What I’d like you to know about me
I’d like you to know I’m not a woman,
not in the way most people recognize it.
My gender ebbs and flows like a cosmic nothingness that is both here and there.
Only I can call myself a girl or a woman (gender-neutral).
On my insides, a twink and androgynous woman hold equal sway over my soul.
(I’m a Frankie Stein kinnie. In case you didn’t know.)
I’d like you to know I don’t feel Korean in any way except when I’m struggling with my eyeliner in the mirror or wondering why I don’t look like any of the K-Pop girls.
If being Korean was a captcha test, it’d think I was a bot.
I feel like an imposter in my own race, my own body.
Sure, I’m not fresh off the boat, but I have no memory of said boat,
no memory of the country I should have a right to call home.
I’d like you to know, despite the gap in my front teeth, I had braces as a child because my parents could afford it.
Just like the glasses on my face.
I’d like you to know the price of a comfortable white upbringing was knowing no one like me until I was in the 8th grade. There was only one Korean girl in my extremely white school, and she didn’t even know which Korea she came from.
(she told me this like not knowing was a common occurrence)
I’d like you to know living in my body and mind is a fight every day.
The rumination marinates and sits heavy in my skull till it hits my shoulders and drags down my steps as I walk.
Sometimes I get so tense, I sleep on my back in the fetal position.
My childhood bedroom walls belong to my parents, so they accommodated the multitude of identity crises I faced with pins and pretty paint layers.
I’d like you to know I mask my neurodivergency as much as I do my physical body.
I try to be “normal” because society won’t allow me to be anything but that.
I fight to find calmness just to exist in the present moment without fearing for my life.
Something about a good ol’ social situation can really put a bitch in fight or flight.
I’d like you to know I’m Asian, even if I don’t feel it. I’m nonbinary, even if you don’t see it.
I’m neurodivergent and bleed manic pixie dream dust.
I’m comfortable, but only if the lights aren’t too loud.
and those are some things I’d like you to know about me.