wanting something different

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?