Being mixed means being twice as triggered with no home to run to.
I feel safe with M culturally in ways that are hard for me to find because of my mixed background. He's a rare breed with the same backgrounds as me, but he is seen as brown while I am seen as white, and the world reacts to us differently depending on which community we're interacting with. Usually one of us or the other takes turns being the unwelcome outcast, like my neighbors thinking he's here to steal something, or me getting hostile glares or being called "guera", or being on the receiving end of a stranger's drunk lecture about why I shouldn't be there (participating in my own culture.)
It's a huge bonus that he grew up in such an isolated place that he had zero preconceptions about Jewish people. He didn't even know what that meant when I met him, which is awesome, because every other non-Jewish date has made off-putting comments and antisemitic jokes and/or called me exotic and sexualized my nose? So it's a RELIEF dating someone from a remote indigenous village in the middle of nowhere like M, who has ZERO preconceived notions whatsoever.
Although in the beginning he did make me cry when he said my skin is "too white" and stared at it like I had leprosy, about the same as I was used to feeling growing up the lone pale mixed girl in a town where that was extremely uncool and the whiter you were the more likely you'd be bullied. But people there knew my family and could plainly see they're brown, so, I didn't need to explain or defend myself as much as here in this whiter city. Because when you see me and my family together, you can clearly see I am a clone of my brown side, except my skin. (I detest using "brown" and "white" to describe things but I don't want to be overly specific online.)
My best friend of the past decade is black and we talked about these subjects on many occasions but I want to convey to her that I feel ... like a bad friend for never knowing how to react all the times when someone made a weird comment that made us both uncomfortable. I want to convey to her that I noticed, and it upset me. And that I wish I was the kind of friend who would punch a guy out for making assumptions about her, or throw coffee and flip tables every time it happens, but I react the same way I react when someone says something ignorant to me. I go into silent shock, then anxiously make a random joke at my expense to lighten the air hoping to make her feel better, and then I go home and replay the event in my head 100,000,000 times and think of all the clever retorts I COULD have said but didn't have the cojones. But I'm fucking slow and it takes time for me to process everything, besides being extremely terrified of confrontations in general due to my own traumas. I can barely defend myself, let alone protect someone else (which is one of many reasons I can't have kids. They'd be eaten alive while I stand there like a deer in the headlights.) Thanks a lot, freeze response.
It would be awkward to bring up race out of nowhere and be like, I'm sorry that I am simply not a brave person and therefore an inadequate friend in this way and you deserve an outspoken friend with an actual spine. I cannot even handle my own mixedness when it comes to standing up to people who believe they know me better than I know myself because I inherited the skin of my mom who racially did not accept me as hers, and now my dad is in denial of his obvious dark skin and is triggered if I mention the truth and show a crumb of pride. What do I even... How do I ... Where do I .......
For something so skin deep, it's all gotten under my skin. But I'm stubborn and refuse to erase my culture just because I don't fit tidily in any box. Honestly, fuck skin, check out my blood and the culture I was raised in. I know that if I follow my bliss and wear my huipil like my nana did, people will view me as a white person trying too hard or appropriating, or think its self hatred, or confusion, but it's the polar opposite.
Why do they never ask me to erase the white half? Who is more self-hating, the mixed person who is loyal to herself and those who raised her even if its the harder path? Or the one who ostracizes their own kind for not passing the colonial color test?
I could theoretically pretend and shut up about half my dna and 100% of my upbringing to *maybe* spare myself some hurt and try to enter a headspace of privilege and use it to my advantage even if it feels foreign. But I'd be lying to myself. And my ancestors would haunt me. I don't need to fit in a meaningless color box. I just want to be socially permitted to LOVE MYSELF FOR WHO I AM is that friggen okay?
Reminding myself of the people who have treated me perfectly decently. I actually received some very warm loving messages yesterday. Maybe everyone was just drunk and feeling optimistic because of new years. But still. I have to focus on the good stuff. Most people are not horrible and stupid. Even stupid people can learn and change. I've seen it. I've been it.
Even M, the one who understands me best for nearly a decade, when drunk momentarily forgot everything and said "I think you were [nationality censored] in a past life." (Et tu, Brute?) So I said "Bitch, I AM [nationality censored]!" He immediately realized his brain fart and apologized.
People will probably never ever stop doing this to me for the rest of my life, so. I think my new years resolution should be something about not cowering down or hiding important parts of myself for fear of being misunderstood. If I'm misunderstood, so be it. I can't change my dna and I can't change my skin, so the world is just going to have to learn to live with me the way I've had to live with it and the way I've learned to live with myself on this tightrope between two worlds.
"The whole world is a very narrow bridge." Lol. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, I feel you.
Who says I have to be a tightrope walker anyway. What if I wrap my sweater around the rope and zipline across instead? What if I fucking jump? Maybe the ground is only a short hop from where I stand. What if I grow wings or gills or...?
Okay I've officially typed enough today. Seriously. This is me after two coffees. I won't edit it down. It's part of my new years resolution to be unapologetically me. And we can start by accepting the fact that I am the crazy person who just wrote an entry the size of Moby Dick. Unapologetically triggered, neurotic, caffeinated, and SELF ACCEPTING in all my humanness, tits out for the world to see. Non judgmental observation.
Tits out, is my official resolution in its most succinct form. I like it. Tits out. Tits. Out.
12:27 p.m. - 2022-01-01