I am a third generation chinese-american who does not speak mandarin. When I was in junior high people made fun of me for being chinese and I didn't understand why--my parents weren't any different, my speech wasn't any different, nor my clothes, nothing. When I was in high school asian kids made fun of me for not being like them--by then I understood why at least.
I am a spiritual agnostic from a devout family of catholics. I never really rejected God, I just reacted naturally to a coldness I felt in church; my mind, my heart hungered for something else. What that is, I still don't know. But I know that I find it on my own. Maybe that takes me back to religion someday, but if so it will be on my own terms at my own time. I know that's somewhat prideful by any Christian terms, but I don't care. I am fiercely alive and self-aware, I will not surrender simply because independence entails a new degree of solitude.
I am an introvert who learned to assume the mannerisms of an extrovert, to the extent that they became habit and partial-personality. I used to bottle everything up and dwell on it incessantly--the dwelling aspect hasn't changed. I remember that even as a precocious, perhaps hyper-sensitive child I would let problems lay until they came bursting out. Usually I confessed them to my mother, who consoled me like any loving mother does, and eventually the crying and the inner anguish would subside. But as I grew older my parents, my family became the problem as I sought to push myself away and, like any typical adolescent, find a new sense of self in the midst of my own private familial rebellion. As this developed, I was like an emotional kettle without a spout and I slowly went crazy--as most adolescents do. The short n skinny of it all is that I had to learn to express myself to other people. And thus, as a corrollary and consequence of the present paragraph...
I am an insecure untrusting person who learned to trust and to love. (also, clearly, I am a cheesy cheeseball). I need other people to live; it's as simple as that. I remember my freshman year of high school was among the most terrible of my life because I was pushing away my family and hadn't learned to open up to other people. I was stubbornly, even vehemently alone. During this time I came up with an analogy that encapsculates the lessons of that year: a single pin cannot stand up alone, but if you lean two or three others against each other, they will stand up together. But... that year I did learn to befriend people on the basis of casual aquaintanceship, and that was a big surprise, to learn that people would like me, just me, for no other reason than that I was me. Obviously learning to be secure with yourself is a step towards being comfortable opening up to other people. In any case... it wasn't really until my late junior year, and senior year in high school that I found all the friends I had been looking for, without really knowing I was looking for them until that moment. Not everything was smooth sailing, because I am above all things a fool and impulsive in matters of the heart, but I wouldn't have had it any other way.
I am a spoiled suburban kid who wants to change the world, or rather for the world to change and for me to have some small part in its alteration. Yet I am, to an extent, still enmeshed in a self-involved indifference that I associate with the suburban middle class. The result is an odd hypocrisy. I balk at paying extra for organic food (though I try) and yet rant at the perpetuation of unsustainable and environmentally damaging agricultural practices. I will still drive when geography and urban layout make life difficult without a car, yet I despise seeing SUV's hummers and big trucks in the middle of a CITY. So I swore to myself that I would go to the Middle East by the end of my sophmore year in college, and I swear to myself now that I will go after college. It's not so much a matter of DOING all the things I tell myself need to be done, but it's a beginning to remaking my self by relocating to a place and mindset that evoke my ideals. I'm talking about the imaginative, metaphysical leap that occurs simultaneously with any great physical move. And the imagined self becomes the real one.
I am me, and like you, like anyone else, I am completely unique. You cannot read about me in the annuls of history, in the news media, anywhere really.
My personal history inclines me to see myself as such: an individual, apart from and in unity with every other human being on the planet.
So you will excuse me if I demand your complete attention should you ever attempt to understand or judge me, because I'm not simple. No one is. The only difference is that I know it.
