America

I don’t think people generally regard me as a loving Patriot. I rail against our glorious military and trash our renowned police force. I’ll deliver biting criticisms of anything with the slightest trace of imperialism, from tourism to white people wearing Henna. I could shit on any of the three presidents I’ve lived through for an hour at least. I want the electoral college burned at the stake, I think nearly every face featured on American currency is the devil personified, and capitalism can eat my-- casserole. But a very disgusting and poorly prepared casserole.

And yet, I love love love standing for the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem. If a vet approaches, I’ll readily give them my utmost respect (regardless of the imperialist ideals they may have partaken in). My favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. I will punch anyone who uses the British form of words (there’s no “u” in color) or who generally claims anything British is superior to anything American. You know what? That applies to any European country, really. My pride for the states is overflowing. Despite my many tirades against this country, I am, first and foremost (and maybe only) an American.

See, my heritage is Indonesian. Indonesia is a giant archipelago between Australia and continental East Asia. We’ve got coffee, tropics, beaches, poverty, hobbit fossils (Google it), and the fourth largest population in the world. But I’d bet good money that I’m the first and only Indonesian person you know. Or one of very, very few. And it’s for that reason that it’s difficult to think of myself as Indonesian. Think about your identity, your culture. How do you identify with it? Through the food? The clothes? The art? The community? Of those, I’m betting the latter is pretty damn important. Thing is, there aren’t a whole lot of Indonesian-Americans. It’s more likely to be born on February 29 than to be an Indonesian living here. I asked my dad, who's lived in this town longer than any other Indonesian person, how many of us there are in the C-U and he said less than 200. To the best of my knowledge, I’m the only Indonesian kid my age in all of Champaign-Urbana. There’s no one I can have conversations with about typical teen angst while also discussing our love of bakso. There’s nothing for me to latch onto, no one to relate to, no sense of a group to which my identity can point to and say, “That’s who I belong to.”

I realized this pretty early on, so I went looking for other tribes to call myself apart of, since the one I should belong to was essentially nonexistent in the immediate area. As a kid who worshipped Harry Potter, Spider-Man, and Jedi Knights, my first attempt at finding a new group was with white men. For obvious reasons, this didn’t pan out quite as I’d hoped. Not only was my pigment a little too melaninated to qualify, turns out the strength of their identity relied on the otherization and exclusion of people that looked like me or something like that. Go figure.

So my next attempt was with the Asian community. Which seems like a logical step because, the fact is, lots of people don’t have a group to identify with that fits their exact specific identity. Even white people are usually of varying ethnic and national backgrounds, but are still able to bridge those gaps with their overarching pale skin. But it never felt quite right. My skin, my facial features, my hair, none of it matched with being Asian. I never had to deal with being made fun of for my eyes or being good at math like many of them did, because I didn’t look like them. And at the end of the day, they went home to communities that came from the same country, which was still something I lacked.

What probably struck the deepest line between myself and other Asians was the fact that I was Muslim. Even if we could bond over the few traits that all first-generation kids share, they’d never understand how it felt to walk through the grocery store with my mom and her headscarf or wait for various “Allahu Akbar” jokes to ensue every September 11th. But I couldn’t turn to being Muslim either. I wasn’t Arab, as most Muslims are, and I’d taken on too many sinful Western values in my time here that I wasn’t welcome among their circles.

So there I stand, not Arab enough for the Muslims, too Muslim for the Asians, and too much in favor of preserving my sense of self-worth for white men. So there’s only one choice left, to be an American.

America is a contradiction in terms. We want to be free without bounds and yet we want protection from all harms. We want to champion human rights while also being an ever-expanding dominant power. WE are nothing and everything, at every instant ready to burst at the seams. We are an unsustainable impossibility. And such is the nature of people like myself, who can find no true identity. And so I turn to the American identity, which is, truly, the identity of those who have none.

Little Man

Stuff's about to get real uncomfortably personal, so fair warning

Here's a secret. I've figured out how to intoxicate myself (fancymantalk for get high) without consuming a thing. In fact, I don't have to do a thing at all. It's brilliant really. Here's all that needs to happen: Someone has to say or do something that makes me think, that makes me really truly believe, in my heart of hearts, that they don't think I'm a good person, that they think me gross or immoral or incompetent. Now, they don't have to think it, but I have to believe that they do. Then, give it a moment to really settle in for me, and that's when the fun begins.

The eyes are the first to go. Actually, they might not be, but they're for sure the first thing I notice. They lose focus and turn my field of view into an overlap of two translucent images. They won't retain a solid image for more than five, ten seconds tops. Not that it would matter either way, since by that time I've also lost any semblance of my former ability to concentrate on anything. Sticking a movie in front of me or trying to start up a conversation is a waste of time, I'll comprehend neither.

All of this is part of the larger trend of my body working at 5% capacity. Moving is an ordeal. My mind no longer has the direct control over my body. It's like I'm controlling a puppet's strings. A puppet with like 50 miles of slack and a damn heavy rope. So I can yank the cord connected to its arm with immense force, but hardly any of the motion registers in the puppet itself. So I tell my body to ask my friend "What's that?" and what comes out is "wzzzt". If the same friend tells a joke, my eyebrows flicker up and my mouth does a little twitch. My body's basically shut down and been rendered utterly useless.

But my mind is working at 200% capacity. I know this because the motherfucker is scared shitless and all of that 200% is being used to scream "NONONONONONO". Ultimately, what's happening is whoever's running the show upstairs has decided to slam the "CODE RED" button because they think the person is going to hurt me. Because if you really truly hate the very essence of another person, you don't just wish them gone, you wish them pain. And surely if someone said anything remotely critical of me, that must mean they want to hurt me. So my mind and body go on the defensive. There's a tiny man in a dark corner in the far reaches of my head who's shouting and insisting "This is completely irrational, they're not going to hurt you." But why would we listen to him? Just because he has "logic" on his side? (Yes, you idiot, that's exactly why) And so we flip the switch into survival mode. Unfortunately, not a cool survival mode where your muscles tense and you become a superhuman version of yourself ready to take on the world. It's more like a possum playing dead. Barely a rung above comatose.

Lucky for me, this hadn't happened in direct confrontation, in real life. It was almost always over social media or from thinking over something that had happened earlier in the day. The actual attacks happened at home, where I was able to recede into the comforts of solitude and under the protection of blanket and bed. I could just curl up and figuratively suck my figurative thumb (I want it to be known I do not suck my thumb) and wait for the storm to pass. Once my body was unharmed and realized there was no danger, it could start recuperating. Even then, for the remainder of the day, I'd be emotionally crippled and incapable of usual levels of productivity, still paranoid and fearful, sensing threats to my safety that were invisible to everyone around me. But the bulk of the stress, the attack itself, was always confined to the security of my home.

That stopped being true last week during a rehearsal for MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM SHOWINGS OCTOBER 5, 6 AND 7. This really shouldn't have been a surprise to me, a kid who's incapacitated by criticism probably shouldn't take ventures into the performing arts. But I did anyway. Funnily enough, the performance had nothing to do with what happened. Someone asked me to move my stuff just slightly more aggressively than I would have liked. They weren't mean, they weren't malicious, in all likelihood they weren't being serious, but that's not how the motherfucker upstairs took it. He took it and ran, shutting down most routine operations and concentrating on fear, fear, fear. He had me stay in my chair, warning me that any move I make, especially in the vicinity of the person who asked me to move my stuff, could provoke someone. And surely I knew, he told me, that everyone in that room hated me. They were all just waiting to do something. Waiting for an opportunity to tear you to shreds. And when they do, he added, there's nothing you can do. They've got you surrounded.

Despite the immensely terrifying and imminent threat, I could have handled it given time. Had I been able to sit in my seat, I would've eventually recovered. But I was going to be onstage in a number of minutes and while Shakespeare has been performed in a wide range of dialects, I doubt the bard's eloquence or wit would come across as well amidst slurred speech or (an option that was becoming increasingly more likely) tears.

The little man in the corner piped up just loud enough to point out that my friend Steve was across the room. He could help, the little man yelled. There's no help, the man in the control room shot back. I made my way to him, an ordeal that at the time seemed akin to the Fellowship's long and treacherous journey to Mordor. Steve, without missing a beat, helped me out and talked me down and I recovered quicker than I ever had and got onstage and immediately rocked the fuck out of that performance with my eyes still freshly puffy. The Flu Game doesn't hold a candle.

Now, dear reader o'mine, you might've noticed something about my tone here (and indeed, in my life in general). But it probably seems especially inappropriate here. How I'm padding every deeply personal revelation under fifty layers of sarcasm, self-effacement, and metaphor. See, I've always fancied myself a bit of a badass fighter antihero type and growing up on nerd pop culture, I've tried to take cues from the Han Solos and Mal Reynolds of the world - the coolest guys don't show their hand, which I'm doing by writing this post. It's not that they don't have struggles, but if you really have a struggle, then you're not gonna talk about it. Tragic backstories are told through flashbacks or dramatic reveals, not expositional chitchat. Talking to Ra-- Steve did a lot to assuage that feeling. Not for a moment did he question it nor did his concern for the situation ever dip. Frankly, a lot of the tears (figurative tears, of course, I'm a man. For real, though I don't suck my thumb) were more out of pleasant surprise than panic. It was ridiculously validating, it helped me convince myself that what I was going through was very much real, even if I asked for help. I definitely wouldn't have been able to write this post if not for Steve. And even now, I still have to cushion it with jokes - it still feels wrong to talk about it. 

But this whole thing is still particularly problematic for me because this is the type of stuff I should really be able to handle. Not because I'm a man (though I'm sure that plays a role) but because I'm literally asking for it. I have, by design, a very antagonistic personality. Like the characters above, I enjoy being snarky and combative but also fighting and taking loud self-righteous stances. I fully intend to pursue in public service / politics, where criticism is like oxygen. These are things I should be able to handle because of how I've crafted myself and laid out my future. So how do these attacks bode for me?

I've been trying to come up with some logical narrative to this story, some conclusion of sorts to justify writing this at all. I don't have a good one. I think I just want people to know. I don't need anyone feeling sorry for me or taking precautions (I'm a MAN dammit!), but I have people I love who might read this and learn something about me, something that's somehow easier to express in a public blogpost in a one-on-one conversation. But also, if all this came about from my oversensitivity, wouldn't this be a good place to start? Exposing myself bit by bit so that I might develop a tolerance for what other people think of me? So, in the immortal words of Tag Team and every adolescent white boy trying to seem cool with a dated hip-hop reference:

Whoomp.

There it is.




THIS IS SO LONG I'M SO SORRY MR. MITCHELL I JUST KINDA RAMBLED AFTER A CERTAIN POINT