A classmate from my college days reached out to me for a phone call and I’m so glad she did.<\/p>\n
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.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I have to remind myself that we all<\/strong> are different people now. Hell, it’s been 7 years since graduation. Some of my classmates are on their third horse by now.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Here’s to more phone calls in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4085"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4088,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085\/revisions\/4088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}