Month: April 2017

No One Else Can Save You: The Realization

Posted on by Kai Raine

We live in a society that teaches us that we will be saved.

This isn’t usually a teaching we explicitly propagate, or even teach on purpose at all. In fact, I hear it frequently being explicitly contradicted.

Yet we worship deities that save us. Most of our folklore is characterized by someone who saves the protagonist, or even all of a society or humanity. (Such as fairy tales, for example.) We tend to place an astonishing amount of weight on the notion of “finding someone” without putting very much effort into discussing what that “someone” is supposed to contribute to our lives, or what we are supposed to contribute to theirs. Families are sometimes held together by the notion that they’re the ones who stick by you when things get tough.

The undercurrent that we need someone else to save us, to stick by us, to put up with our craziness and love us anyway, runs through our lives everyday.

It’s not entirely wrong. Humans are social animals. We do tend to need some form of social life, some support and love.

That doesn’t mean we need to be saved. In fact, in my experience, even the subconscious expectation that I will be saved by some external force makes it that much harder for me to overcome obstacles.

I had to learn that no one can save me but myself.

I don’t mean that I have to fight my battles all alone. But if I need someone’s help, it’s much more effective if I can articulate to them what I need. Even if that person can’t necessarily offer me what I need, the understanding of what I need makes them more effective at supporting me where they can.

As long as I seek to be as self-aware as possible without being clouded by what I think should be, no one can know me anywhere near as well as I know myself. Certainly, some things are clearer from the outside looking in. Sometimes I don’t become aware of some behavior of mine until it’s pointed out to me by a friend. External observations are helpful. But those behavioral observations alone are not me. If I am the sum of my past, my behavior and my thoughts, emotions and beliefs, then only a portion of that is observable from the outside. If I ever claim that someone knows me better than I know myself, I am either woefully unaware of my own behavior, or willfully ignoring a very large part of myself (or, most likely, joking).

So, being the person who knows myself best, it stands to reason that I am the best person to work out what I need to remain adrift; the best person to gauge my own limits; the best person to identify what I want and what I need.

This may sound like common sense. But it took me a good twenty-five years to work it out.

Subverting Gender Norms: The Toys

Posted on by Kai Raine

When my parents got married, my father said to my mother, “I want four girls.” Eight years later, when they had my sisters, my mother joked, “You said you wanted four girls. Well, you have four of us now.”

It took me a long time to realize how unusual this was, given that it was the environment I was accustomed to, but my parents were dedicated to raising me, a daughter, as a person first and foremost. They took care to make sure that I had an abundance of traditionally “girl” toys like stuffed animals and dolls, but also traditionally “boy” toys like toy cars and trains.

I displayed a preference for the stuffed animals and dolls as a child, but very quickly lost interest in the toy cars. In my adulthood, some people in my family have reflected on this and pointed to it as proof of my inherent femininity shining through. I disagree.

I liked to play pretend, making up stories. It’s easy to see why stuffed animals and dolls would appeal here. I liked the toy cars that could do things: there was a truck with doors that opened and closed that I used a lot. The toy cars with motors that allowed me to propel them across the room were fun too, though it was hard to make them work on the carpet of my room. The plastic cars that did nothing―no motors, no doors that opened, no figure inside them to be driving―confused me. What was I supposed to do with these things? Yes, I could roll them along the floor, but what sense did this make if there was no one driving them?

Clearly these cars had to be sentient to make sense. The notion of sentient cars was a nightmarish one to me, and I had a recurring nightmare about my mother’s car kidnapping me from my mother after she had gotten out of the car, before she had come to the back of the car to unstrap me from the carseat. (I continued to have this nightmare for years, even after I was no longer in the carseat; and even then for awhile after we no longer owned a car.)

That was why I largely ignored my mostly-useless, driverless, nightmarish toy cars. When I got a radio-controlled car from my godfather, however, I had no such compunctions and I very much enjoyed that. I also had a wooden puzzle train set that, though it could only be set up into a figure eight, delighted me.

When my parents first took me to India at age two, a Hindu priest “blessed” my parents, that their next child would be a son. My father took offense at this, and berated the priest that he wanted more daughters.

It became a common theme throughout my childhood that whenever she heard me saying things that subscribed to gender stereotypes, my mother berated and corrected me. It often seemed strange to me, that my parents were so dedicated to keeping me from thinking in a way that most of society seemed to think. But I would not, perhaps, have become as confused as I eventually became if not for the books.

The Girls Visiting Indian Boyfriends

Posted on by Kai Raine

As a teen, I would often converse with the person in the seat beside me. On two separate occasions, I met girls with very similar stories: they were in their twenties and visiting boyfriends in India that they had gotten to know over email. One was a German girl dating a Muslim boy; the other was an American girl dating a Hindu boy. I met them approximately three years apart, but it never ceases to astonish me how similar their stories seemed.

They had gotten to know their boyfriends through some interaction on a website, and ended up swapping emails. After that, they had corresponded for a time, getting to know each other (and falling in love). The boyfriends, in both cases, had visited the girls in their home countries once. In both cases, I was meeting the girls on their first trip to India—though I met the German girl on her flight to India and the American girl on her flight back to the US.

Both of them had a lot to say on the subject of the obstacles that lay in their paths in the form of religion. I listened, but it wasn’t a subject that was very interesting to me at the time, beyond analyzing the cultures and why people insist on laying those obstacles before inter-religious and inter-racial relationships.

Both girls were fascinated when I said that I was the product of such a marriage, and were fascinated to hear my parents’ story. They expressed surprise when I explained that my parents simply got married, neither of them being particularly attached to religion or cultural tradition. They would then go on to wonder aloud whether their boyfriend would be willing to entertain this as a possibility (both of them found it doubtful).

I met the German girl first, when I was fifteen. She was cynical, fairly certain it wouldn’t work out in the end. Perhaps because I met her first, she had much wisdom and many observations to share that I had never before thought to consider. I was still in my youthful fairy tale mind, convinced that love could conquer all. She was very laid back, and willing to foster the relationship for as long as it lasted, even if it was not going to be for life, or even for that much longer.

The American girl was more specifically critical in her assessment of her situation. “Why can’t he just say no to his parents?” she would complain to me. “I don’t know if I can live with a man who can’t stand up to his parents.” She then went on to exposit about the differences between American and Indian culture,* naming things that were very familiar to me and leaving me to shrug and smile. I offered some advice based on observations I had made, but I got the impression that she wasn’t interested in my opinion as much as she just wanted to vent.

I kept in touch with the German girl for a few years afterwards; the American girl and I went our separate ways after our flights and never corresponded. I do know that the first girl’s relationship lasted through that trip and for some months afterwards before her boyfriend caved to his parents and broke things off.

*I am aware that both of these are very culturally diverse nations. This is meant to indicate the experiences of India and American culture as lived by myself and this one girl. It is not meant to be a generalization.

The Necessity for Internal Strength

Posted on by Kai Raine

The sad reality is that no matter how much I try to stay afloat and happy, there are times when circumstances align and create really sucky days. But sometimes, it just takes one or two wrong comments at the wrong time, and I’m locked in a dungeon in gloomsville for a week.

For me, the worst of these are unexpected left turns in social situations. An unexpectedly negative comment about something I’m excited about, from someone I thought would be excited for me. A sudden outburst directed at me that seems strangely disproportionate to what started it.

Events like these can take my day from somewhere between OK and mostly happy straight to the land of gloom and I-can’t-write. These generally take place in the morning or evening. Similarly to the reason why I can’t exercise in a depressive episode (the exercise creates a racing pulse and heavy breathing reminiscent of an anxiety attack, which triggers an actual anxiety attack), I already have low energy, and with the onslaught of distressed and/or sad emotions, my body can misinterpret this as depression, which becomes an actual depressive phase that I struggle to shrug off.

So what do I do about it?

Well, it depends. The most direct approach is a conversation with the person. I can confront them about why their words are upsetting. But this, I’ve found, only works with certain people. Some people get angry, and not having the energy to fight back, I get pushed further into the ditch. Other people get overly apologetic, compelling me to comfort them, which again drains me and pushes me further into the ditch.

I could make the argument that in the long run, it’s worth having this discussion anyway, even if it is potentially distressing. But in this context, I’m talking about a scenario where I would have to sacrifice my mental well-being for awhile in order to sustain that discussion. That is never a choice I would consciously make. My policy is always do what’s best for me first and foremost. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to end up spending the day in a daze, just trying to make the unhappy feelings go away.

What I need is internal resilience. That’s far easier said than done.

I find that it helps to remind myself that the other person’s words and/or actions were very likely not just about me, but largely about them. I find it helps even more to ask myself, “Why did this phrase bother me so much?” And then to follow through on that train of thoughts. Very frequently it will lead me to a self-revelation of an insecurity or a fear, and with that brought to the forefront, I can begin to confront it directly and try to work through it.

Sometimes it helps to talk it through, though I’m increasingly finding that this puts the train of thoughts in the hands of someone else, which can make any useful self-revelations take longer than they would if I worked through it by myself. That said, there are times when solitude only makes it harder to see clearly, and a second pair of eyes truly helps.

Reading and My Mother

Posted on by Kai Raine

If there is a reader in my life who taught me to relish the written word and my time immersed inside a book, that person is my mother.

An avid reader herself, my mother spent a large part of my childhood reading books that she would then set in front of me so that I could love them, too. Somehow, my mother always had an uncanny knack for figuring out what sorts of books I liked and procuring more of them.

This was especially pronounced in my early childhood, when my mother and father would both pick out books for me at the library, and I found that I often gravitated more towards those chosen by my mother.

I learned to read using a kit called Hooked-on-Phonix that my parents gave me the summer we spent at my grandparents’ house before we moved to Japan. That Christmas, right before we moved, my mother gave me Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. With my father busy in his new job and my mother was busy looking after my new sisters, being read to became a luxury. So I learned to read to myself, and I learned quickly.

At first, being in Japan meant that access to new English books was rare. It was years before we borrowed the subsequent books in the Little House series from someone and I could finish reading them. By that time, I had somewhat passed the target age group and was finding myself less drawn into the stories.

Eventually, we discovered that the American School, which was in reasonable biking distance, had elementary school, middle school and high school libraries that we could access. For the eight years that we lived in Japan, the American elementary school library became my primary source of books.

I began frequenting this library on my own when I became addicted to the Nancy Drew series though we only had three volumes at home (courtesy of my mother, of course). I then discovered that many of the books were available at the American School. The librarian used to call me the Nancy Drew Girl, long after I’d read all volumes by the original author and determined that I didn’t enjoy those parts of the series written by (an)other author(s), and therefore was no longer reading Nancy Drew.

My mother also introduced me to Harry Potter when I was perhaps five or six years old. She was waxing poetic, so I read the first chapter and a half or so. I was unimpressed and didn’t pick it up again until I was nearly or had just turned seven. At that point I devoured it with an obsessive enthusiasm, joining the ranks of children who secretly waited in vain for their Hogwarts letter all through their eleventh summer.

(Side note: I still don’t like the formula used in the first chapter of a few Harry Potter books, including the first. Namely, the formula where the first chapter is full of characters which the reader either never really knows or will come to know later, only there to set a scene and atmosphere. Reading such chapters, there is generally a certain lack of engagement that I feel, woven into the writing because the author is implicitly letting you know that this is not your main character. Now that I know and can usually identify this formula very quickly, I breeze through these chapters, entirely disengaged, just waiting for the next chapter to begin. While I understand the appeal of this formula and even use it on occasion in my own work, I find that for me, it’s a formula that’s a lot more fun to write than it is to read. Which is why, to date, I’ve ended up cutting every use of it out of my own work after writing it.)

The only time that my mother and I had a serious disagreement about a book was over Bleakhouse by Charles Dickens. I was eleven or twelve years old, and my mother decided that it was time for me to graduate from the fantasy novels I was devouring and turn to more serious books. Some of the books she gave me at this time were well worth reading (Bridge to Terabithia and The Giver, for example). But one that I didn’t understand―and still don’t understand, in the context of my age at the time―was Bleakhouse.

I suffered through the entire first chapter (which, fifteen years later, I still summarize as “it was stormy and windy”). When we reached the second chapter and the prose was still meandering on the subject of a senseless family feud and how very senseless it is, I put my foot down.

“What’s the point of any of this?” I demanded. “Is there even a story?”

The answer was yes, but the book took so long to get to it that by that point I was utterly disinterested in it. My mother gave up and never suggested another Charles Dickens book to me―in fact, that became the last book she ever told me to read. After that, her recommendations were conveyed to me as recommendations rather than as orders.

My Longest Flight and Longest Night

Posted on by Kai Raine

When my family was living in India and I was attending university in Alaska, I usually had to take a minimum of five flights to get from the start of the trip to the end. After my first semester, when we booked my flights around the semester and then had to pay booking change fees when we knew my exam schedules, my mother decided to send me back to Alaska on a one-way ticket so that we could book the next round trips around my vacations rather than around my semesters. That one-way trip was the only time when I had only four flights, and it was a terrible experience.

My route went as follows: a domestic flight from Hyderabad to Delhi, followed by an excruciatingly long flight from Delhi to LA (via London, where it stopped for fuel). From there I was to fly to Fairbanks via Seattle.

Since I was a child, I had loved long flights. I loved the chance to watch movie after movie or immerse myself in a book, and later, once I had my own computer, to do whatever I liked for a hours at a time with no distraction except flight attendants bringing drinks and food.

This flight was long enough to put a dent in my enjoyment. For one thing, there was no personal entertainment system. Normally, this was endurable; this flight, however, was nearly 24 hours in duration.

It was, unfortunately, made even longer by the fact that we were delayed several hours.

Worse still, after we landed in LA, it took me a solid two more hours to make my way through the slow-moving, pushy line of immigration (just the memory is enough to inspire gratitude for those automatic terminals that they’ve been using for the last few years).

Naturally, by the time that I made it through immigration, it was four or five hours after I was supposed to have landed, and my connecting flight had gone. There was a line of people being rebooked before they went out of customs, so I joined the line and waited another hour.

Of course, once I reached the front of the line, I was informed that because Air India had nothing to do with Alaska Airlines and my tickets had been booked separately, I had to go talk to Alaska Airlines instead.

Air India and Alaska Airlines were two terminals apart, and the terminal in the middle was under construction, and therefore deserted and dark as I rushed through it, ignoring the shadows in my imagination.

Naturally, Alaska Airlines informed me that because they were not affiliated with Air India, they were not responsible for my delay and I would have to rebook. After running back and forth through the deserted terminal and even (out of sheer desperation) trying tearing up and declaring, “But I’m only seventeen, I’m a Minor!” I could elicit no sympathy. At last I conceded and rebooked—for the next morning.

I contacted my mother and let her know, as a friend of hers was supposed to meet me in Seattle. She asked me if I wanted her to contact a friend of hers who lived in LA, who was my sister’s godmother. I told her that it was only eight hours or so, hoping that she would insist. She didn’t, and merely wished me a good night. I said goodbye and hung up so that she wouldn’t hear how my throat was closing and my eyes were filling with tears.

I had a large backpack, a computer bag and a large suitcase. I felt a marrow-deep exhaustion that I’d never experienced before, much less from a plane trip. I saw people sleeping in seats, huddled around their bags to keep them from being stolen in their sleep. The terminal was deadly silent, except for the occasional snort or snore. Occasionally, I would see someone laying on their side with their eyes open, following me as I walked, and I felt terrified. I tried to arrange myself and my bags in a seat to sleep, but my suitcase and backpack were too large for me to keep a hold on them. I could do one or the other, but not both.

The fear mounted with my exhaustion, so I went to the bathroom. I locked myself in the handicapped stall, left my suitcase and backpack against the wall and hung my laptop bag on the hook, and sat on the toilet and tried to sleep. It was by far more comfortable than any location I’d tried before, but every sound of a person entering the bathroom startled me into waking and I wasn’t resting at all.

After half an hour that felt like a day, I gave up and wandered around with my bags until at last, I found an outlet in a hallway with no seats at all. Perching myself on top of the heating vent, I called my mother’s friend in Seattle.

She talked with me for perhaps half an hour or an hour, until my phone was running low on battery (I couldn’t charge it and talk at the same time). I felt safe while I was on the phone, and was terrified to hang up, lest the exhaustion and the terror come rushing back. Fortunately, it didn’t. I plugged in my laptop and wrote stories until the dawn finally arrived and the terminal started groggily coming back to life.

I had a croissant and slept on my flight to Seattle, where I ran into a friend from university and my mother’s friend came to meet me for a scant half hour or so before I had to go back through security to my next flight. I was (somehow) perfectly chipper and energetic by then.

(But on occasion, the thought of flying into LA still fills me with a sort of remembered sense of horror.)

Exercise: Breaking Out of a Lifelong Rut

Posted on by Kai Raine

Ever since childhood, I haven’t been very athletic. I always preferred to curl up with a book or a puzzle over any outdoor activities. Even when sports were required at school, I was always among the slowest runners in my class, or even my grade. I was on a swim team for awhile as a teen, but I was always the slowest or second slowest swimmer on the team. The only “exercise” I could do with any confidence in my own ability were table tennis and skiing. I also enjoyed swimming and dancing, but all four of those activities were difficult to access with any sort of regularity.

At some point, I realized that exercise had become something that I associated with general unpleasantness: pushing my body into exertion knowing that I would only get sweaty and uncomfortable (and probably look ridiculous doing it), knowing that I would be terrible at it. I knew that if anyone was around, surely they would scoff and mock me for my sheer inability to run fast enough or long enough, or the way I’d keel over after what to anyone else wasn’t very much exertion. (Unfortunately, the mockery I’d experienced throughout my childhood and teenage years had created certain expectations in me.)

In short, I had come to dread the prospect of any sort of exercise. As I’ve mentioned before, I also was unaware for a long time that I had anxiety, and couldn’t explain why the prospect of doing anything that got my heart rate up was sometimes an extremely psychologically tumultuous experience. But even after identifying this problem, while it did give me a defense at long last, I couldn’t find a way to effectively exercise. I also couldn’t find the will to try very hard to learn to like something that I knew I hated and could never remember enjoying to begin with.

The change began with my sister’s invitation to do a 30 days of yoga challenge on YouTube with her. We lived an ocean away from each other, but she suggested we do one video a day “together.” It was exactly what I needed. The idea that it was for my mind rather than my body got me over my dread of exercise. The instructor Adriene was soothing and offered enough alternatives for people with varying degrees of flexibility, which helped me by letting me simply enjoy the movements and the poses and the breathing without getting caught up in my lack of flexibility or weak muscles. The prospect of doing this “with” my sister kept me going even on days when I didn’t necessarily have that much will to exercise.

At first, I only did yoga in little bouts of a week or two, only to forget or lack the time for another week or two before resuming the habit again. But little by little, I grew more comfortable moving in my own body, and I grew more comfortable with its abilities and limitations. I came to enjoy exerting myself through yoga. Before I knew it, the sheer dread I had once felt at the prospect of exercise had faded away into a light pulse of nervousness.

Storytelling and My Father

Posted on by Kai Raine

If there is a storyteller in my life who taught me to love every part of creating stories, that person is my father.

My father would make up stories for me all the time, and would frequently pull me in to help him create the story (though I would have been perfectly happy listening to him simply tell me a story). He would make up stories based on things we had seen or talked about. Eventually, I started craving repetition: not the same premise told a dozen different ways, but one story, told in a certain way.

I had two favorites. One was a story about a baby bird who falls out of his nest while his mother is out finding worms to eat, who then sets out looking to find his way back to his tree. The other was a story about a raccoon in the US and a Koala in Australia who become pen pals through messages in bottles thrown into the ocean.

My favorite game was also a game we called Friends, which was essentially a game of pretend. We would pretend to be somewhere else, and pretend to explore that place or play there. I have one particular memory of playing Friends at the Beach when we were at the top of a mountain. Another parent may have said, Why don’t we play Friends on the Mountain, so that we can enjoy being here? But not my father.

In fact, my father was frequently attempting to engage my imagination in ways that sometimes seemed to distress others. For instance, when someone would read me a fairy tale or show me a Disney movie, and they would tell me at the end that “They all lived happily ever after,” my father would point out, “No they didn’t. What about the stepmother?”

I don’t recall whether he did this with me as well, but when my sisters were young, he frequently told them variations on fairy tales, perhaps becoming the catalyst that kicked off my love of adaptations of fairy tales and folklore. I have a particular memory of his version of Cinderella, in which the stepsisters and stepmother are kindhearted and Cinderella is the antagonist. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I so enjoyed Alex Flinn’s Bewitched, which told that same story, but making the stepsister far less altruistic and more human, crumbling under her step-sister’s self-victimization and manipulations.

I didn’t recognize my father’s skill in storytelling until, one day when my father was gone on a business trip, my mother offered to read me a book and I asked her to make up a story instead. I awaited her story with bated breath―and was underwhelmed when she told me about an episode where a girl watches a baby’s diaper being changed. The twist―“That girl was me!,” ended my mother―did nothing to improve my opinion of the story. I asked her to tell me stories two or three more times afterwards, but it was always the same: an episode out of her own childhood with no arc, and neither a beginning nor an end. (Essentially, things happened, but there was no story there. Funnily, my mother was capable of telling engaging stories out of her childhood, but only if it happened naturally over the course of a conversation and she couldn’t seem to call up these stories simply in the name of a story.) I learned to ask my mother to read to me and to ask my father for the made up stories.

Eventually, there came a time when I tired of the same repeated stories and asked for new ones. My father would tell me that he would tell part of a story if I would continue it for a time, then he would pick it up again. I remember a story we were making up this way, night after night, until one night I was making up a scene about a few of the characters (various animals) running up a downwards escalator in a mall at Christmastime when I realized that I could no longer remember how the story had begun. I also realized that I had no sense of the story trajectory any longer. Immediately, the whole venture seemed pointless. The following night, I asked my father for the story about the raccoon and the koala. I began to resist attempts by my father to draw me into storytelling: I would think of the animals running up the downwards escalator and think of the pointlessness of it all, and didn’t want to repeat that experience.

After my sisters were born, storytelling between my father and myself became a rarity. As I grew older and learned to read, I discovered a whole world of stories, and the father-daughter tradition of storytelling died out altogether.

No One Needs to Know Who I Am

Posted on by Kai Raine

When I was in university, I went through a phase that lasted about half a decade where I was extremely cynical of strangers wanting to know who I was or about my life.

This was in the late 2000s; I had finally acquired a Facebook account and learned that anyone could Google me and acquire more information about me than I necessarily wanted to provide. I’d always been somewhat talkative with random people I met on public transportation, beginning with a nice man who sat next to me when I was 6 and flying alone for the first time. Now I was growing more wary of offering any identifying information about myself to strangers. My name in particular is so unique and identifiable that I decided it was best not to give it to strangers. Sometimes I offered alternative pronunciations of my name; sometimes I used fake names.

It quickly turned into a game of playing pretend. I wouldn’t contradict any assumption made about me. I also didn’t want to explain my whole life story to random people, so I would pick a country and find ways to make it sound as though I was only from that place without actively lying.

It was a fun game.

But this also created more distance between me and the people I met. The conversations were fun, but I never stayed in touch with any of them. If anyone gave me their contact information, I threw it away. I never really remembered anything meaningful from the conversations. During, I was busy spinning my own tale and only superficially listening to the other person’s side of the conversation. Once we parted, I would forget everything: my own story and the other person’s.

I eventually stopped doing this as a rule because it began to feel tedious and burdensome. I was doing it in large part because I didn’t want to make conversation, I realized. It was all well and good as a strategy as long as it was fun, but once the fun was gone, there was no more point in continuing this, I thought. In that case, it was far easier to answer in monosyllables and communicate through non-verbals that I wasn’t interested in conversation. If I choose to make conversation with strangers, I now figure, it may as well be either sincere or enjoyable. Sometimes, it’s even both.

Veganism: Pancakes

Posted on by Kai Raine

Sometimes, I have down days and just want to not have to think about anything. Pancakes are a great way to start days that are already taking an effort.

Vegan pancakes are insanely easy to make. If you’re feeling particularly low-energy, just mix together 1 part flour and 1 part non-dairy milk and fry it up in some oil. It can be as simple as that.

But if you think it’s worth the time and effort, vegan pancakes can be extremely delicious: better, in my opinion, than their non-vegan counterparts.

This recipe from Ceara’s Kitchen is one of my favorite recipes, and the one that made me fall in love with vegan pancakes in the first place.

This recipe from One Ingredient Chef is a similar version, though slightly more work in its use of flax egg.

And this recipe at All Recipes isn’t quite as elaborate as the two above, but still delish!

Each of the recipes above can also work in waffle irons. 😉

(Is this a cop-out of a blog post, you ask? Perhaps, yes. But as we’re headed for about a month’s worth of introspective, long-ish posts, I could use some pancakes.)