Category Archives: Identity

Moving Out

In my culture, there is only two reasons for a girl to be leaving her parents house. One, she is going to marry and she leaves to join her husband’s family. Two, and this one is very unlikely and still hard to see through, she leaves for a better college life.

And the thing is, I don’t fit into any of those categories.

Here is the first thing, I don’t plan on getting married. And this is going to sound contradicting, but I’m not ruling it out either. It’s just that I am not in a place of mind to be thinking about marriage. Marriage, for me, doesn’t mean completion. Marriage, for me, doesn’t mean that life is finally starting. But marriage, for me, doesn’t mean that I am going to be forever stuck as well.

I just haven’t found the person I would like to be forever with, nor do I think it is the time to start looking. When it happens it will happen and I know that there will be no regrets.

Here’s the second thing, I’ve tried college living at home. It doesn’t lead to anything other than depression. The first time I hit depression so hard, it took me months to get over it. The second time I tried my best to not be depressed, but it still came. I have to admit, I’m scared. College scares me. I know I can be good at it, but I know it come with a price as well.

So here is the final question, why am I moving out?

Why am I moving out?

Why?

My parents don’t want me to leave. Honestly, I could live the rest of my life at home and my parents would be okay with it. But do you see the issue with that? I could live THE REST OF MY LIFE at my parents house.

And I know, I know. Who wouldn’t love to live a life full of safety nets? I can buy and do whatever I want, whenever I want, and life would be peachy cause I have parents who takes care of all the bills. Who wouldn’t want that?!

Heck, this is one of the reasons why I waited 24 years before I was pushed into this decision.

Here is another part of this story. I have been conditioned into staying to protect my parents. For over 8 to 9 years all everyone has ever told me was that my parents needed me. And I believed it. My parents relied on me for everything. I had to grow up and I had to change myself over and over again just to satisfy their needs.

But then, you know what happened, my parents mentally and verbally abused me. For years they manipulated their words, and threatened my every thought and action. I couldn’t do anything. All my actions, whether they were purely good or slightly ill intent, were shot down.

I couldn’t even be my own person. I had to be my parents daughter. I had to be the face of my family. I had to be perfect.

That doesn’t sound so bad right? Being perfect.

But perfect is not who I am. I am flawed. And I am perfectly fine with being flawed.

So, what does that have with me moving out? I’ve been wanting to move out since the notion entered my mind when I was 16/17. But I was scared. I’ve been scared of leaving my parents. I’ve been scared of leaving everything I have ever known about my life. My normal was going to be shattered.

My parents need me but don’t want me. My parents want me but don’t need me. It is always one or the other.

They have the need to feel like everything is in their control. So they say things and do stuff that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

And I need to get away from that.

It’s honestly not as bad as it sounds. I’m not in a horrible place. But I don’t feel like I’m really living. I may live in their house, but it isn’t my home. I may have a room, but it really isn’t my room. My parents still feel like they can roam through my junk when they feel like it. And it may just be junk, but it is my junk.

I’m a very private person, other than me writing about my life all the time. But there are limits to my private life. I don’t like knowing that I don’t have a safe spot. And right now, I don’t have a safe spot at all.

So, even though it was my sister’s idea to move out, I am now taking the lead. Even though it was my sister’s plan, I am taking the brute of the aftermath. My parents are acting as if I was the mastermind behind the decision.

My parents know that I am not like any of their other children. I am the one to go out of pattern. The one who may follow their every order but the one to go against every plan they also have.

So, why am I moving out?

I am tired of being pushed and pulled. I am tired of having these expectations without information about what is really going on.

I am tired of not being in control of my life.

A Little Something I Wanted to Share

I wrote this to a friend and thought it would be cool to post it here. I do mention references to my story I am writing, which is what sparked this conversation.

Have a little of my past 🙂

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Personally, why I don’t agree to forced marriage and fear it, is because I don’t want to lose my freedom. I had to struggle just to be the person that I am right now. When I was growing up, I was “the pretty one with white skin” that all the old ladies doted on. I grew up with expectations to do well, to marry well, and to have a good looking boyfriend/husband, all because the fact of me having “a pretty face.”
I was basically told what to expect out of life. But having all these words thrown at me didn’t make my feel any better. My sisters, and cousins had to witness it too. They were being compared to me, but I didn’t like to be the china doll that everyone showed off. Honestly, as a young girl, I didn’t think there was much about me that was charming. I blinked too much, I was empty minded, and filled with
imaginations.
It should have made me a bitch, and maybe it did, but since I was so different, I secluded myself. I didn’t want to stand out as “the pretty one.” It got to the point that if any guy talked to me, I would turn my back to them, honestly I was an ice princess during my middle and high school years. It was something that I never noticed till just last year..
I never allowed myself to grow to my full potential, I was scared to be ‘me’. So while I still worked hard, I pulled back in the department of social skills and love life.
For awhile I did find ‘me’, and I thought I was finally going to go somewhere in life, but things aren’t always that dandy and great. I had a conflict with my sisters. I had other life ambitions and they were worried about their love lives. We weren’t seeing eye to eye in anything. They were the closes people to me in my family, and in matter of months we hated each other with a passion…
But they were still my family, and with time we slowly became family again, but never as close as we once were.
I still lost myself though, and I was lost for so long too. I closed myself off again. My best friend could see it, but she didn’t know how to deal with it. She didn’t know what I had to grow up with. For years I would put on a mask with a smile, but I was basically dying on the inside.
It was just two years ago that I started on my life journey to be happy and to be ‘me’. I feel like I took three big steps in my life. If I were to be married, I would be taking four steps back.
Plus, I tend to think that my dreams carry heavy messages that I am afraid to admit, and I had dreams about forced marriages. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was thinking consistently about my story, but it showed me what my darkest fears were about forced marriage. People kept trying to get into my bubble, trying to control everything for me. Just like Luna, everyone was making mistakes for her and she had to deal with the mess. Nobody would let me grow as a person, and nothing would be mine anymore.
That is another thing, while growing up, my sister’s would claim things as theirs and I would step back and let them. I had nothing to claim as mine. Now that I do have something that is mine, I am scared that someone is going to take it away from me.
And yeah, I lost a lot of my sisters while I was young. They were never really sister figures though, or at least I felt like they never were. They never tried to understand me as a human being, even though I tried with every last tear to understand what was going on in their minds. I tried so hard with my younger sisters too, and it only left me hurt even more. I love them to pieces, but no one really understands me.. So yea, I do have a silent promise with myself to not let my younger sisters go through what I went through when all my married sisters left. Because honestly, when my family was already under scrutiny, it hurt that my sisters were finding love and I was stuck to deal with all the drama and gossip.
Rather than focusing on others, my main goal in life is to focus on me. As greedy as that sounds, it’s something that I owe to myself, to my kid self who worried too much about what other’s thought about themselves and about me.
When I write a stories, my characters are their own people, but I tend to leave a bit of me with my them. And that may seem greedy too, but I can’t help but leave part of myself in places that my family would never think to look.
I can’t seem to make my stories short…. I had to share my whole life story… (and why would i share my whole life story? i don’t fear my flaws or horrible past.)

Nothing is Wrong with Loving Your Culture

it hurts me to write this…

i’ve always been an open minded person. i have always wanted to know MORE. i have this guilty pleasure of knowledge. and not only that, but i have this guilty pleasure of broadening my mind to different cultures.

i am Hmong, born in America. i am a Hmong American girl.

i grew up with TWO cultures. there are times when something from BOTH cultures don’t make sense to me. it is hard, to be made fun of for not understanding something from someone who was more exposed to that culture. it is hard, to be made fun of for liking something that another person does not take time to try and understand.

it is even harder when my Hmong siblings make fun of me, a Hmong girl, for liking Hmong music.

judgement on me, on who i am.

as a Hmong girl trying to make a name for myself, is it wrong to enjoy and encourage other Hmong artists that are on the same path as me, as all of us are?

because of this judgement, this sneer that would come my way, the disagreement of what is “good” and “bad”, i have been lost.

i am a lost Hmong American girl.

i love music and it makes me who i am.

yet i can’t even enjoy it when my family, my peers are judging me about it…

in this moment where i am lost, i have given in to the guilty pleasure of Hmong music and i have not regret it at all.

i can finally connect to something. relate to other Hmong communities, like finding a little lost piece of myself.

these past few days have been filled with nothing but good. i can finally write, write and write without worries. i can finally write what is deep in my heart. what bothers me and what makes me, me.

so don’t suppress yourself just for the sake of others. find out who you are, find all your little missing puzzle pieces. take a stand for what makes you, you.

Childhood Dreams

I sat there, listening to music, that carried my childhood in them. This particular night was like any other night of my life. Nothing special was going on. Other than procrastinating on homework, life was a yawn.

I closed my eyes and thought back to when I was a child. Back in California. When days were much simpler. When the only thing I had to worry about was coming home with bruises on my knees from playing with the boys at recess.

The days when my siblings and I didn’t get yelled at for playing in the sprinklers after school,  making our uniforms soaking wet. When all I had to do was read books after books.

And of course, that smile of my best friend.

I had missed a few days from spraining my ankle (jumping off my roof). And when I returned, she had greeted me with her big smile and told me that everyone missed me. We were inseparable.

But that was back in California.

My parents moved us to the great midwest, to the state of Wisconsin. Everything I ever knew changed. People were different there, my friends new. It was difficult to accept the change. Despite my difficulties, day after day, month after month, even though I yearned for my home in California, I was moving on.

I lost connection with my childhood friends, I lost what it was to be a Cali girl.

What did I become? A girl stuck in reality. Dreaming at night but forgetting to have dreams while I walked the grounds of Earth.

a girl sits in front of her computer screen

a girl sits in front of her computer screen

unaware of who she is

unaware of how she is supposed to

tell the world how she came to be

where she came from

why she does the things she does

days turn to weeks

weeks into years

but there is only

confusion after confusion

My After Effects Of Depression

I haven’t been able to think straight for a while now. After school ended my goal was to find myself and figure out the reason why I went back to school. I didn’t know it would actually consist of losing myself in the process.

I am lost. Everyday that I don’t work was supposed to be a day full of writing. I wanted to write every moment I could. But I can’t, my heart isn’t in it. I was writing and having thoughts of writing almost everyday when I was in school. Now I can’t even sit down to think about it.

I feel like I am nothing since I have nothing to do everyday. Going to classes was my life for those five months. Now that school is done, I’ve gone back to the girl who has nothing to wake up to anymore.

My reasons for going to school is still the same and the motivation is still the same too. I guess I just added another reason to wanting to go. I want to wake up to something to look forward too. I want to wake up early with a full list of schedules.

I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m not having nightmares, I’m not staying up to look forward to anything, I just can’t sleep. I lay there and hope to knock out but my mind won’t let me.

I’ve been thinking about my after effects of depression.

For a person who never cared about timing, I started to do things in a timely matter. One of the biggest was leaving for work at a certain time. Small things were doing things at 1, 1:15, 1:30, or 1:45. I don’t know why, but I would always look for a time marker.

I don’t do it as much anymore. I know for a fact that it started when I hit depression stage and I wanted to get rid of that habit. I try to take life as it is and not worry as much as I did anymore.

There was this one time in the past when I thought was over my depression, and this habit hadn’t disappeared yet. I was getting ready for work, and when I went outside to my car, it was gone. I came back inside screaming my head off, wondering where and who took my car. I found out from my sisters that it was my mother and I was angry! It was my time to leave and I had no other way to get to work. It felt like my life was out of my control! I started to cry and bawl my eyes out over this fact.

I cried in front of my sisters. I didn’t even know why I did that in the past. But when I think of it now, I guess it was the fact that I was screaming out to them that I wasn’t fine. I needed help, I needed my sisters to help. But I am the black sheep of the family, and everyone is scared to ask me how I am feeling unless I talk to them first. So life went on. My mother came back and I left later than I did normally for work. I was still angry but I did make it in on time.

The sleeping thing is another side effect of my depression. Like I said, I used to have nightmares. It sucked even more since I remembered them, all of them. They weren’t of monsters or anything like that. The people, who had a cause in my depression, they were ignoring me in my dreams. Even though I wasn’t acting any different, even though I was trying my hardest to get things back to the way it was before, nothing was working. They still ignored me and left me out. And it may sound silly but it really hurt me. Even in my dreams they were still causing me pain.

Ever since I started those dreams I’ve been scared to sleep. I started to sleep later and later every night. I would wait till I was crazy tired, unable to keep my eyes open tired, then finally I would fall asleep.

The last one may be the biggest for me. I can’t help but become a hermit crab again. There is no reason to go out. There is no reason to socialize with other human beings. I feel like even though I try to look more approachable, people just don’t want to talk with me.

I don’t even want a boyfriend at the moment, I just want people to acknowledge that I am alive and worthy of talking to. Make me realize that all human beings aren’t bad, since I’ve lost all hope in men already…

Another thing that has been bothering me is the fact that my memory is horrible. I was the girl who remembered everybodies birthdays and sent out cards ahead of time. I was the girl who people could rely on to have everything. But now I refer to myself has the girl who has a memory of a goldfish. Someone could say something to me and I would forget it in the next three seconds.

And in trying to forget what made my depression happen, I forgot a lot of things that happened around that same time. I even went further back and forgot most of my high school years. People could ask me about things that happened to me back in 09’ and I wouldn’t know.

Except, I would remember random weird things. Like the fact that my parents wanted body pillows and a year later I would buy one for each of them. Or the random little conversations I had that weren’t that important.

I’ve become a different person since then. For better or for worse, I live with it and do my best every day.

Yea I’m weird, I’m random, I’m shy, I’m awkward, I’m an ice princess, I’m boring, I’m strange. I’m a lot of things…


Going Bald…

There was an idea behind this. I don’t know what, but it was there. The Christmas before I turned 21, I put into my phone of how I wanted to shave off my hair. On my 21st birthday. I had seven months to really think about it, but I knew I was dead set on this goal.

Yet, when it came to my 21st birthday, I didn’t do it. I went out and did the normal twenty-one year old scenario.

A year passed, and still the thought of shaving my head was floating around. But, as it turns out, it was not going to be the year.

But this year came about. I knew if I wanted to go bald, this was the last chance I was going to get. I had to do it while I was young, before I regretted not doing it sooner.

I got over my depression, I was on the path to figuring out who I am. I was happy.

I got the courage to finally let my sisters on the in about my goals.

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We came to an agreement of baby steps. And not soon after, I went in to get a pixie cut.

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I was happy, but still, the lingering thoughts of being bald bothered me.

After my hair grew out, we thought again about a new haircut. This time, I wanted to go shorter,

It was the day before my birthday and I wanted to go all the way this time. But I was pulled back by my sister again. We cut it short but not all the way.

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Soon after it was like the world was messing with me. My nephew and niece got to the razors and decided to give themselves a haircut. They had to go bald.

I watched the ending of Legend of Korra, and Jinora fulfilled her wishes of becoming a airmaster, getting the chance to go bald,

I was thinking of Doctor Who and remembered that Matt Smith went bald.

So I messaged my sister again.

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After three months of talking about it, I was finally going to get my wish. My sister was agreeing to help me out in my goal.

And finally, after two plus years, I got to fulfill one of my life goals.

My before:

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And, finally, my after…

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Society tell us girls should have long hair. To be a woman, you have to have a head full of hair. To be pretty and wanted, you have to have a long lock of hair. In my culture, a good girl has long hair.

For me to cut my hair, I am going against all reasons.

There is no beauty on the outside unless there is beauty on the inside.

I love myself regardless of how my hair looks. I will love myself through this experience. ‘Cause I will weed out those who still stick with me even though I look different.

(P.S. I am super happy how it turned out. I love how I look and feel. That’s all that should matter. Run and chase your goals, fight for your happiness.)

 

Update: Summer is Over and School Has Started!

Wow, I had so much more planned for this. My mind definitely works better at night. I was going to go on and on about how my summer went and how school is starting soon.

I can’t believe how fast everything went this year. I was hoping for more. But like always, I’m sucked into doing so much more for others and not enough for me. I need to save up for next summer. I want to do something fun for myself. I say this but it may not even happen. I need to get these next three and a half years done first.

I think the excited thing about college is the classes I am going to take. I cannot wait to learn everything I’m going for.

So I am scared and worried that I maybe going back for no reason. I’m scared that I am wasting money and time on school. But I know that I shouldn’t be feeling this way. I should be confident about my life choices.

I want to be a writer, I want to be an editor, I want to start a publishing company, and I want to start a cafe with books in it!

My English major is important to me. Going for business is important, going for philosophy and psychology is important. I want all of this. But summer makes me forget everything.

It’s been a while since I’ve written. It was so hard. With work in the middle of the day, I couldn’t think of writing in the mornings before work and writing after work. I was making excuses of having to get ready, and needing to wind down from all the customers I had to deal with in that day.

But since school has started, I can feel the motivation come back. My progress of writing may still be slow but it will be more frequent than this summer. Trying to juggle work and school is hard, but writing is such a big passion for me. I’m not going to let go of it just like that.

Even if I feel like a lot of people don’t get my goals of wanting to be a writer, I want to show them that I can have this dream and get to the finish line.

 

Life Goal: Going Bald/Buzz Cut

Tonight I feel like going crazy. I’ve been thinking about life goals all day. I want to be bald once in my life. I don’t care if I’ll be judged. I don’t care about all the negativity that will be involved after. I just want to live my life the way I want to.

I’ve been considering it since 2012 and now I can’t stop thinking about it. This choice of mine is making me go crazy.

The only thing I’m seeking now is support.

What would people say.. This short Asian girl. Being Bald…