There\u2019s something about choosing an inanimate object as a Halloween costume that simultaneously amuses and unnerves people. When I was a kid I was fond of painting boxes to resemble this or that. One year, a packet of gum, another, a teapot. This year, every person who I have told I plan to be a tree has abruptly burst with laughter. There\u2019s something unexpected about being a thing instead of being a someone. But I struggle to embody someone else when I hardly can embody myself. How can I be someone else when some days, it seems like I am barely myself?<\/p>\n
I remember taking a disposable camera with me on a fourth-grade field trip to Sacramento. After developing the roll of film, my parents discovered that the majority of my photos were of squirrels I\u2019d witnessed in and around the capitol. In the eighth grade, when I went to Washington D.C., I used 8 rolls of film taking pictures of monuments, buildings from abstruse angles, and clouds. My parents were mad at the cost of developing all my photos, then puzzled by their contents. \u201cThere are no people in these pictures,\u201d my step-mom observed, anguished, \u201cWhere are your friends?\u201d Do people have friends in eighth grade? I\u2019m not convinced I did.<\/p>\n
Days into my student teaching assignment, my mentor (and now friend) Shannon asked me if I felt like I was observing my life from a distance, like watching a movie of my existence rather than experiencing it firsthand. I narrowed my eyes. Maybe? How would you know to ask something like that? Well, if you know what autism looks like, it\u2019s really not hard to spot in the wild.<\/p>\n
My father-in-law is not a man of faith in the typical sense but he has unrelenting faith in the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator. Your path laid out before you in a four-letter sequence as tidy as your DNA. a-t, c-g, INTJ, ENFP. Destiny. Because my father-in-law and I share a type, INTJ, he believes he knows a lot about me. He doesn\u2019t bother to ask my opinion or hear about my experiences. He knows me like he knows himself. He acts like we\u2019re part of an elite club, leaning in conspiratorially to share a universal truth about the long-suffering life sentence of the INTJ. \u201cYou and me,\u201d he begins, \u201cwe\u2019re not compassionate. You don\u2019t know how to be a nice person.\u201d One time I said I was, in fact, a pretty alright person and he didn\u2019t know my life, to which he informed me that my response was not indicative of a compassionate person. Apparently, the truly compassionate would have the forbearance and wisdom to take this character assassination in stride and merely smile into the middle distance, secure in the knowledge of themselves.<\/p>\n
I want to not be bothered by the stupid shit my father-in-law thinks he knows about me. But when parental figures wade into sensitive subjects it\u2019s difficult to remain steady and trust my sense of self. Why is it a sensitive subject anyway? Why have I spent years thinking I\u2019m some kind of arrogant jerk when, I\u2019m pretty sure, I\u2019m not that at all? Why have I made such efforts to improve my people skills over time? Oh, right, that other father figure: my dad.<\/p>\n
My dad has left me with some stupid ideas about myself. Intellectually, I know it\u2019s not true and probably an act of projection, more than one of judgment, but intellectual understanding doesn\u2019t always lead to emotional truth. My dad has said that I\u2019m arrogant, I can\u2019t relate to people. I\u2019m a smart-ass, I\u2019m rude, I\u2019m too loud. But also, that I\u2019m too sensitive, that I\u2019m defensive and collapse under the slightest criticism. It\u2019s taxing, being a living contradiction.<\/p>\n
I spent a lot of time in my 20s working on my perceived faults, if they were ever really faults in the first place. Even if my worst traits weren\u2019t as egregious as they were made out to be, I am still glad I was able to improve something about myself. That\u2019s the nature of adulthood: you can choose who to be. I don\u2019t have to be a compassionless jerk if I don\u2019t want to be. So I developed better qualities. I worked on myself. I feel good about the person I am.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, it takes so little to strip me of my sense of self and leave me bare, crying in the bathroom at my in-laws\u2019 house, hoping no one can hear my muffled sobs. My mantra isn\u2019t \u201cI\u2019m good enough, I\u2019m smart enough, and people like me,\u201d but that\u2019s not too far from what I hold onto when I\u2019m hiding in the restroom. It\u2019s too easy to peel back years of self-sufficient, emotionally mature adulthood to reveal the friendless eighth grader taking pictures of clouds on a field trip to Washington.<\/p>\n
Ultimately these patriarchal take-downs hurt me because they reveal my fears about myself. I often feel disconnected from myself and others. Maybe I\u2019m even less connected to people than I thought. Maybe my friends aren\u2019t really my friends and everyone is just tolerating me. Maybe I really am just a tree or a teapot, a passenger in my own life.<\/p>\n
I know none of those things are true, but sometimes, they feel very real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There\u2019s something about choosing an inanimate object as a Halloween costume that simultaneously amuses and unnerves people. When I was a kid I was fond of painting boxes to resemble this or that. One year, a packet of gum, another, a teapot. This year, every person who I have told I plan to be a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[44],"tags":[45,69,46],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-essay","tag-essay","tag-inspired-by-real-life-events","tag-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3ni6N-66","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":379,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}