THE PEN iS AN UNDERRATED TooL.
D+L, B + A, A: A Modern Eulogy
I made one of those shrinky-dinks with our initials back in 2nd grade. Kept it in my wallet for years afterwards. I made a joke about how people might misconstrue it as us dating.
“Just friends… right?”
Just friends.
You told me I was one of the only people who could beat you in an argument when I came over to hang out once. We talked about the ghosts you saw in your hallways + the philosophy inside your head. We talked about our goals + your sister + education.
We passed a rubix cube back + forth. Debating the pros + cons of 2 look OLL + PLL.
You showed me some magic tricks. Pulled scarfs + coins + cards from thin air. Your sleight of hand was impressive + I remember wondering how much effort you put into making something look easy. Impossible even.
The year we went to the poetry slam we competed to see who could eat the most spicy edamame. Eyes focused, teeth gently pulling soft insides from their shells. Only when the plate was empty + our lips numb did we stop— grinning + surrounded by broken open cocoons.
That same day, in the backseat, you told me the secret to reading in the car is to begin before the motion hits + to never look up.
Never look up.
Maybe that’s what we both did.
Escaped.
+ never looked up except for those Christmas parties where you were busy hosting + I was busy hiding my social anxiety from a slew of faces I don’t remember anyone.
Never looked up.
So when I left for Boulder + you LA, we must have just accepted the occasional texting as the fall out.
My mom told me you had changed when it’d been a few years. I just shrugged, we all changed— I certainly had.
The last time I saw you we were boarding a plane out of a valley that tried to drown me. I suspect you might have felt the same way.
We both looked different but maybe were haunted by similar things. Our old selves from that old town pulling us down.
I stopped talking to you. I shouldn’t have done that. Shouldn’t have been so quick to dig up my roots and burn them.
But I was + only now, in the throes of your absence, so I realize that we have connections + contacts that tie us together even now. In that way only those gasping for air in this great big world can.
+ your head, hovering about the water, will slowly sink. + you will drift all the way down to rest on the ocean floor with all those who I tell myself can finally rest. But perhaps this is only because I am still floundering at the surface.
+ I know I’ll keep arguing with my dad + hiding from people I know in that godforsaken town, + burying myself deep within myself, + staring at a deck of cards or a rubix cube or a monster energy drink.
Everything will be the same.
Except
Nothing will be.
2024: Meditations on Pride
Back in February of this year I finished a piece entitled After Eve’s Betrayal for a school course on painting and color theory. The painting depicts me, shirtless, with Trans Tape and flowers decorating where top surgery marks might be. The photo it was based off of is a beautiful composition of blues and oranges complementing each other is a symphony of light and shadow.
I am no master painter. This piece was the first real painting I did with acrylic and while I am proud of where the piece landed, you can still spot the struggles of my novice hood peeking through. Sometimes I find myself staring closely at it and wanting to take it to my studio to do just one more pass of paint— clean things up.
But I am a person with obsessive tendencies, and to pull the painting back down is to reopen a wild world of tweaking and re-tweaking until the day I die. I cannot allow myself that. Sometimes we must make ourselves believe that things really die if only to move forward more easily. Thus, the no longer alive self portrait hangs in my home, not unlike the white animal skulls Georgia O’Keefe found on her property. A corpse really, both my painting and the skulls are now nothing but pretty corpses, frozen in time, a warning perhaps.
I’m always thinking about what it means to be trans, and what it means to be queer and what it means to be human. I’m always thinking about art and life and how it seems I’m always trying to blend the two. I wrote somewhere, in a different art course this past year, that art should aim to be the reverence of life itself. And in that way, I am trying to make my existence art. The subtle imperfections and arguments and moments of reprieve all beautifully uncapturable, art that exists just beyond the fingertips.
I’ve felt that a lot recently.
To execute the staging for After Eve’s Betrayal I invited a best friend over whom I’ve bared my soul to in a way that can only be described as a leap into ethereal love. My chest already taped, I found myself standing in my kitchen, bouquets of flowers spread across the counter, the soft cadence of clippers against stems. She gripped a yellow hot glue gun, the same one I used in my youth, carefully applying flowers to the bottom of the trans tape. The heat bloomed through the thin fabric and I thought about the earth, the human, the man made, all linking uncomfortably but somehow cohesively.
At some point the man made melted plastic hit the human skin atop my ribs and produced a painful burn. It has since keloided, a raised reminder that it is not always easy to become one. To become whole.
And I certainly am not always whole.
I recently listened to a podcast on how Will and Grace transformed mainstream opinions on gay people. I’ve heard often that similar hateful things are now being said about trans folk that were initially directed at gay people. It seems like a cycle no? But it’s eerie. It’s eerie that I have just concluded two and a half weeks of intensive filming for a documentary that is supposed to be about me and my identity. It’s eerie that so many young kids struggling to reconcile with their identities may turn to my face, my film, as a first introduction. It’s eerie to hear the people closest in my life speak of a trans agenda as though I have fallen victim to something I cannot conceptualize. They blame my youth.
I don’t know what I blame.
A childhood friend who later came out as trans recently died from an acidental overdose in New York City. Another one of my trans friends is buying estrogen off the gray market since a parent of hers doesn’t support her HRT journey.
I don’t know what I blame.
But it feels like us trans people, especially trans kids, are racing against a clock. The sand slipping through the hourglass. How many years, weeks, hours, seconds do you get to live as you. Do you get to be ok with you before the intermission is over and it’s back to a state of disbelief. Back to dodging becoming a statistic.
I don’t think any of my trans friends feel like it’s easy to talk about being trans with BOTH parents. And the thing about that is, transness isn’t so much a political affiliation. Isn’t so much an opinion about pineapple on pizza or on how to properly make a sandwich. It is almost incomplete to label transness as simply an identity either because transness is laced into my cells. My transness is there between the in and out breath. It cannot be the result of a pretty picture but is instead the fragility of moving water.
Your feet wading in a cold mountain creek. Children screaming through the sprinklers in the heat of summer. The deluge of rain on a stormy day. The rivers thumping in spring. The iced over ponds in winter.
To be trans is to be fragile, but less like a wine glass with a narrow stem and more like the impermanence of water.
To be trans is fragile, because it is impermanent.
To gasp for air at the resurfacing— when the wholeness returns.
To be stunned by the light, for only a moment.
To hold the handful of sand,
And to dance in a split second.
2024: Watershed Graduation Speech
May 24th, 2024
———
Some 14 billion years ago our entire universe fit into a sphere the size of a marble. Some 14 billion years ago the matter of everything we know from the brains of my fellow seniors sitting before me to the rocky rings of Saturn, from the lithium in your phone's battery to the dust and hydrogen found in nebulas millions of light years away.
All matter fit into something the size of a marble– and then, just like all things, change. The Big Bang. And suddenly, the universe expanded outward. Rapidly. Faster than any of us can truly conceptualize.
This is the paradox of the human experience. We are growing apart from each other, not just because of whatever social qualms you might have, but also because the universe is quite literally expanding outward as we speak. Once at home in our tiny marble, we are now hurtling through space, trying desperately to grasp onto what was once close to us and today is so, so far away.
We are the same matter, always, just configured in different ways. And it seems, like with all things, that as soon as you get used to that marble, as soon as you figure out the edges of its landscape, your life shifts, either in totality or just a smidge. In both cases, change is inevitable. And we find ourselves pulled from all that we once knew, left to make sense of our existence in community again.
This is a truly terrifying and paralyzing thought. The fact that we are so unbelievably small and insignificant is enough to send anyone into existential crises, but, perhaps we can consider this in a different way:
It is only because matter has arranged itself in infinite ways, and that it has the fundamental tendency to change– that we are here today.
As an example, let me paint the picture of a singular moment for you:
Imagine snow falling out of the sky. Not the kind of light and fluffy snow that evokes a magical feeling, but the heavy, almost sleet type of snow that makes you grateful that you have the warmth and comfort of a home or hot drink. Good. Now place yourself into a too short sleeping bag on a 2 inch thick sleeping pad that keeps deflating, beneath a 4 by 8 foot tarp– outside– in that snow.
That was my 8th grade solo. An experience that seemingly was the result of a series of poor choices. You see: that situation would likely have been more easeful had I simply brought more food out onto solo, or checked the length of my sleeping bag, or fixed my pad, or, even more fundamentally, did not go on that particular trip to begin with. These are all choices I made which I deeply regretted while staring up at my neon orange tarp. But at some point during solo, I think I recalled that pondering the past was not a very uplifting way to spend my time, and instead, I turned over and started to journal. And, after the hours had passed, the snow stopped, I crawled out of my tarp, and breathed a sigh of relief.
We can allow ourselves to get caught up in the past moments of our lives when our present moment is uncomfortable– but luckily, moments pass.
And, with the hindsight of several years, I can say that the moment I spent shivering in my sleeping bag has since branched into even more moments, and if you follow those splits far enough down you will find this moment, a moment that would not exist without all the moments that came before it.
And isn’t this a pretty great moment to exist in?
Matter is always moving, so we must learn to take snapshots and moments that give us insights to our own lives. The fact that we each live lifes with infinite moments behind our present existence and yet find connection in each other is a miracle.
The fact that Amir and Rebecca had hot water for ramen and hot cocoa upon my return from solo was a miracle.
That fact that I am standing here, sharing this moment with all of you, IS a miracle.
This marble is tinted by more than infinite things. Because as we zoom out, as we start to consider the makings of moments, if we start to pull the moments apart from each other, a near impossible thing to do in and of itself, we start to realize that everything affects everything.
And while this is a deeply overwhelming thought, it also grants a sense of hope because if we can make the most of as many of the tiny moments we have as possible, then the change begins to ripple and cascade. Which means that we must focus on the here and now. The infinitesimally small ways we treat ourselves, each other, the planet.
And truthfully, if we wish to succeed in saving all this, in mending this tattered web. We must start with the tiny fractures regardless.
We must first work to heal:
This moment.
This moment.
Graduating class of 2024, I am so proud to see all the ways we’ve learned to live all in and I’m even more excited to see the many ways we learn to do this better in the future. I hope you embrace all the highest of highs and lowest of lows and I hope they help you grow. Help you evolve and change. I believe that each of you will go forth with a voracity to live fully, to live with your feet planted in the present but with a hopeful glance towards the future. You’ve got to let yourself fall– because who knows what’s yet to come.
And to all the matter of this moment. To all the matter that spans to the far edges of our universe. To all the matter that’s configured itself in infinite ways in the past so that we can arrive here now.
Thank you.
Thank you for everything.
2024: Portrait of a Graduate
Some 7000 miles and 17 years ago, I was born. I don’t know where I was born. I don’t know to whom. I imagine the night I spent swaddled outside the local orphanage was cold. High 30s maybe. Some 7000 miles away a White couple came to adopt me. They filled out file after file after file until the Chinese government finally deemed them fit enough to be parents. And then I flew the 7000 miles here– or really, to the Roaring Fork Valley on the Western Slope. My existence became an extension of a diasporic identity. The first of many.
I’ve told this story often enough. What I haven’t often told is the story of the director who took care of me. The foster family that carried me on their backs for 8 months before I found a home. The caretakers. The many children around me. I have never told the story of the silent supporter. People who have heavily contributed to my being here today. People you’d never know about if I never told this story. People too easy to forget. So I will tell this story in that light. And maybe I can capture what turns a person into who they become.
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The first time I laid eyes on my orphanage director, Shi Paa Ping, I was only a couple months old. The toys at the orphanage were limited, the winter nights cold. There often wasn’t enough milk to go around. She did the absolute most to keep us safe. To get us to foster families or homes. The orphanage put up fliers with my face on it. No one ever responded. In 2019 I went back to my orphanage. I met the very same director from so long ago. I don’t remember a thing from my first 11 months in China– but she does. It was clear from the moment I rounded the corner to see a face 15 years older, that she remembered everything. It was clear she cared: especially when she sat me down on the opposite side of a table covered in food and told me: “Your name, Shi Juishang, Shi is my surname. I gave that to you”.
I’ve spent most of my childhood grappling with what it means to be adopted. It was first the strange comments or glances. Later on, it grew more insidious, kids pulling back the corners of their eyes, kids telling me I must be so smart because I’m Asian. There was the blatant racism but there were also the tensions of when I entered Chinese spaces. I didn’t speak Mandarin, didn’t understand the customs, didn’t honor Chinese culture and yet I was held as though I was the pinnacle of the American Dream. As though any of the cards I was dealt were of my own volition. As a result, I developed a sort of double othering. A banana, Yellow on the outside, White on the inside.
Upon my visit with the orphanage director, this subsided, if only for a moment. She was a sort of surrogate mother for the first 11 months of my life. She is the closest I’ve felt to my roots. When we hugged goodbye I did not feel like an other, like an abandoned or stolen child. I felt just as worthy of planting my feet on China’s ancient soil as her.
About a year and a half after initially being flown home from China our neighbors had a baby girl. Her name– Sarah Gray. As the two of us got older, we started playing together more and more. Poor renditions of “Let it Go” with a drum set and plastic microphone, hours laboring over our spy names, our gadgets or superpowers. I remember the year she got a wooden playset and we pretended to be pirates all summer. We learned to deal with our conflicts, developing off time or code words. We both became better people as we strived for excellence together. She was a rock for me because I knew she cared. I knew she understood me, even when it became clear that the other kids at school didn’t match my tendency for bluntness or honesty. She never took it personally, she never judged me for not being cool. We were not cool together: jumping over the fence between our yards for “second dinner.”
She helped me to hold onto my childishness. She taught me a lot about living in the moment and pursuing what you’re passionate about. She taught me a lot about optimism and hope, especially when it felt like the foundations of my life were beginning to crumble.
My parents got legally divorced in 2019 but they were separated for years before this. At the time, I had no words to describe my experience. I’d march the two flights of stairs between my parents' bedrooms seething. I could not, after already experiencing an abandonment, process the crumbling of my family again. Instead, I grew depressed. I isolated myself as the words to describe my experiences vanished and the sense that no one could truly understand grew stronger. I was so angry, but I didn’t know how to be.
It is around this time that I also moved to Boulder to attend the Watershed school and for a variety of other familial reasons. One summer after our move, my mom and I went up to Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather. There I met Leslie Gossett, spiritual instructor and child empath extraordinaire. At first, I pushed her away just like I had with everyone else. I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to engage. I spent the free time we had outside quite literally kicking rocks. But for once, I wasn’t told to change this. Leslie would watch from the porch of the children's building and simply nod. Simply smile. Eventually I started opening up to her about my sense of isolation. The nagging othering. She offered solace by expressing how special I was. How I couldn’t understand what my peers were going through because I was so mature. At the time, this perspective felt like a final straw to grasp, so I internalized it.
Leslie and I would spend more time together from that point on. I always felt unique and empowered around her. I always felt seen. She was one of the first people where our connection felt as though we both actively chose it. She held me to a standard where I felt capable.
Around the time I started to re-envision my isolation in order for it to be less painful, I met Becky. She first strolled into class to teach the second semester of my Math B class. One of our first interactions was an instance in which she called me a procrastinator and I lost it. I think she drastically underestimated the confidence I had in my identity at the time. Despite this rocky start, I developed a strong rapport with her quickly. It felt as though she actually wanted to understand my experience. It felt as though she actually wanted to help. I grew a little codependent at this point. My relationships with my parents at the time felt more mysterious than anything else. I still wasn’t sure how to make friends, much less keep them. I was lost in the recesses of my own mind with few people interested in joining me or pulling me out. Really, I couldn’t be pulled out because I have centered my individualism, my uniqueness, as the quality of my character.
But Becky kept pushing, often to my chagrin. She’d disagree with me. She’d constantly insist that others felt isolated too. She’d encourage me to look up from my work. To consider others. To better regulate my emotions. Sometimes I’d leave our check-ins feeling more confused or uncomfortable than when I started, but I always went back. I always went back because it was easy to talk to her and deep down, I knew she cared.
Becky has stuck with me through the thick and thin of it. I have a completely different perspective now but I am always happy to experience the new ways she pushes me and I’m excited to feel the transition in our relationship from a mentorship to mutuals.
During the many years Becky and I have spent together, there has also been a variety of other friendships that have emerged and dispersed. These have all made me feel a variety of ways and taught me a variety of things but the most pertinent one which I will speak to you about today is my ever evolving friendship with Scout Sherman. Scout arrived at Watershed around the same time as Becky. We weren’t close at first and I actually got rejected when I asked her out at the end of 6th grade. We were tenuous for several years after that. She’d pass me in the halls and I’d be so mad she didn’t keep her word to stay friends. It wasn’t until our first backpacking trip together that my perspective started to change. I started to see her, not just for her pep or popularity but for the genuine interest and care she brought to the things around her. She also seemed to redevelop an appreciation for my oddities and quirks in friendship.
From there, things flowered naturally. We attended concerts together and had “study” sessions at each other's houses. I finally saw her beyond the oversimplified popular girl trope that always seemed to haunt her. In turn, she started to see me beyond the emo depressed kid. Both our horizons opened, in part due to forced proximity during advisory.
We also learned that we make a great leadership pair. I can organize, delegate, and plan like no one's business. But I struggle to excite or motivate others. To me, the motivation feels so intrinsic that it’s difficult to imagine what it might feel like to not have it. Scout helps with this part. She’s amazing at rallying the troops and getting kids engaged. She knows what’s fun and exciting. She has the dreams and I help make them happen. I have the plans and she helps gather support. Together we balance out a breadth of leadership needs.
Scout has pushed me to be better too. She had consistently pulled me out of my comfort zone in order to try new things. She helped me to rediscover my love for dance, for rolling the windows down when driving, for good music. Scout was a big step towards my eventual abandonment of my internalized individualism. We were both trying new things and learning, but we were doing it together.
The other major person who helped me rethink my isolationist thinking was Jenn. Jenn has transformed my thinking through the vast intricacies of science. During human evolution she had us analyze the finer details of each distinct Homo species until we could accurately describe the ways each of them impacted us today. In Atmospheric Science she broke down a dozen complex weather factors into their small parts before putting them together again, this time in a way we could understand. Even in our Materials class from just last trimester, I was so happy to be around a person who valued the minutiae and its ability to branch near infinitely.
She also taught me a lot about interconnectedness. When constantly asking for new connections across content points in class. When pointing out the fragile ecosystem present at Skalanés. When letting the class run into a tangent because the new train of thought was just too cool to not explore. Through Jenn I learned to elevate the mundane. To think like a scientist and work your way up systematically. To consider how the littlest things could impact the broad picture.
Since this transformation of thinking, which occurred as a result of various people pushing me in the right direction, I’ve made all sorts of new friends and mentors. I’ve made the commitment to surround myself with people who inspire and empower me. People who show up, people who care.
My relationships with the people I’ve mentioned in this presentation have changed drastically since when they first occurred and they will continue to do so. People change, we grow together, we grow apart. But these connections, they are what create the radical and beautiful web that is our world. All of these people have made me feel special. And that saved my life for a long time. But I don’t think feeling special is my goal anymore. I think feeling connected and supported and empowered is the goal.
This presentation wasn’t about me. I know it was supposed to be about me. I know this presentation was theoretically supposed to be a representation of my growth, my ability to produce work, my character. I know this presentation was supposed to be about me:
And yet it isn’t.
I spent the first 14 years of my life clinging to individualism. I was convinced that I could make meaning out of the isolation, the othering. I forbid myself from letting it hurt. I tried to avoid affiliating myself with anyone because to connect with another person is to make yourself vulnerable to manipulation. I tried desperately not to be vulnerable. But to be vulnerable is to be human. And all the moments I’ve come to cherish, the core memories tinted with flecks of gold– they are suspended in the fragility of space. They are a moment of reprieve from the immensity of all this. I hope to continue forward with the belief that any moment may one day be looked back upon with a softened face. I hope to continue to live all in. I hope to continue to elevate moments of the mundane. I hope to continue to lean into our shared humanness– our interconnected natures, our genuine kindness.
I can’t wait to see where this spiral takes me.
I can’t wait to look back and see all those who helped along the way.
Thank you.
2023: Meditations on Pride
I have been out for over 1000 days.
But this year has by far felt the hardest.
The rawest.
My queerness feels more honest. Intimate.
It feels more deadly.
The sharp edge of a shattered glass that is transphobia.
The gentle kaleidoscope that reflects from it- queer joy.
My gender feels more exotic.
Primordial attraction.
My queerness feels more rooted.
More like the river.
The wind through cheatgrass.
It feels like interconnection.
Like mourning carving a well
to bathe in.
Like soap stinging against your ankles.
Seeping into thistle and micro cuts.
It feels beyond me.
But it feels like home.
_________________________________________
I hold my breath and press ok. The poem successfully posted on Instagram, my yearly pride post achieved. I started doing a post specifically for Pride month a few years ago. I’m not entirely sure why. It likely had to do with feeling fed up with corporate Pride. Massive corporations waving cheap flags for a month before turning their backs to fund anti-LGBTQ+ politicians. It likely formed from this craving for Pride to honor its roots. Violent riots and protesting. The AIDS epidemic. The need to highlight queerness as something more complex and nuanced– which it is.
But this year felt really different. I spent the whole month trying to come up with the right words, and ultimately, I posted a short snippet of my actual experience this Pride. So, that’s what this is. My thoughts without filter. The significance behind the TLDR of a Instagram post.
_________________________________________
My best friend’s father is transphobic. I learned this fact on the first day of Pride, listening in on his conversation with my mother. We were returning from my cousin’s graduation when he called, asking about a new K-12 curriculum which introduced concepts like gender expression and identity. He was livid– the conversation shifting from curiosity to animosity. His argument was the same as most conservatives, the queers are indoctrinating the youth, they’re trying to confuse our kids, they’re threats, the same things shown on the news. I was both shocked and unsurprised. This man had shared some conservative beliefs in the past, but I never thought he’d regurgitate the same anti-trans rhetoric seen on TV. But frankly, more than shocked or unsurprised, I was hurt. A man who had known me nearly since I was brought back from China, a man who has watched my journey of coming out and social transition believed that my community was a threat. It shook me. Mainly because I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to simply cut him off because of my friend. I couldn’t. Deep down I had this belief that if I could just sit down with him, we could make sense of some things.
He also reminded me of a traumatic history as a marginalized person in a rural mountain community. I never had the language to describe my experiences, raised in a valley that never really talked about it. Looking back, to say I was unhappy would be a huge understatement. Everything felt so unbelievably empty. Like all the kids around me had some secret code to unlock how the fuck life worked. It wasn’t prepubescent angst, it was a deeper inexplicable disconnect. I understood there were rules, to how you act, look, behave, but I didn’t know what they were and I much less understood that they could be broken.
Coming from a mountain town often feels incongruent with my queerness. Not the mountains, but the people. The valley I was raised in is somewhat fanatic about sports. Half the kids in my 5th grade class were prodigy athletes. My school would run biyearly outdoor trips every grade. I could pitch a tent by myself by the end of 2nd grade. I was skiing double blacks by the end of 4th. The sad thing is, this probably isn’t even that impressive to the people who read this and do live in the Roaring Fork Valley. This is the norm. Everyone treats the land as though its a playground and we’re all trying to master its little quirks.
The Roaring Fork valley has since made significant progress but, well, they are a group of mostly non-minorities trying to bring every voice to the table. That is an extremely difficult thing to do, especially when all voices simply don’t exist there. So, despite the immense amounts of effort put into inclusivity in the Roaring Fork valley, there is still so much misunderstood.
It took me a very long time to unpack what living in a culture that would never help me to understand my own identity meant. Sometimes I’ll see a post and it’ll spark a new flame of anger. Of grief and regret. I learned about AIDS more intensely this summer. About how the hatred towards the LGBTQ+ is a new thing. The truth that I didn’t mention on my post is that I’ve spent most of the summer enraged, resentful, and hurt.
This year has by no means been the easiest on my queerness. I feel so inexplicably vulnerable and raw. Like skin scrubbed hard. In many ways I feel broken, the last pieces of my youthful naiveté surrounding the magnitude of hate around us, shattered. Right now, I am working hard to remember that mosaics are beautiful things too. That broken does not mean bad. That sometimes cracks must be made; for the light, for the plants, to come through.
That is what I’m thinking about this year. Resilience.
Resilience and Interconnection.
2023: Portrait of a Graduate
It feels as though I always see double
I see double as in the list of names on my ID
As in the gender marker on my birth certificate
As in the form of my body in photos
As in the Tennessee lawmakers
I always see double
Or triple, or however many visions you want to use to describe a person like me
After all
I see double in my birth and childhood
As in the cultural dissonance of my parents
As in the range of experiences that come with a skin tone that’s different
As in what do you do with a Chinese Jew
My one superpower is that I can hold the duality
I can handle it. Even if I don’t want to
So I see double in everything
The conflicts of diaspora
The decline of someone you love
The names, identities, and cultures
I don’t think I can stop writing about this
For it is a struggle without clear resolution
It is the endless journey
Of becoming more human
___________________________________________
Good evening everyone, my name is Ash and I’m a junior here at Watershed.
It is frankly trippy to be presenting another PoG. It feels like just yesterday I was doing a similar presentation for 10th grade. Or bundling up during 8th-grade solo’s when a snowstorm hit. Or sitting by the fire and telling my classmates about my change of name on our 6th-grade trip to Crow Canyon.
Honestly, if I were to sit 6th-grade me down for this presentation, they’d probably get up and leave. I think 6th grade me felt as though they were just beginning to understand. Just starting to map the ways of the world, and while it was a little uncomfortable, it made sense. They were terribly mistaken. What they thought was the tipping point into meaningful and poignant adulthood was actually a stumble and fall into the muck that is living. I must, however, point out that it is better than it was.
This is probably because even when I was a young child, I was already aware of certain paradoxes. From first or second grade I could feel how the trauma of my adoption shifted my maturity, especially as I looked around at my peers. When I’d express this gap to teachers, they’d respond with something like “College will be better”. I was in 3rd and 4th grade. The push to grow up fast became this ever-present whirring in the back of my mind. I wanted to be 18, 20, 25. Even now, I sometimes will lay in bed and imagine my life if I was 5 years older.
This is a common phenomenon. Most people call it wishing your life away. I think what they mean is that by focusing on another time, you’re missing the now. You lose track of the urgency within this very moment, idealizing something you cannot understand until it sneaks up on you.
Nonetheless, I did this. I prided myself on my maturity. From second grade on, I never played tag or football. I despised recesses. What a load of wasted time. Time we could be learning. Time we could be having valuable conversations instead of tossing around a piece of leather. Joy made herself small to make room for practicality.
It’s sad to see how much I missed out on, and yet also humorous to see how what 6th-grade me would have considered childish, is so present in every person I look up to. In pursuit of what they thought was maturity, little me was digging themselves into a hole of burnout, something that wouldn’t catch up with them until high school.
What I misunderstood about maturity when I was younger is that personal and professional success is measured not by your ability to be solem and consider all these terrible things in the world, but by finding reasons to continue living as fully as possible. There is something here to be said about Emotional Intelligence. That the preservation of a people is so heavily based on our abilities to advocate for change, but also to enjoy life for the wonder it is. That the success of mankind lies in our abilities to be both childish and mature.
However, even now, with all the work I’ve done to understand my past, I still experience this strange separation from the kids around me. I have more recently come to understand that this is primarily due to nuances of my identity. I came out around the same time my parents divorced. Since then, it’s been an ongoing journey of exploring self and identity. Every year has birthed new developments and discoveries. This year was no different.
11th grade started with a bang. My initial plans to attend a study abroad in Israel were crushed when I was forced to face the magnitude of my outsiderness as a politically neutral person in a biased program. While I had intended on attending the program to learn more about Israel, Palestine, and the complexities of Jewish identity, I was instead bombarded by a program that looked to the Israeli government with zero criticism. After two weeks of minimal sleep, immense discomfort, and intense dysphoria, I dropped out.
Upon my return to the States, emotions started to bubble up. In addition to my already gut-crushing guilt and shame at failure, I was forced to stare my identity head-on. This has framed the rest of my academic school year as the program served as a clear analogy to many of my ongoing struggles and the launch pad for internal development.
A major consequence of multiple identities is this constant feeling of being an outsider. That the spaces that exist were never really made for your experience. They can touch on pieces of it, but the uniqueness of your identity isn’t something most people can truly grasp. When I was younger, I coped with this by developing self-reliance, ambition, and a fierce work ethic. Internally, I understood the possibilities of my perspective but lacked the security of a community. Nonetheless, I thrived in my work. I placed so much pressure on myself to turn the outsiderness into meaning, into impact. I was quickly pushed into gifted student classes. I was praised for my work ethic and internal motivation.
My outsiderness fueled my great work for so long and for so long it worked. But fueling anything solely with fear is a recipe for failure.
For me, this arose as the internalizing of my individuality. Being an individual is fine, we each have our own experiences, but too much individualism can easily lead to isolation and arrogance. When I convinced myself that no one could get me because of my perspective of the world, I was unintentionally pushing away everyone in my life.
This is harmful, not just in terms of my personal mental health, but also because it distorts every interaction I had with another. I was noticing differences, not similarities when what you really need to observe is both.
Quality leadership elegantly demonstrates this. A leader is constantly juggling the needs of the individual against the needs of the group, But one cannot solely focus on the individual as no collaboration can be made, but one also cannot ignore individual differences and tensions. I’ve noticed that I tend to lean more toward the individual side of things. I thrive in the one on one moments and by leading as a quiet example. These also have immense impacts, I just know I am not a leader that cares about who’s at the front when backpacking.
Leadership and any effective communication with another also relies on the consideration of intention and impact. This theme is everywhere. You can only have so many conflicts before someone mentions intention and impact. Therefore, for the sake of everyone’s sanity, I’m only going to speak on it briefly. The intention is the personal piece, your thinking coming into an interaction, and the impact is how it actually lands. The spectrum between the two gives space for disparity and disjointedness.
One of the major ways I’ve explored the balance of effective communication is through the use of storytelling to highlight misunderstood, underrepresented, and greater social justice stories. Each of the works I’m most proud of this year, and in the past, could be considered in this light.
That is what my Ism’s analysis paper on BDSM practitioners was about. It is why I still haven’t finished the booklet I made on Latinx Immigrant Stories for Spanish. Why I picked the topic of African Americans in front of and behind the screen for my final Cinema Studies reflection, instead of the other, more traditional genres. And, to consider earlier work, it’s the why behind my Social Entrepreneurship Project and my Borders History Paper. I work hard to uplift people and communities in hopes of lessening the blows of isolation and invisibility.
Storytelling also feels impossible to get right. There are so many variables to consider. What is the perspective of your subject, your audience? How much of it is about you? Storytelling certainly also plays into the greater questions surrounding craft and artistry. As a creative, there are always two big questions bouncing around in my head; how do I know it’s done, and how can I make it better? You can turn in 20 drafts of your paper, and each time it will get better, but at a certain point, the paper must be turned in, and perfection is, as we all know, an illusion.
The same can be said of art, poetry, or any piece of work. When is the want to deliver a product greater than the want to improve within the process? It is just as valuable to know when to stop, as it is to continue.
An antidote I’ve found to this dilemma lies in where we focus our energy when creating great work. Many of us are attached to a destination, a grade, an acceptance, or accolade. The issue with destinations is that we lose track of the process, and often, our intentions. For example, one paper I wrote in my Rise of Ism’s class felt amazing. I had clarity the entire process on where it was going and my intentions. The other, not so much. My message was unclear and my motivation minimal. Guess which one I aced? Enjoyment of a process is ultimately huge in the execution, and if it can’t be enjoyment, clarity is the next best option.
There is a therapy-related concept that argues that goals are like destinations on a map and values are like directions on a compass. If you solely rely on your goals you will likely end up headed in directions that contrast your values. However, if you have no goals, you may end up wandering aimlessly in a direction with no real conclusion. Goals can tell you when a piece of work is finished, but only considering your direction, your values, can distinguish what will make the piece better.
So while the artist is having struggles within themselves and with surrounding their work, they are also facing the challenges of society. As an artist, a creator, it often feels that we live in a society that doesn’t so much value the subtle art form of story, meaning, and impact, as much as it values practical analytical application. Even when story is included, it’s often to churn out more product, to play with the pathos portion of our brains.
This reality would shut down a large portion of my passion for storytelling in exchange for the security of a job that required more analysis and less balance. I was probably stuck in this rut for a year, maybe two, and only have just climbed out.
As I reemerged from my fears surrounding my career this year, I’ve also found some courage, and have reopened myself to the breadth of wonders creativity can contribute to great work. Instead of meticulously planning and then step-by-step actualizing, one end of the spectrum for courage, I’ve tried to make room for some trust and faith. Trust that the values I’ve held so closely, which no longer serve me as they once did, will make room for values that will serve me in the now.
But to finish my thought on creativity, one interesting thing I’ve come to understand is that while creativity can and should be utilized in the classroom, it is more valuable to me as a mostly personal process. The lasting impacts of perfectionism, a consequence of my obsession with controlling my outsiderness, has placed insurmountable pressure on me to perform, in school and often in life. I’ve come to recognize that everyone needs a way to express and explore themselves without the pressures of delivering.
This has always manifested as writing or drawing for me. For several years now, I’ve meticulously journaled all of my experiences and feelings. I don’t intend on doing anything with these, despite many people telling me I should try to publish them eventually. They’re not designed for the audience's consumption, they’re art for the sake of art.
This was a vital understanding for me. I often attempt to turn every experience into content, and not just content that’s good, content that could be hung on the wall. This has only added to the immense pressure I already feel, setting me up for failure.
Sometimes, you just have to create to create, and live to live.
Nonetheless, there is a sweet spot between creating for a product, and for something personal. And like all spectrums I’m sharing here, they aren’t mutually exclusive.
In Pablo’s class on China this year, we learned about Taoism. In Taoism, there is the Ying and Yang. They are not opposites, more so flows that neutralize each other. Nothing is best in absolute form and everything is changing. In this way, the Taoist principle provides no definitions or rules. It encourages you to naturally find where you sit on the spectrum.
Similarly, what I have shared with you offers no definitive answer on what it means to be a good leader, a good communicator, a craftsperson. I also cannot offer you an absolute answer on what it means to be me. To be queer, to be Asian, adopted.
And truthfully, if I could, I’d probably have an incomplete picture. Nothing is so simple. I am not, cannot be, just Jewish or Asian without losing so much nuance. Just as you cannot be solely a leader that considers impact; you’re missing so much.
Each year, as I get older, I just see more perspectives. It's daunting, difficult, and oftentimes destabilizing, but it’s also human. This year is the first time I started to be ok with that. Owning up to my history, culture, and identity is huge. I’ve loosened my grip on who I decided I needed to be in order to see what I might become.
In this, I’ve also accepted that sometimes things are going to be complex, they’re going to make me come home exhausted, and they’re going to be disheartening and confusing and beautiful. And that’s ok. That’s good. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Just remember,
Life happens, not in the extremes, but the in-betweens.
ISRAEL Entry 4: Moving Forward
I’ve been back in the states for just under 4 weeks. It’s been chaotic, a bit messy, and sometimes stressful, but at no level even close to my experience in Israel. I keep expecting to see a post pop up on Instagram and feel some level of FOMO but I don’t. At all. I’m happy that some of the friends I made there are happy, and I’m happy I’m home.
Some things became really pressing upon my return. Credits, housing, rentals, and transitions. This path also isn’t the easy one, because, at this point, there is no “easy” option. Of course, our choices and the many facets to them, are framed by our own privilege, which plays an integral part in all aspects of the situation. However, through the thicket of variables, we have developed a somewhat rough plan, and that will be the road map for the next month or so.
So, what is that plan? I’m sure you definitely aren’t asking through the screen. Well, a road trip. Put simply. We are taking to the roads, and we’ll be there until the start of my second trimester, which begins the first week or so of November. We’ll go look at some colleges in the Pacific Northwest (my top location in the states), I’ll log my driving hours, and we'll embrace some of the vagabond lifestyle I didn’t realize I needed until my time in Israel. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good solution considering our predicament.
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My first two weeks back in the states, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Choosing instead to dive into the isolation I longed for in Israel as well as the space to process my complex emotions. For the first week I was filled with chest aching guilt. How could you give up such an incredible opportunity, look how much space you’ve taken up, look at how much your mom has canceled?
I’ve spent most of my life priding myself in my resourcefulness, my independence, and general strength of character. A teacher once told me I take the hard road and it really stuck as this integral part of my identity. I do the hard things. I fight my way through. But the more I consider, and reflect, the more I’m reminded of a deceivingly complex concept: the very things that make us unique, powerful, “strong” are also our kryptonite, and our greatest flaws.
So what’s mine? Well I have many, like all of us, but after hours spent in my room I’ve come to a conclusion that frames this entire experience.
I don’t like taking up space at others “expense”.
I am a big person, in personality, passions, and values, but I will quickly shrink if it is my needs against theirs. In Israel, I took one drawer and a locker for my things. I got smaller, and of course, intentional or not, some of my roommates viewed that as an opportunity to be bigger, to take up more space. I have stayed in programs, positions, and places only because I fear being a burden or someone who requires extra care. My brain also always jumps to comparison here. What about him? She always seems so cheery. I know it’s a facade, that we all have boundaries and needs, just, for whatever reason, I can’t stand mine.
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There’s a balance required when it comes to peoples boundaries and needs in programs such as the one I attended. The students must be willing to push their comfort zones, understanding that some needs may not be met like they have been in the past. Simultaneously, the program must do their best to meet the most severe of those needs. They must treat students adequately and swiftly enough that the they are healthy, physically, emotionally, mentally, and even spiritually.
When that doesn’t happen… kids come back home.
Perhaps this is the best way to explain what occurred during my two short and yet excruciatingly long weeks. I came into a program not understanding my own needs well enough to even understand what comfort zones would be pushed, or to what degree. And the program, while doing the best they could, didn’t react adequately for me to feel healthy, safe, or even somewhat comfortable.
And so, in a sleep deprived, dysphoric, and overstimulated haze, I came to realize, that despite how much I might despise my own needs and personal challenges, if I don’t respect them, I’ll end up dead. If I don’t learn to honor those things, I am not honoring myself, and I end up hurting those around me.
So, to those I hurt in my all consuming shame, I am truly sorry. There is not justification, and there is no expectation for forgiveness. We often char others in our own fire, and it is our jobs, to eventually understand how a fire can heat, and protect, but also burn down.
ISRAEL Entry 2: Perfecting the Art of Packing
After traveling to 8 countries and frequently exploring the US, I’ve practically perfected my packing technique. Use a combination of packing cube and compression sacks. Keep out some jackets or other loose clothes to fill the gaps. I’ve chosen to bring a truly massive duffel and because of good packing, it still has space in it. My one fear while packing was the weight. Would it be under 50 lbs?
Perhaps there’s a metaphor in that. Things add up, little things. It’s the same with backpacking but feels more prevalent here, where the bag is so freaking big. I suppose we’re all the same way in that. The to-do list grows longer. We read the news and scroll through our feeds. Eventually, we snap. We’ve surpassed our weight maximum. And, for each of us, the weight maximum is different. Certain things that wouldn’t seem to stress another might be your tipping point. It’s your job to figure out what your weight limit is. What takes up space, and what makes your life heavier?
During my last days in Boulder, I took around 7 hours of neuropsychological tests to better understand what weighs me down. The tests helped to identify what areas I struggled with. One of the things at the top of the list was sensory issues. I have a harder time filtering out what isn’t important.
The tag on my shirt
The seam on my sock
The smell of perfume
The rumble of a truck passing by
These files in my brain are almost as high in importance as to-do lists, schedules, or appointments. This has its benefits, I can compensate for cues I might miss in social situations and create intricate art or stories. However, these come at the expense of my energy and often my mental health.
So, packing.
I don’t know anyone there. +2 lbs.
I’ve struggled with social situations like these before. +5 lbs.
I’m in a dorm but do better when I have alone time. +6 lbs.
Packing is the worst part. It’s when my anxieties fester and multiple. It’s when I play out every bad event that could happen. Yet, it also tells me more about myself. Packing is pre-letting go. Deciding what weight isn’t worth bringing with you.
So in that way, I suppose packing is an art.
And in the end, my bag came in at 48 pounds. 2 pounds below the maximum.