dedicated to his family. I rewatched to the episode that the collection went up to maybe last year. The magic is mostly gone for me, and I mainly see a series of tired tropes and particularly hurtful stereotypes. I still enjoy the theme music, background animation, and food segments.
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I am sitting on a bench, wearing a surgical mask for my own sake at the urgent care doctor’s suggestion, holding my partner’s hand, trying to enjoy the artificial tropical climate of the indoor bird sanctuary we are in. It is many years before the Covid-19 pandemic, before public masks are a little more normal to folks in the States. The humidity makes it much harder for me to breath, but it feels heavenly on my skin. People look at me with obnoxiously sympathetic eyes as though they are contractually obligated to. My partner treats me with respect and dignity as they are helping me physically get around. I have to sit at each bench to rest for roughly 10 minutes as we make our way through the sanctuary. The benches aren’t very far apart. Even though I feel like I’m dying and I’m aware of how weak I am, I am grateful to be spending time with my partner. We met two months ago. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but they hold my hand the whole time and I feel important and worthy for the first time in a long time.
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I’m in the best shape of my life yet. In spite of my lung condition, I’ve become a confident cycle commuter. I bike everywhere. I can easily do uphill at this point. I’ve been preparing for a final exam that I’m excited about and decided to take a break to be outside in the spring weather. It’s unseasonably warm, and the grass has formed hearty green mats in places where the sun shines. There’s a spot by the river under a looming tall bridge that I like because no one really ever spends time there (yet). It’s a nice open space to go think and watch the ships or the rowing club, depending on the day. The openness and visibility from the multiple bridges nearby lends itself to a general feeling of safety.
It’s morning, maybe 9am. I get up at 4:30/5am at this point in my life, so I am wide awake and my day is well on its way. There’s still dew gathered on the reaching tips of the grass blades and grapevine leaves, bringing out a sweet petrichor that fills my chest with each breath. It drenches the seat of my pants as I sit in the grass against my backpack with my bike stood-up beside me, but it doesn’t really bother me. I feel in-sync with the world around me; alive and happy and well.
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I’m in tears trying to google what the point of anything is again. I ask the expansive web of collective human creation and knowledge “how does happiness work”, “what is it like to be happy”, “does depression ever end”, “what is the point of life”, “will I ever be happy”, and other questions like this. None of the answers I come across are particularly helpful or relatable to me. This is before the crisis hotline ads were placed at the top of search pages for this family of searches; before google pages looked polished; back when they used a yellow “o” to represent each search results page, as though they were spelling out “google” with so many “o”s.
I’m not sure why this particular day stands out to me among the many days I’d done this. I didn’t find anything special, I didn’t figure anything out. It was just another bust, another snapshot of my ongoing mental health crisis. I’m not bothered by this memory as much as I used to be because it shows me that I knew that there was something wrong and I was looking for help in the only way I’d found so far. It is evidence to me that I had a form of self-regard that needed cultivation. I see a therapist for the first time in my life a couple months later, and I join a support group about finding life purpose at her suggestion that oddly predicted later parts of my life. It’s strange to slowly realize over time that I know myself and have known myself; that the haze in the way of this self truth had more to do with other people than it had to do with me.
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I’m trying to come out to my mom. Again. I never seem to get it across, or maybe she’s playing dumb because she doesn’t want to talk about it. I try to tell her about my friend, the one I fell in love with as a child. I remind her that the friend was a girl. She puts her tea down for a second and shoots me with what seems to be a concentrated beam of brief, aggravated confusion through her eyes. Then she goes back to eating her food and changes the subject with a carefully crafted, sweetly innocent voice, the one she uses to gloat when she has intentionally hurt my feelings in a way that is difficult to address, pretending she didn’t understand where I was going with what I was saying. It was a destination she refused to reach with me.
I wonder internally, maybe I need to be more explicit and not beat around the bush so much. We’re at one of her favorite restaurants near one of her jobs. Even with my head swimming with feelings of guilt and anger, the food nourishes my body and soul. I didn’t go back for a long time. The next time I went, I was there with my partner and I was significantly less concerned about people seeing my queerness publicly. The food nourishes my body and soul the same way, but I leave feeling full in different ways. We shared a couple of my favorite dishes. We haven’t been back since we moved away. I’d like to go again after the pandemic is over if it’s still there. The particular way the restaurant uses aromatics in their vegetarian dishes seeped into my cooking many years later.
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I come out to my dad. It’s simple, emotionally speaking. His pride and feelings of effectiveness as a father are not resting on my identity. It’s early morning and he’s driving. We’re going to get breakfast because neither of us are set up to host the other. We’re both early morning people. He has a couple probing, tense, awkward questions, but that’s it when he runs out of them and we discuss them all. We settle on an understanding of “nonbinary” and “bi” and that was it.
He’s started teaching me things that I wanted to learn as a child that I was guided away from. He is happy to see “me” when we spend time together. He’s started telling me about queer people throughout his life and how they’ve changed his perspectives on all sorts of things. I start to feel like part of a web of healing; healing myself by being open and learning from other people, and being a part of other people’s process of healing by sharing. This feeling grows as I meet more queer people and non-queer folks that are living their unique “truths”. There is still always fear in the back of my mind, it never goes away, but sometimes it is drowned out by pride and feelings of connection.
My dad and I get pancakes and coffee once we get to the restaurant, even though we can’t handle caffeine. It’s one of those strange things we have in common, and we both pretend that we like it. He used to make us simple pancakes when we were altogether. My partner and their dad make pancakes, too. I only ever have pancakes when I’m with other people. Over time, they become a symbol of togetherness for me. I guess, what’s the point of making all that batter if it’s not for sharing?
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Well, thank you for reading! I hope you find time to process your feelings and emotions in ways that leave you feeling better without them piling up too much. Seeya next time!