I normally have a policy of not airing out any laundry on my blog that I wouldn’t be comfortable having my family read, but I’ve got things on my mind today. Early in the weekend, my cousin and I got into a short flame war on Facebook over an article I linked on my wall. He had words — he basically said “Oh STFU. BOO HOO about being fetishized and wanted by white men. Growing up as an Asian guy, I’m part of the least sexually desired group on this planet.” It was a point I really felt, knowing how my racial identity has been shaped; I really understood where he was coming from. Unfortunately, his response boiled down to a personal attack. Essentially, “My problems are much more worse than yours so don’t even bother opening your mouth,” which is an attitude and a response I’ve dealt with all my life. I hardly even know if I should take it as personally as I always do, but from my perspective, my cousins never seem to respond to anyone else with as much hatred and anger as they respond to anything I say. I really felt my original post was worth keeping up, but other people were witness to this (my Facebook profile also includes friends and coworkers) and it was just embarrassing and inappropriate. I responded in a comment that he must have gotten in an email, but I ended up deleting the post and began fantasizing about how soon we could make this move back to Los Angeles happen.
So here’s the thing. I can’t often afford therapy; when I can scrounge up enough resources to go, it’s usually because I’ve surpassed the end of my rope and might have actually considered hanging myself in the closet. I know — totally fucked up and it has occasionally been something I’ve had to take medication for, but I’ve already boiled down the root of all my problems. The ongoing troubled relationship I have with my cousins comes up as a topic in my therapy sessions nearly the most often, second only to the topic of my father.
We were very much a “takes a village” type of family. My mom was my primary parent, but my aunt and uncle were like a second set, and my cousins were essentially my older brothers. They were my measure of cool and made so much of my childhood (tarnished by my controlling father) actually bearable and fun. They also provided a safe environment for all the experimenting I wanted to do, so it never got out of hand — I got drunk for the first time with them, skipped school with them, smoked my first joint with them, went to my first rave with them. Ironically, alcoholics as they are, I thank them for my iron self-control.
That being said, I owe a host of my own issues to the relationship we had and still have, and how that relationship has changed over the years. When I mean they were a measure of cool, they actually seemed to be the measure of cool for everyone in town. They used to beat up on me and tease me as the little sister, and I have countless vivid memories of other people — our other cousins, friends of our other cousins, and even some folks they might have just met — hopping on the Bash Theresa train just to get on their good side. Their tearing me down often happened without provoking — I just needed to be present for them to find some reason to make fun of me — so I never really wanted to open my mouth with any opinions and give them reason to beat on me more. This was never a safe area for me to speak my mind.
All the while, I was never really taught or encouraged to stand up to them. I had two things going against me: I was the youngest and I was a girl. Aside from that, they were blood, and instead of being encouraged to stick up for myself, I was actually told not to raise too much of a stink because they were, after all, family — supposedly the people who would come through in an emotional clutch. I thank my mom for a lot of the strength, intelligence, and will she’s passed down to me, but it doesn’t really change the fact that every time I went to her for help in getting my cousins to stop hurting me (either physically or emotionally), she’d hardly even get up from whatever she was doing and would simply say to me, “Oh, just ignore them.”
The few times we have been able to get deep with it, they’ve said something to the effect of, “We were only tough on you all these years because we wanted you to develop a thick skin.” But it’s done the exact opposite. This is the dynamic that has informed everything I’ve done since I’ve been able to make my own decisions. I can’t seem to get away from it. At first it was benign. I started college with a major they seemed to approve of, and whenever I was home for a visit, I went to all the clubs they wanted to go, despite the fact that I really didn’t like trance.
But when my own adult experiences started to surpass theirs (aside: while they no longer live with their parents, they never really left the nest — one moved out of my aunt and uncle’s basement when he bought the house next door, the other lives with his family directly across the street. Save for a year that the younger one moved into an apartment with his girlfriend a few miles away, neither of them left the street they were born on), it has made for a lot of tension. Yes, we’re people of color, but they’re very much in a red-state mentality: gun-ownin’, beer-drinkin’, terrorist-hatin’ anti-intellectuals. Aside from that, they’re too comfortable telling me, in particular, that my opinions and experiences aren’t valid and that I should just shut the fuck up. This follows me everywhere I give them the chance to speak, which is why I don’t even bother reminding them I have a blog (they know I have one, but they stopped visiting years ago for two reasons: 1) they don’t like to read and 2) they don’t really care what I have to write).
It always starts out as a political conversation but quickly becomes personal and stings more than any argument I could have with anybody else in the world. I’d say that they seem to be more careless with their words around me more than any other family member because they know I can’t fight back, but I’m not even sure they make it that personal. I really don’t think it even occurs to them how much it stings and how much it makes me hate them. They just get under my skin and they know what hurts — they know exactly how to shut me up.
So it’s easy to see how they motivate most aspects of my adult life. I don’t party because they do it in excess. I make opposite parenting decisions as theirs. I’ve moved a total of 15,000 miles in my life, and every time I went back to California it was because I felt that my cousins were getting in the way of my goals. Ever since moving back, I’ve felt like I’ve been living entirely in their shadow and I’m tired. I’m tired of forcing myself to try to be my own person around them, I’m tired of continuing to fail at that, I’m tired of feeling too weak to defend myself, I’m tired of working for their props, and I’m tired of wanting their respect so bad in the first place. I’ve so far lived an amazing life, have come out stronger than I’d ever expected myself to be, and yet I undermine my self-worth on a daily basis because, to them, I still ain’t shit.
What’s so shitty and dysfunctional is that I know they love me. I know they’re proud of me, but they’re too proud to admit it. They are a staple to the best memories I have of my childhood, but as an adult, I feel like I can’t live this close to them and see them as often as I do without having compromise my happiness and sell out the person I am. I never learned how.
This is why I write — because I can’t speak. For a long time, basically until BF and I really started working on our relationship, writing has been my only safe haven for expressing my thoughts. This runs so deep and there’s just more at stake these days. I’ll be damned of my daughter learns from my example of letting my older brothers walk all over me. While I’ve always hoped that my daughter would grow up around lots of family the way I did, is it worth putting her through all the same stuff I deal with to this day? Why do I even value that so much anymore? One day I’ll be able to explain it all to her, but I’m not going to risk killing her self-esteem and self-worth and setting a horrible example for her just to prove to myself that my family can change.
So I’ll never really be able to get away from the fact that moving back to Los Angeles is, in some part, my way of running away from them all over again.
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