Looking Back, Looking Ahead
When I was 6, my mom enrolled me at a Telugu and Sanskrit class at a temple in the Dallas suburbs, and I stayed 10 minutes before leaving because I didn’t want to learn about a culture that “hated girls” and demanded she take me home. She took me home and never made me go back. I sometimes I wonder why I’m so bad at following rules I disagree with and feeling remorse for my actions, then my parents tell me a story about how I flat out refused to do something when I was a child, they immediately folded without any concept of disciplining me, and I’m like “oh.”
Possibly due to the former point, I struggle a lot with guilt and remorse. I’m not claiming to be a perfect person but when someone tells me I’ve wronged them, my instinctual response usually boils down to “Oh,” or alternatively, “Wait why are your feelings my problem?” I just don’t feel that I do wrong unto others because my behavior always falls into one of two categories:
I meant to do something knowing full well it was wrong and it will hurt someone, and there’s no point crying over spilt milk whining about how bad I feel after the fact and demanding someone else clean up my mess by forgiving me for my wrongdoing, knowing full well I was spilling the milk.
I genuinely didn’t realize I was hurting someone, and when I find out, I apologize earnestly, but I’m still not going to dwell on my so-called wrongdoing because I genuinely didn’t know better.
I don’t know how to deal with this disconnect from other people a lot of the time, and I work to rectify it by curtailing my natural tendencies of abject tactlessness, but I’m a work in progress like everybody else.
Back in elementary and middle school, I’d look at the front of my textbooks to see which kids from the grades above had my textbooks, and when I knew the person, I’d feel a little thrill, even if I didn’t know them well. It was a kind of kinship with someone who came before me, and I don’t know if kids today have the same feeling.
I’m very good at math and with numbers, probably more so than I am with words, but I think that my dual acumen makes me substantially better at both disciplines than I’d otherwise be. I’m very precise in my word choice, and I think that throws people off because I almost never lean into pathos or sentimentality, even when writing about my feelings. The funny thing is that I’m not a naturally good writer, like I have a good vocabulary but I used to be a mediocre writer at best when I was in the 5th grade (or thereabouts), and I simply practiced to the extent I regard myself as decent-to-good writer now as an adult.
I’m watching Laguna Beach on Netflix, and I got through the entire first season in three days. When we were in the 6th grade, my friend Lauren and I would watch the show in her upstairs den and we thought they were so goddamn grownup, and now, when we’re 10 years older than Lauren and Kristin and Stephen were in the show, they seem like children. Watching Lauren moon over Stephen makes me cringe so much as an adult as someone who was half in love with her high school friend for a lot longer than she should have been, but it’s great entertainment nonetheless. And, I love LC’s closet because I love myself nothing more than a cute halter top although I can do without the flared jeans and flip-flop combos.
After reading her Rolling Stone profile a few weeks ago, I watched the Selena Gomez documentary, My Mind and Me, with my mom last night, and I cried, which low-key terrified my mother because I’m not a particularly weepy person by nature. I’m probably never going to be comfortable talking about that era of my life the way Selena does here, for a number of reasons, but the documentary really resonated with me. My mother said that Selena seemed like she was trying really hard to come across as more composed and put together than she really is, and I pointed out that when you have that brand of illness, you constantly question your own sanity and you feel obligated to be more … normal than other, not irregular, people would be in similar situations. You feel like you can’t react rationally to being wronged, to being hurt by others and the world we live in, and when you do respond emotionally, you feel overwhelmingly guilty for doing so, for being the person that you are. I live with that feeling every day of my life and it sometimes weighs heavily on my shoulders.
Anyways, I’ll end this with a reminder (mostly to myself).