you say i’m wrong, i say all right

How do I make sense of my feelings? How do I reason through this overwhelming self hatred, this self derision that I feel to my bones? This contempt I have for my very being, for my countless inadequacies, for my pathetic body habitus, my awkwardness, for my lacklustre performance, for my failures that mount. How do I account for the meaninglessness of my life, the emptiness and lack of excitement I feel, the way it feels like I’m grasping blindly onto anything to make me feel something, the way I am reaching, stretching to make myself part of something, grasping emptily. I am so tired of hurting this way. I fantasize about many different ways I can make this stop. There are so many different ways. But I’m “responsible.” I text my friend, my program coordinator, I burden them all. I feel okay in some moments and brutally awful in others. I can’t control these feelings. I am so tired of feeling empty and alone and hopeless. I feel so hurt and upset and empty, I can’t think of any value I bring to the world. What is the point of my existence? What do I add?

I feel like some westerners don’t get how a good amount of Asian LGBTQ media, even if it’s more implicit, is about sending messages that being gay is okay™️, that it’s okay for older people/older people should support younger people’s happiness, even if it’s in an “atypical” form. I saw similar complaints about ELKDTAL. It’s a little tiresome but acceptance/rights aren’t there, so these messages have to be sent. That’s why, as annoying as it was to have seen less Monsam in favor of Saint teaching Grandma that gays can, indeed, get married, or the fact that Grandma changed vs Khun Sam changing for Monsam to finally get together, it makes sense given the context. Showing older, “traditional” people changing their mind is important. I am still scared to really come out and I know I would want any media content that family members watch hammering those kinds of perspectives in vs something that’s just about the hero’s journey.

As for issues with the romance, I think the idea was to just recycle every het trope but make it gay. It wasn’t perfect, and as someone who has gone to therapy for years to try and get over childhood trauma, I also strongly feel Khun Sam needs therapy. She has a lot to work through. But at the same time, she’s not a fundamentally terrible person who tries to get better so the love story still works. For me, just seeing the tropes, seeing the conflict (which is a common one) play out, and it all having a happy and positive ending, down to a wedding, meant a lot. This is the first fictional story (in visual media) that I’ve ever cried at because it made me really feel like things could work out for two girls. I grew up in the west but all the worries about how my culture, something I don’t want to abandon, greatly affected my sense of optimism and hope when it came to love, so seeing something succeed despite the odds, in the most cliche romantic way possible, was very impactful. I mean, how can you look forward to love when there’s this constant worry that it’ll cause a showdown with the people you care about the most in the world?

In some ways, I think the situation for me isn’t that dire because of circumstances but because I’m a 1.5 generation immigrant, it’s been “us vs the world” for so long, and the idea of conflict in this area is so hard.