Adulthood

If you're reading this and you're thinking about that 7th grade mix-up with "adultery", let me just remind you that that's actually a really bitter memory for me, and every time you guys laugh about it, it actually kind of hurts, just like it did when y'all didn't let it go back then. JSYK. hahaha.

I know my role as a maturing person is to step it up and accept my parents for who they are instead of crying about it. On the other hand, I don't want to be too accepting, and just allow what they dictate to be true.

I know that even science says that my mom is out of her mind about Six Flags, but at the same time, I don't want to go behind her back anymore. It might be the cool thing to do, maybe even the strong thing to do, but given morals and whatever, its not the right thing. And that's another crazy idea, that moral decisions have to compromise experiences and friendship.

I used to completely reject my parents for the way they restricted my social life. Today, even, I envy the year above me, which has a huge friend group at church and is close cross-genders. They can talk and party like any other functioning member of society, while we're all stuck in our own parent traps. If my parents didn't make socializing such a shameful process, I might be less awkward, more outgoing, and a happier person. I personally still believe that having so many more deep connections would have saved me from moping, a lot of depression, hate, and non-living thoughts.

At the same time, I've finally realized that at least my parents really care a lot. At least they maintained a family that now has an identity and unique dynamic. There was no divorce that broke us in half, no cheating that made us feel like scum. Even if they were messed up standards for what we want to be, at least my sister and I have some knowledge of father and mother figures. While we don't have any real life examples of affection, we're still by-products of responsibility, discipline, and even love (lol). That's respectable.

These Chinese ideals for living have spread throughout my entire life, especially for food. Most people believe that three meals per day is healthy. This is true, but my family told my 5 year old self to never waste food. Then, by the time I began to feel guilty about eating way past my limit, my mom told me to never force myself to eat. This kind of commentary persisted throughout this past year, and my dad was consistently obtuse about it. Again, it was this persistence that put me through incredible shame.

Still, again, there's another side. Without this public, embarrassing rebuke, I might not have realized how messed up my habits are. These insecurities led my mom to reveal some of the darkest parts of her life. That kind of knowledge of someone I've only known for 18 out of her 50 years of living is not only intense, but it also rips up my assumptions of her circumstances. So many of these defining conversations wouldn't have happened if my mom hadn't directly addressed my problems.

Another part of life, athletics. My parents and I screamed at each other about the value of badminton, running, and health versus SATs and academics. They have never valued athletic progress, but instead, tolerated physical maintenance. Once, my dad straight up told me that I would never be an athlete. This crushed my motivation and my dreams, because financially, they controlled every aspect of my competitive athletics. It made me direct my hatred towards studying and settling down, and I would literally shake with the itch to be aggressively active.

Here, I started to truly gauge my mental intelligence. My parents believed in time investment and repetition, which is partly true, but they didn't have a grasp of the high school system. I faked at least 20 SAT practice tests, and still received the score I wanted. I understood the amount of work I needed to put into pulling my grades, even if I do complain about it in school. At the same time, I began to cherish the outdoors with every fiber of my body. The meaning of freedom became infinitely more vast and important. Its hard for me to linguistically describe the exhilaration I feel in fresh air as the sun is going down or the breaths I can barely take when I see bodies of water. When I think about Cornell and how I can take a twenty minute walk to my 7:30 PM discussion, I want to dance with literal giddiness, because it seems so fresh. I mean, maybe I would love the feeling of flying on the courts even if there wasn't "oppression" in my life. But I don't think it would be the same.

One more. My parents never saw art as anything more than a trivial hobby, even though for most of my life, I've wanted to integrate it with my career and lifestyle. When the going got tough, I always had to quit drawing lessons, even though my teacher there was the most encouraging and valuable instructor in the world. Art was the only place where positive and negative reinforcement were always in balance. I don't want to come off as arrogant, but I have very few doubts that if I consistently trained for the past 7 years, I would be as sophisticated as Eliza. Not in creativity, but in technique. I truly believe that given my intuition of aesthetics and perfect homework completion, I could be able to study at a high level in a Chinese art academy under some masters.

But I didn't receive consistent training. Instead, I watched a lot of YouTube, read a lot of comics, a made a lot of dopey cartoons. Even when I was drawing stupid stuff like the Elite Team tshirt design, my parents got mad because I wasn't studying for AP tests that were two months away. During the latter half of senior year, I still had to hide my sketches because I was afraid that they would tell me study for my ELA final or something. That sucked. Having to hide so many things from my parents diminished my already wavering passion to, sometimes, almost nothing.

Still, there's a positive side. Since I wasn't able to do any large scale projects, despite having so many in mind, I ended up making art that was "relevant". For instance, I picked up a little digital work and made quite a few designs. And yeah, they're shit compared my traditional work, which is already falling subpar, but its another kind of life, an entirely different community. In these past two years, I've played so much more with concept and audience than I ever wanted to, and the results are positive. I posted this one on Facebook, and it went 150 likes. It took a long time to build up confidence to publish crust like that, but in the end, the feedback emphasizes to me, once more, the vitality of concept and audience. "Its the heart that counts" is real.

Anyway, tl;dr, this was just a rant that I had to figure out on paper. Bart and Geo are so articulate when they talk things out, and I'm kind of down for the whole avoiding mind games thing. SO, the writing today - low level. The thoughts - still pretty basic. The necessity - 100%. -_- Call me crazy but at least in this way, with respect to my parents, I think I want to be an adult about it.