nothing but snails

What followed were several weeks of back-and-forth calls and messages, at first with an effort toward understanding, an excitement on my end, a feeling of progress - and then an abrupt turnaround in which I was told to go back into the closet.  She was not "emotionally ready" to handle a second queer child.  Why two should be any more trying than one, I wasn't sure.  

Sexuality is sometimes communicated through gender - by unconscious preferences and conscious choices.  My brother was very feminine as a child, which could easily be attributed to the fact that he had two older sisters who dressed him up and whose Barbies he inherited.  Looking back on this, my parents say "we always knew," that "there were signs," and they are now therefore comfortable with the fact that he is gay.  

But aren't there a whole lot of other feminine young boys with big sisters who grow up to be straight?  Or couldn’t my brother have been transgender, which I am absolutely sure my parents wouldn’t have liked (yet the signs were still there)?  Why did my dad give my brother "the talk" on using condoms when having sex with girls, if he "always knew" that my brother was gay?  This, along with the idle, unavoidable jokes that follow every maturing boy - jokes about girlfriends and female love interests - all beg the question: did my parents just retcon my brother's life in order to justify their support of him now?

I know the answer is no, and I know that there may have been slight uncertainty, but on the whole, they were very prepared for the prospect of him being gay.  But for those of us who didn't grow up with our identities solidified into us from an early age, are we not equally deserving of that same affirmation?

I struggle to think of moments as a child in which my gender and sexuality manifested, and I do find a few powerful moments.  But on the whole, they were abruptly cut short, held back from fruition, under the even more domineering pressure of my older sister and mom.  Up through high school, the two of them bought my clothes for me without my being present.  I was given things and told to wear them, I had makeup applied to my crying face, and I learned that my stubborn refusal to do things caused more trouble and pain than my apathetic compliance.  I adapted, allowing myself small moments of rebellion and self-actualization, but for the most part that came about in college when I was free from any family influences.

Because of the pressures placed on me to conform, and my desire to be a compliant (straight-passing) child to avoid punishment, there may not be enough evidence for my parents to conclude that I was "born this way."  

Even in my struggle to identify those moments of queerness, I find myself playing into stereotypes when I'm not sure I should be required to.  It's fine that my brother's childhood follows a common queer narrative, as do many other people's, but do little girls really have to be tomboys in order to believably come out as not-straight later in life?  

The narratives of "we always knew" children assume that a home environment has always been welcoming enough to support these non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality, and say nothing of the coercion that others face that leads to the self-censoring of divergent identites.  In this sense, those who were given the least support as children continue to lack support as adults because they lack the narratives that would otherwise solidify their identity among their family and community.  There is no room for growth, for change, or for identities that move from one state to another.

It's crossed my mind that maybe the disbelief surrounding my sexuality has less to do with the "evidence."  I am my mother's daughter, and by virtue of our shared gender, she may have a stronger investment in me maintaining whatever gendered status quo she would like to reflect her.  This is both more and less stressful: less in that it's not an issue of whether I can retroactively justify my sexuality, but more in how my dignity and my respectability as my mother's daughter are now rooted in something that is decidedly not me.  My devotion to her, then, lies in my silence, and in my ability to play this role for as long I humanly can without crumbling.

There's a third angle that I'm afraid to acknowledge: in one conversation with my mother, she asked me how it was possible for women to know if they were in love with other women, since "women are so close anyway."  There's a sinister side to this that reinforces concepts of female "togetherness" versus male detachment - and an insinuation that gay male relationships are more "real" in that they are clearly diverged from standard gender norms, and gay female relationships are less real in that they may as well be conflated with typical gender behavior.  My mother may not believe that my identity actually exists.

Maybe it's some combination of all the issues above, or maybe it's none of them.  I fixate on things, I think about things much longer than I should, but I'm allowing myself this brief time in order to explore something that's been weighing upon me for two years of silence.  I'm waiting, as I have many times, for a response to an e-mail: a lengthy and impulsive message I've sent on the cusp of a breakdown, in a millisecond of vulnerability, and I'm both wishing for and dreading a response.  

Our guide is the father-in-law of one of the women who raised me.  My mother worked while my siblings and I were growing up, and we had a series of foreign au pairs blinking in and out of our lives.  Jana and Christina were the first two, Swedish, of whom I remember very little - Christina had a little beat-up red car, and I helped her spoon-feed my brother when he was uncooperative; Jana exists only to me in the grainy footage of old home videos.  But the third was Kiki - Kirsten, though our small mouths couldn't grasp the consonants - and she was with us the longest, and it was her influence that's stamped upon my childhood.

Her father-in-law is limber for his age, climbing the ladder with less difficulty than my father, and he stands with us looking out over the city.  His hands are on his sides, and he squints against the sun, and and he doesn't need to look back at us to know that we are overcome with awe.  He was born across the street the same night that natural disaster befell the structure - a fire, I believe - and his destiny is tied to this place.  

We don't know how many other people, if any, are allowed to see this place.  Kiki told us before we left with him, in a half-proud, half-endearing whisper, "He wants to show you his cathedral."  We are unsure of what exactly he does there, but he carries all the keys.  

I sit cross-legged on the roof of the cathedral and let the air cool my face.

It's been a while since I have felt genuinely filled with faith.  The view from the roof doesn't impart that feeling - it's a different kind of calm: detached, sanitized - and it's merely the thought of my lost faith that enters my mind in that moment.  I would be one of many to say that I wish I could experience that feeling again.

It's more difficult to regain a faith that's been lost than to grow a faith out of untilled soil.  For me, the loss is permanent: I know it's gone, and it will not come back, as every brief resurgence of divine connection or illusion thereof has always been quickly followed by a return to the normal.  Its loss ran parallel to my growing up, and so my disillusionment with regard to all other things - of adulthood, of politics, of death - is so inextricable from my disillusionment of faith.  I can't reverse the path of my faith any more than I can turn myself back into a child.

The moments of spiritual transcendance are few, and they grow less frequent with time.

Walking into holy places carries something akin to nostalgia.  There are the unconscious, physical triggers: the coldness of high-ceiling spaces, the echoes off the stone, the clean smell of a place where no one lives.  I can feel my body relaxing, and I always wish I could fall sleep there, but doing so would rob the space of the very thing that comforts me.  There is an inorganic opulence to cathedrals that is so wholly separated from people.  It is daunting and paradoxical, born from the work of man yet simultaneously forcing him to his knees before its divinity.  It turns one toward their own insignificance - something I feel intimately acquainted with in my sadness, and righteously estranged from in my moments of empowerment.  And it is more than just opulent: it is unapologetically so.  

In a cathedral in the heart of Salta, Argentina, I sit within the first few rows and stare upon the altar.  It is breathtaking in the same way the theater is to me, and for a while I'm amused by the similarities: there is a backdrop beneath the floating visage of Mother Mary with two doors on either side, disappearing into the wings, and the tables and chairs are set out like in the opening scene of a play.  Before this stage, I feel as I do at the beginning of a good story.  

There is a tendency to conflate notions of "performance" with inauthenticity.  "Stage" carries the same connotations, as if what is to be presented is inherently deceptive.  But these words to me are prefaces to revelation - stories that twist the real at its corners and turn it into the unrecognizable - symbolic, hyperbolic - before revealing truths that grip you closer than any plain presentation of facts could have.  It is with reverence, nostalgia, and a sense of loss that I say that I miss the performance of faith.  

In cathedrals, I feel small ripples of it, like the ends of roots still stuck into the ground from a plant that's been torn out.  I feel the beginnings of a slow slide into an unreal world, where I know I am being told a story, but it is my momentary and unquestioning acceptance of the story that would make the story ultimately powerful.  I feel as if I am losing touch with my imagination: my childhood trust in fantastical narratives that turned parks into jungles and empty air into angels.  The world felt fuller, more susceptible to magic and capable of bending beneath my fingers.  I miss the way that world felt, and it still exists in my dreams, but I know that there is no way of going back to it.

I find other forms of peace in spiritual places.  It is in the low echoes of a trumpet reverberating off the walls of the cathedral in Lubeck, cloaking us in music; a small and nervous dog led on a leash before the statue of San Roque in Salta, shivering as if it knows it is somewhere sacred; the cathedrals of Italy, too distant in my memory to make themselves distinct, forever hidden behind a veil; and so many others, whose saints stared down at me as I stared at them, whose judgment I felt upon me as my faith slipped away until I finally lacked the faith to feel that they could judge.  

Somehow, I don't feel an empty space.  Space implies that it should be filled from the outside, by another substance - like a vessel with water, a soul with faith.  I feel only a loss of ability, but permanently so - like being able to cartwheel as a child, but knowing that your joints now make that impossible.  It is a lasting injury to the ability to imagine, and I struggle to repair it in other ways.

I collapse onto a pew in a cathedral in Caacupe, Paraguay.  I am fatigued, sweat dripping from me onto the floor, my stomach empty, my resolve broken.  I am crying in one of the few moments I have ever openly cried in a public space.  I have spent six hours traveling on buses to and from a place no more than 60 miles from my house, and I am lost with the sounds of thunder in the distance.  I kneel before the statue of Mary, less out of reverence and more to prevent myself from fainting.  Despite myself, I pray for the first time in a long while.

We met always in Hawaii, the halfway point between our home and her home, joined sometimes by our cousins and aunt and uncle all aligned in adjacent hotel rooms.  In these small windows of time, I saw her as opinionated, proud, and unwavering: her ideas were superstitious and fanciful, existing only as a source of wonder for my siblings and me.  We were deaf to everything that was said in Japanese between her and her daughters, arguments that bled over into English before shuffling back into exasperated silence.

One of the inescapable stories of my mother's childhood  is the story of the scar on her arm.  It's oval-shaped, the size of the space between my thumb and forefinger when I touch their tips together.  My mother told us the story openly as a tale of caution; all stories from her were warnings against the unknowable dangers of the world.  

Her family was a dog family, as ours currently is (I wonder if a love of furry creatures is at all inherited.)  They had their own dogs that were constantly breeding, little litters of pups appearing every six months, and were surrounded by the free-roaming are-they-stray-or-are-they-claimed multitudes of mutts that color the streets of any developing country.  The story goes that my mother and her sisters were walking down a street they always walk down when they saw some cute dogs.  The dogs belonged to a neighbor, and my mother stopped and reached out to pet one of them.  She says - as people always say about harrowing memories - that she didn't remember what happened until she heard the sounds of her sisters' crying.  And there she saw it, the bloody bite on the tender underside of her forearm.

When they returned home, my grandmother fell to her knees and wailed.  I imagine it as the high drama effusions of a Kabuki actor: she is uninhibited in her expression, always, a mask prepared for every inch of emotion and swapped so rapidly that one can't register its changing.  She let her scream scale multiple octaves (a scream I have heard once before) as my mother and her sisters watched this minute-long performance.  My mother says that she did this in front of the TV after Kennedy's assassination.  Once the curtains closed, I assume she tended to my mother's arm, but this is the crucial part: she said she would take the dog to the vet and have it tested for rabies.

A week later, she told my mother that the results came back, and the dog was clean.  But for a week my mother had lain in bed believing she was going to die, and that was the lesson, that the world is unpredictable in its anger.

And this is the story my mother carried with her until the age of fifty-six after my grandmother had moved in with us.

My grandmother is bound by karma.  Her world, her very perception of her life and the events that transpire are tied in ways to things that she may have done or that someone higher up the ancestral line once did, and the effects have trickled down to us in the present day.  She believes that her colon cancer was karmic vengeance for her great-grandfather's not-killing himself - he was beholden to Bushido code and obligated to kill himself after a military defeat, by sword through his stomach, but he ran away and procreated and so gave rise to us.  She says where the sword would have pierced his stomach is where her cancer took root.  And that it too is the reason for my own stomach problems.  And I was fascinated and horrified all at once.

She approaches my mother one day in the kitchen and says that she is having bad dreams - and these she takes seriously, though my mother can barely conceal her own lack of interest.  She says she is having dreams about that dog, barking at her, barking and barking and barking, staring at her with God's judgement flickering in its eyes through the rear-view mirror.

My mother stops.  Dog?  Rear-view mirror?

Yes, my grandmother continues, the dog that bit my mother, sitting in the back of her car, barking at her and cursing her for taking it away.

Taking it to the vet, my mother says.

No.  To the mountain.

My grandmother never took the dog to the vet.  And it makes perfect sense in retrospect: what vet?  What vet in the outskirts of 1960's Taipei?  My grandmother tells my mother, this great sin weighing upon her, that she returned to the neighbor's house and berated the owner for ten minutes - short, as far as many of her lectures go.  She then took the dog - whether against the neighbor's protests, or if the neighbor had at that point wilted beneath her fury, she doesn't disclose - and threw the dog in the back of her car and drove out of the city.  

The dog, understandably, barked at its kidnapper.  And the look on its face in the mirror seared itself in her memory throughout that drive as they left civilization behind, until they were far enough away from her home and any hope of the dog finding its way back, and she left it up on a mountain and drove back.  She waited a week, the dog never came back, and she  told my mother the good news.

My mother is outraged.  She could have had rabies, my grandmother had lied to her with no concern for her health - but my grandmother listens to this with a blank expression, an expression she adopts when she is either uninterested or pretending not to understand.  She waits for my mother to finish, and then immediately returns to her karma.  The dog cursed her.  It is weighing on her soul.  This is about her.

Her thoughts continue to center upon her own formidable force of gravity.  She moves on from the dog in time, though she will return to it at random and with inexplicable intensity for brief periods of time.  Another day, she returns from a doctor's appointment in righteous anger, telling my mother that the doctor has refused to treat her.  For a moment my mother is stunned and concerned.  But the concern quickly fades when my grandmother reveals that she asked the doctor to help her die faster.  My mother struggles to engage without erupting.  The doctor, a westerner - my grandmother seethes - is useless.  She has the right.  The emotions and realities of no one - not the doctor who would lose his medical license, nor her family grieving her loss - none of them seem to matter let alone exist in any of the actions she takes.

I teeter towards outright laughter in my own growing discomfort.  

She harangues my mother almost daily, lecturing her on how best to raise us, ignoring the deep ridge she's created between herself and her only other living daughter.  In correcting faults, she turns outward, shedding her own accountability.  In everything else, she seeks to draw people into her personal world of interconnected tragedies, dredging up sympathy and flinging herself before us as both hero and villain in a generations' long tale.  

It was enchanting, but in my being taken in by her stories and her life, after falling into her orbit and experiencing fully the extent of her philosophy, I feel tinged with something unwell.  She was, to me, my connection to my Japanese heritage: the quarter of my identity that I have for whatever reasons felt the most comfortable engaging with.  She was obligation and independence.  She was concession and strength.  She was a paradoxical mesh of the qualities I most admire in my personal endeavors and those that I ascribe to Japanese culture.  

But where her culture ends and her own personal constructions begin - where karma ceases to be karma - where my family and I have begun to tease apart the superstitions and obsessions and where we find ourselves reaching uncertainly for words for mental illness - I'm uncomfortable drawing the line, and wish it could be drawn for me.  I am embedded in a conflation of culture, what could be culture, what I thought was culture, and what my grandmother had invented for herself.

My mother is not immune to this either.  She thought until recently that all Japanese mothers tied their daughter's feet together while they slept.  She did it, my grandmother said, to "train them how to take up less space when sharing a bed with their husband."  My mother and her sisters had to hop to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night with cords around their ankles.  

The more I see of my grandmother, the more I feel I must step back and distance myself to keep from falling in.  She tells me stories of violent murders - news stories she's collected over the years, pertaining to every place and profession, to thoroughly warn me or discourage me from any path I hint at taking.  Sometimes I feel as though she simply mentions them in order to safeguard herself from fault: that if anything should happen to me, she said it first, she was the signal fire, earning the claim to foresight and once again shifting the story into her orbit.  She tells us of predictions she made for people in her obscure Buddhist sect, a group she had been wholly consumed with until a falling out with its members.  No one supported her enough, she says, and again I wonder as to the reality behind those words, for someone with such overwhelming interpersonal demands.

As my mother and I inched away from her, leaving her in the middle of her rants, finding that we could not entertain the ideas and realities she espoused, she decided to move out of our house and back to her former apartment in Thailand.  For a time, people she had been close with came to us and asked why we had mistreated her so much that she needed to leave.  My mother asked her where these people had heard of mistreatment; my grandmother's face turned blank.

There was a tension in our house that I feel is now gone.  I'd been nervous every time I left my room, hoping not to find my grandmother waiting at the kitchen table, ready with a new story of someone's brutal death.  We've heard from my aunt that my grandmother's Thai maid recently walked out on her after weeks of what the maid described as harassment and slavery, screaming at my grandmother that any other maid would have killed her by now.  I feel both disquieted and vindicated.

She's fading from my immediate thoughts in what I believe is a positive change for both sides.  We were apparently not good to her, and she was not for us, and even though my mother is significantly more grounded than she was, there is that shred of irrationality, that seed of genetic worry that sometimes makes my mother physically ill, and I know that it comes from her own mother.  

My mother has become a well for my deepening sympathy.  In our joint bewilderment and frustrations, our whispered confessions after my grandmother had gone to sleep, we found a common reality from which to judge our predecessor.  Few issues place us on the same ideological side, but in our rejection of she who allowed for our existence, we were united.  I feel both fulfilled and saddened.

I sought stability in another human being and was predictably overthrown.  In my disillusionment, I no longer known how to engage with her legacy.  Can there be strength in insanity?  Can I only appreciate her by separating the parts of her that are admirable - the story-filling chunks - from the rest that drove me away?  Can I find a place where I can embrace all of it: the paranoia, the resilience, the selfishness, the righteousness and the self-endowed holiness, and can I accept it just as I delight in equal acts of absurdity?  

So ended the likely most potentially lucrative internship I had - though who could've known (isn't that the promise of all internships?) - and so too ended my professional-casual-cool friendship. I still don't know what he thought after a week of me not showing up. But no one bothered to find me. No one even called after the first day. I probably still have the lab key.

So maybe I wasn't as essential as I thought I was, but my shortcomings are (fortunately) not the point of this particular piece. I've gone over the events and concluded that it could have ended no other way. I am a firm believer in destiny (whether to excuse myself of the burden of choice, or out of a genuine spiritual foundation, you'll never know, but you probably know) and the strange thing about it all is that it wasn't the first or last time it had happened.

I have a habit of disappearing.

Not Gone Girl style, shagging/stabbing Neil Patrick Harris, running to the middle of trailer park nowheres, I mean checking out of particular habits or circles of people or places that have grown customary to me and cutting off that string from my life without any explanation.

School was the longest commitment I ever made, and it was mandatory, and I struggled toward the end of college to even make it through. I scrambled out of college to go diving into the Peace Corps, where I went through the three-month training with a host family, got out, hoped I'd never have to see them again (we had issues) and moved into the community where I'd be living for a full two years.

I stayed about nine months before I felt anti-inertia's familiar tug.

And it was inevitable in the end: the death of my dog eliminated any hopes I'd had of staying and maintaining a service-focused mind. I wasn't in any place to stay (so spake destiny) and I headed back north. And that's fine, that's normal, that's what a lot of people do, but I didn't even tell anyone I was going. The only reason I even saw my host mother before leaving was to return the key to the place I rented from her.

I mumbled some excuses - "medical reasons" - and she had a look of blank disbelief. I said goodbye to her and her alone and headed back in a big black SUV to the capital city. As I looked out the window at the passing countryside, all I could think to myself was Finally. And the string that had been stretched tight in my chest was snipped in half.

It feels good to let go. To vanish.

What drives this compulsion?

2.

The longest I ever stayed in one place was in virtual space.

We're not including facebook, because it's not a forum or even a meeting place in the most generous of terms. It's a platform designed for personal image creation. You log onto facebook to take your real self and package it into something palatable, marketable, presentable, whether for your old elementary school friends or your future employers. If you're like me and you've read anything about the fragility of online privacy and social media, you are now hypercritically conscious of the content you generate. In short, you use social media to refine your current self - digital Botox.

There's nothing wrong with this. We all like to imagine that we're better version of ourselves.

But the internet I grew up on was far from that: it was the insidious kind of place our parents warned us about far too late for their words to mean anything. We'd already clicked in, reinvented ourselves with edgy screen names, scribbled our signatures on digital walls, and their warnings were akin to hearing "Watch out for wooden horses" in the midst of burning Troy.

I was twelve when I got into my first online forum, and I was there until five years later.

I technically wasn't supposed to be there - I lied about my age, as I did with all online endeavors. But there was something that pulled at me from this new online space. Technically it was a video game forum - an official, company-run forum from the biggest name in the industry - but video games were rarely discussed. We talked about everything else.

Anonymity is often bemoaned as the internet's greatest curse, a veil you can slip behind and be freed from the responsibility of your words. But it was also the most freeing thing. We were teens in the midst of heartbreak, confusion, and joy - trying all at once to be both clowns and sages, flexing our comedic bones, waxing philosophical and sharing our grief, one-upping each other and waging war, all having somehow arrived at the same place through the same processes as everyone else. You choose a screen name. You log in. You start at zero posts. You have no history other than everything you say from then on.

Everything we were before then or concurrently in physicality was nonexistent.

I was in the middle of a collision of unimaginable human variety that we only had the faintest conception of. There were the older members who we regarded like big siblings, the ten-year old kid who was known only as "The Kid," the chronic troublemakers who we shunned on the outside but quietly awaited their next move, and the moderators who we treated like parents: fawning over them when we needed anything and bitterly rejecting their rules as a part of our natural teenage rebellion.

We were known only by our screen names or abbreviations of them thereof. We saw both the barest and most elaborate personalities crafted out of the sandbox we were given, and we formed friendships that still follow me to this day. We knew things about each other we hadn't even shared with the offline world.

I lived on the internet in this way throughout my most formative teenage years. I never went to a house party, never tried weed, never drank, never stayed out past midnight - but I felt as subversive and secretive in my connections as I thought anyone could ever feel. I felt profoundly, voiced my deepest conflicts, and relied upon this globe-scattered collection of friends whom I knew I might never physically see. They were present in a way no one else was.

But all things must end, and maybe it was ultimately for the best. The forum was suddenly shut down by order of executives higher up - maybe they knew what their creation had become - and we rioted for a time but gradually gave up. Those of us who had grown close already knew how to contact each other outside the forum, and we drifted off toward separate spaces.

I tried other forums, but never found another that stuck. I would stay for a while, get frustrated with some facet of it - the people weren't bold enough, the topics too mundane - and I'd abruptly leave to find another place and create a new name. Maybe that was the beginning of it: we were virtual exiles, never to find a home like the one we had before.

In my rare reconnections with other members of the forum (because it was pre-facebook, reconnecting now is a bit of a small miracle) all say that they've never gotten as deep into another forum as they did in that one. Maybe it was just that time of our lives. Maybe it was the place. Or the people. I don't know.

"You were an immigrant, right?  Can I interview you for my presentation?"

"I'm not really an immigrant," she pauses.  "You should ask someone else."

"But you were born in Taiwan, you grew up there."

"I was born American.  Nobody liked the Americans." 

My mom walked the thin chalk line between "us" and "them."  She scuffed it with the sole of her shoes and smeared it across potholed streets.  

Half Chinese, half Japanese, full American rights.

You don't hear a lot of stories from the people called army brats.  Hopping from one base to the next, clusters of kids  tying the frayed ends of their stories to each other. Linking arms to keep afloat until the tide washes them back out.  There's a nebulous privilege in recalling the name of that kid you once knew, the casual utterance of a person known in the time when your roots are allowed to sink in.

She grew up in Taiwan as an outsider, and came to the US as the same.   

The one thing I knew about her life in American high school was she wanted to run for student council.  She pinned posters around school one day, and found racial slurs scribbled on them the next.

---

My mom stands off to the side as Mandarin-speaking parents talk.  I know she's listening, watching them out of one eye, and she'll tell me later what they said.  

If one of them asks her if she speaks Chinese, she'll excuse herself and say she doesn't.  If approached in Japanese, she squirms and responds in kind.  The only exception is "Do you speak English?" which ignites a righteous fire.

She suddenly forgets herself, and in that slide between knowing and speaking she'll slip a comment into the group. They will turn to her, aghast.  She looks Chinese, but not quite, speaks Chinese, but it isn't perfect.  She fumbles with her designer purse straight from Chinatown and looks down behind black and unreadable glasses.

I see her, unsure of how to continue.

--- 

My mom teaches me one important thing.  When they say, "Chinese, Japanese, same thing!" you laugh and smile with them.

---

My mom speaks to us in crisp American English.  She passes as more than first generation - is she first generation? - what does it mean when your family has moved back and forth across the world?  The words we use to qualify our otherness cannot account for still other forms of it.

She gave me English, and nothing else. I held it, curled around it pressed against my stomach and let whatever warmth these words have abate my hunger for other tongues.  I fed myself this cataclysmic collision of grammar and felt my insides churn until I could speak it too, write it too, in prose and poetry and she grew proud of me.  

And then the hunger came back.

(Note: An edited re-post of this entry is scheduled to appear on The Asexual Agenda.)

It is unsurprising that the hostilities that asexuals face run parallel to the harassment and coercion of women in public, of lesbians in public - the two (or three) often going hand-in-hand in intersectional circumstances.  Where humans are presumed to be sexually driven, and to exist for the sexual satisfaction of the "opposite sex," those who are overtly sexual, and who hold power in society are liable to exhibit aggressively coercive attitudes towards those who deviate from the narrative.  Those who are asexual hear similar, and sometimes identical proposals and threats to those experienced by LGBT-identifying individuals.

You don't have to look very far to find someone in the asexual community who has been confronted with echoes of "You just haven't found the right man/woman," "You won't be asexual after you sleep with me," and "Are you sure you weren't abused as a child?"  Among the barrage of sexual pleas, assumptions, and threats, asexuals encounter the all-too-familiar Psychoanalytical Layman, who deems it their responsibility to elucidate the "suppressed reasons" for the asexual's orientation through invasive personal interrogation.  Some asexuals experience bodily dysphoria unrelated to their gender identity, as the society in which they live continues to cast them as sexual beings for possessing "sexual" body parts, and they identify more readily with a body absent any sexually distinguishing characteristics.

Amidst the lack of awareness and information available regarding asexuality, asexuals are frequently delegated to therapists for "treatment."

Yet even in light of these similar experiences of both invalidation and self-discovery, of marginalization and growth, asexuality remains in a dubious grey area for many LGBT spaces.  Because we still value overt sexuality - because the LGBT community is largely concerned with matters of safe sex and of positive sexual expression - those who remain uninterested or repulsed by sex are thrown in with the oppressive and "prudish" forces that are conceived of by the community as a threat to sex positivity.  It's baffling, how queer sexual attendees of a pride parade advise asexuals to "Keep your distance, I don't support what you stand for," while the asexual replies, "But I support you."

In creating spaces that truly value sex positivity, that are committed to educating the public in matters of consent and self-awareness, why are we shaming those who have chosen to consistently decline to consent?  Could we be predicating our judgment, perhaps, on the idea that consent eventually must be given, that a person at some point has to "give in" to sexual contact?

I'd seen the grey hairs on my mom's head, age forty-something - though to me they were less grey hair than they were brilliant strands of thread tied into her curls.  She permed her hair, had been doing it since college, because "It'd be too flat if I didn't."

Paradoxically, my mother's discontent with her hair's thinness, greyness, and coarseness all seemed to clash.  One of the recurring sights from my childhood was the way she ran her fingers through her hair, feeling along each strand with her fingertips with unceasing repetition.  One hand on the steering wheel, the other beside her hair.  One hand on the television remote, the other embedded in her curls.

If she felt something in a particular hair, or glimpsed in it some unwelcome quality out of the corner of her eye, she would slide her fingers down to its root, secure her grip, and pull it out.  Just like that.  

"Mom, why do complain about your hair being thin, and then pull out half your hairs?"

At my age, my grey hair wasn't something that registered as a negative yet. Because it was so outside the naturally occurring time frame of aging and biology, it could mean absolutely anything to a 10-year old mind.  I'm an old and wise soul, I thought.  There's something about me that makes me special.

Unfortunately, whatever justifications of divinely-bestowed uniqueness I had for myself were not reflected by others my age.  A girl on a youth soccer team once called my hair in question, a kind of wild confusion mixed with laughter lending to a thoroughly derisive tone.

"You have grey hairs!" 

The nature of her observation took me by surprise.  This was not something to be proud of, let alone admit to.  

I played the fool, cocking my head to the side, mirroring her own confusion on my features.

"What?"

"You're a granny!  How come your hair's like that?  Are you old?"

I felt along my hair, as if the tactile sense could reveal color, until I feigned a sudden realization and smiled back at her.

"Oh.  I'm helping repaint my brother's room," which was not itself a lie, "And the paint dripped on my hair and colored it grey," which was most definitely a lie.  I mimicked the motion of paint falling from above.  "Drip drip."

Between her continued confusion and my unconvincing narrative, she scoffed and repeated, "Granny" once more, before never acknowledging it again.  And I appreciated the lack of acknowledgement.

The following year, at age 12, I was convinced by my mom to start dyeing my hair.  She had bought the dye for herself, as I supposed my questions as to the paradoxical nature of her hair care habits had finally sunk in, and there was plenty left over for me.

I wasn't particularly thrilled by the idea, in fact I think I resisted for a time, not wanting to relinquish this strange claim to "otherness" or originality as I had interpreted it.  But the memory of remarks from teachers and classmates regarding my hair had started to fester a little.  They weren't necessarily derisive, and I was not opposed to more observational and qualitatively neutral commentary, but it was the implications as to my state of being as a person that grated against my skin.

"You're stressed," a 6th grade teacher said, "You need to relax.  The more stressed you are, the more grey hairs you'll get.  Look, I'm getting them too."

The absurdity of her comparing the stress levels of a 12-year old video game playing child and an overworked junior high teacher in her late thirties, thankfully, was not lost on me.  Even older women would make the same remarks, and I was abundantly aware of my singularity in these circumstances, and I was utterly disbelieving of the idea that out of every other person in my classes and soccer teams and youth groups, that I alone was the single most stressed child in this limited existence.  It was a kind of originality I didn't want to claim.

I began to dye my hair, continually.  

And this was the Benjamin Button moment, mid-shot of GIRL and MOTHER cooped up in the small space of a bathroom, dyeing their greying hair in unison.  Deep brown dye plastered across their scalps, trailing like blood from their temples as they both wait with towels draped across their shoulders for the mixture to sink in.  They comb out the globs in each other's hair and make small-talk.

Eventually, toward the end of high school, I began to have problems with my head - not my hair itself, but with the skin my hair was rooted in - in that much of my scalp experienced persistent irritation and redness and because I rubbed and scratched it so much, many of my follicles were damaged.  My hair was thinning, at age 16.

And whether the irritation was actually on account of the dyeing and not some other malady, and whether the thinning was actually on account of the scratching and not yet another problem, we somehow returned to the root of the issue, and I saw a western doctor for my childhood grey hair.

"My mom had this too, and her sisters.  My grandmother, she also did, and she says her mother was the same."

"And how old were you when this started?"

"Ten."

"Hm.  Let's do some bloodwork."

What followed was a series of stressful, embarrassing, and ultimately fruitless efforts of ascertaining the reasons as to why my hair was the way it was.  And I too was swept up in the scientific curiosity of the moment, before realizing the utter stupidity of trying to use my current biological state to determine the causes of an issue that emerged 7 years prior, the circumstances of which could in no way be replicated.  

I was shuffled between doctors, and when the blood work showed nothing, I was sent to a dermatologist.  Her attention immediately turned to the skin on the rest of my body, acne-speckled and scarred as it was, and though I was unconcerned by it she lamented it in front of me.

"This really hurts a person's self-esteem."

I flinched.  The fact of my crushed self-esteem had never before been made known to me, especially not by someone who had grown so dear and close to me after all of 5 minutes.

She sent me away with nothing for my greying head, but topical medications for the acne "that may cause nausea upon application," and in my disgust I dropped them on my desk and walked away.  The bag still sits there, unopened, 5 years later.

Heaped upon all these visits, as things usually all pile up at once, was a curious issue regarding my teeth.

In the words of my oral surgeon,

"You're 18?  I haven't seen gums like these on anyone younger than 80.

My gums have receded beyond natural repair.  Pulled back, elongating each unit of dentition, revealing jagged roots that people have compared to a dog's mouth.  It causes no pain on my part, yet "aesthetically, it can be an issue."

One extra visit resulted from that, in which I was told by a very mellow-voiced doctor that I would have to undergo an intensive surgery in which the skin from the roof of my mouth is cut off and transplanted over my gums, in a process that may result in my mouth rejecting my own skin causing pieces of these new "gums" to decay and fall out into my mouth.  

Regardless of the outcome of the procedure, I would have to eat through a straw for 6 months.

I left the office in tears.  

I don't know why it struck me at that particular moment, but I feel like the narrative had finally manifested itself and its meaning broken upon me.  I didn't want any of this.

It began with my mother wanting to change herself, and seeing part of herself persist in me, she was driven to change me too.  It was being corralled, observed, and poked, first by peers and then by adults, first by laymen and then by professionals.  And all of them converging upon me, conveying to me that I should not be fine being this.  This, is not youth.

The idea that my childhood or teenagehood would somehow be tarnished by inconsequential factors of my physicality, by the appearance of old age, by something other than a pre-approved image of "the young girl," and that this would (and should) directly factor into my confidence in myself.

At nearly every stage in the process, it was made explicitly clear that what we were striving to correct was purely aesthetic in nature.  My blood was healthy.  My organs were healthy.  My hormones, my nutrients, my cell counts all registered as normal.  

And so everyone around me seemed more driven and more concerned and more determined to "fix" me than I even cared to.  And what was hypocritically asked of me was pain, time, and sacrificed youth in order to attain the image of youth.

That was the last doctor I saw for these issues, because I would not, and will not pit my body against my body.  I will not induce nausea in order to clear my skin.  I do not care to be forced to watch and see if my mouth rejects my skin, because what would that mean if it does?  Do I even wish to know?  

Apparently my comfort has no relevancy to the commentaries of others, so the commentaries of others are not relevant to me.  

I am these things, and they are not ugly, nor are they beautiful.  They are qualitatively meaningless.  They are not "old" or "young" and thus they are not incongruous.  They do not need to be removed from each other.