A classmate from my college days reached out to me for a phone call and I’m so glad she did.
I deleted my Facebook in 2020 in a moment of moral disgust with the management’s press release with regards to civic responsibility. That cut me off from most connections I made before graduating. (Although it should be noted that I never checked my timeline. Those posting were most often those I didn’t wish to hear from. And those whom I did miss were probably staying off for the same reasons I was.)
To be honest, I usually look back on my college memories and cringe. But I’m not that person anymore. Maybe that’s what has me hiding in shame from those I knew from back then. Or at least, I don’t reach out to them as often as I do more recent acquaintances.
I have to remind myself that we all are different people now. Hell, it’s been 7 years since graduation. Some of my classmates are on their third horse by now.
I’ll likely go more into detail on this at a future juncture, but my observation of myself from back then is that I lacked confidence in my identity as queer, as Asian-American, and that’s coupled with my still newborn role as a health care professional. Mix in a good deal of uncertainty from a decade of class consciousness putting me out of place and the urban/rural culture divide and what I had was a personality so shrouded in self-doubt and exhausted from posturing that I couldn’t hope to be true to myself. I was in the LGBT closet, but also closeted about my ethnicity and my class background. But that’s a story for another time.
I was glad to hear my old friend also felt similarly to me with regards to Asian-American identity. We deliberately downplayed it… for what? Why did we do that and what did we gain? It’s complicated, man. Is it a insidious example of white supremacy? Asking us to sacrifice our uniqueness for acceptance? It’s a tangled topic that I wanna poke at more with my Asian-American cohorts.
Here’s to more phone calls in the future.
