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Early on in my life, I knew 2 things about personality and identity control. I knew that forces outside of human control shape who people become, and I felt how people create mental barriers to control what other people can be. Since I was kid I felt the mix of frustration, passion, and yearning of wanting to belong to something you can't because someone told you so. I had a robust extracurricular life as a kid. My mother forced me into ballet classes, French lessons, and piano lessons when I knew I wanted to learn martial arts and drumming and Japanese. I wanted to be that kind of person, instead of the perfect fake Francophile daughter she wished she could've been. I frequently experienced the double-sided desire to be seen as Black and Asian and the subsequent pain of unacceptance. And as a child from a broken home, my subconscious was constantly wishing my life wasn't horrifyingly stained with violence and death.
My mom wanted me to do French things so she surrounded me with French culture and customs. School immersed me in American culture and customs, and I started seeing the differences-- the freedom, creativity, and infinite possibilities of human identity. At the same time, my identity was permanently constricted by the immaterial forces of death, violence, and illness. I would always be the girl with the dead abusive dad and traumatized abusive mom. I will always be fucked up because of that, physically and mentally. What I've learned from this life is that human identity can be so much simpler than it is right now. Why have we created barriers of race and gender and sexuality? There's no need to punish me for not being you. We could just chill and acknowledge that we're both human. Social forces are so much more in our control than natural ones, and it's baffling to me that people don't understand that. Racism is much easier to fight than the ocean levels rising and drowning your family. All you have to do is stop getting mad at someone for something that has nothing to do with you. Meanwhile, there's nothing at all you can do to save yourself from the pain of grief and loss. There are real problems and there are fake problems. Fake ones are social ones, and they're fake because they're only one version of how life could be. The real problems are inherent to being alive, like dying and illness and trauma. I don't think there's a society out there that could transcend those problems, but if there was it definitely doesn't look like this. We're accelerating towards mass death, not immortality. We are insanely, damagingly obsessed with manufactured social problems and it's unclear to me as to why. It feels like suicide, and as a survivor I can tell you I'm really not looking to die. What will be the wake up call?
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I feel like I'm everything. I am an artist and a scientist. My parents are dance and music. My father was a music producer and my mother is a professional ballet teacher and dancer. She's spent 50 years of her life with ballet and it's safe to say artists as dedicated as her are rare. I could've been born with a different nature, but I was born an artist too.
I'm a scientist by education. One of the biggest forms of privilege I have is my education. I attended public school on the Upper West Side, one of NYC's specialized high schools, and an Ivy League University. This has allowed me to understand the world in comprehensive and diverse ways so I have great empathy for people who don't know what I know, because I know I only know it for fucked-up reasons. There's no reason for them to not know what I know, no reason for this gatekeeping other than elitism and white supremacy and greed and evil. Weirdly, I lived two very different lives. Winning the housing lottery changed our lives and I went from Spanish Harlem with dead rats in our shoes to laundry in the building and a lovely bedroom. I have been very privileged even though my background is bit tragic... and so I feel like I've seen a lot at a young age and I feel old. Along with feeling like everything is mental illness, because bipolar disorder is an extreme experience. We get higher highs and lower lows than other human beings and for me before medication, every emotion was turned up to 11. They would possess me and I'd become them, and I went through an in-depth exposure to the range of emotions like godly superiority and suicidal, low self-esteem despair. I am who I am because of this terrible experience that took me to unknown depths... that make me feel like I've gone deeper than others. Definitely not everybody but seems like other people might not have gone at all. My overexposure to emotion has made me highly empathetic and sometimes I wonder if I'm more human than most of society. I'm a minority in a million ways and based on what I observe in society, I might be a minority in this way too. Am I suffering an acute case of the human condition? Or is this how all of humanity feels, not just me? |