A History of Scars

by Laura Lee

  Peers asked why my face was so flat, or commented on what they saw as my squinty, slanted eyes. Substitute teachers asked me slowly if I spoke English. Strangers approached to ask if I missed China. Ching chong ching chong yells greeted me from moving cars.

  As a frequent traveler, I am well aware that how I am seen changes, based on geography. When I was an adult crossing into Turkey, the border guard refused my U.S. passport repeatedly. He wanted my other passport.

  When I am the only person of color in a given space, I am always conscious of that fact. I am aware, too, that the presence of my visage might draw unwelcome comments, wherever I go.

  I remarked to her once, when we were driving through East LA, that I was pleasantly surprised by how little commentary we’d gotten on our relationship, at least from strangers. In bars, on trains, walking in city streets, we’d gotten stares when publicly affectionate—some friendly, some unfriendly—but little more. She turned to me and said seriously, Yeah, but you know it’s coming.

  I knew what she meant. I hoped she was wrong. Then and now, a boundary-less view of sexuality and desire has brought me joy. It’s made me more human. My sexual fluidity isn’t as readily, visibly apparent as my ethnicity, and therefore it’s been less likely to cause unwelcome commentary. It has felt like a source of strength I’ve gotten to choose to share.

  Racist comments wounded me when I was young and vulnerable, partially because they mirrored my reality of ethnic isolation. Nearly everyone around me was white, and so I therefore had to deal with suspicion simply for looking different, in ways I still encounter regularly and deal with today.

  Like trauma and illness, dealing with explicit hate is different as a child versus as an adult. As someone who once identified as straight, I find myself less likely to care about openly homophobic comments. I have the emotional distance to judge those comments as what they are—reflective of the speaker; hateful, pointless. Still, I hoped the walls built in response to racist comments, in response to abusive comments from family, didn’t have to be built up to guard my sexuality, too.

  * * *

  As someone who grew up buffeted by abusive comments, it took me years to realize that I get to define myself—that others’ limitations of my mind, body, or abilities aren’t real.

  Unlike my ethnicity, unlike my family, being in a relationship with her represented freedom: it was something I got to choose. I hoped to preserve its innocence.

  When I arrived in rural Indiana, prior to Trump’s election, I saw a polarization that didn’t exist in New York City, where the default assumption seemed to be that people were whatever they were: a mix of many different traits and identities. I didn’t hear academic buzzwords like intersectionality used in conversation. If anything, diversity and difference were the norm. I loved that freedom to simply be, and to allow others the same courtesy. I’d come to take it for granted.

  In Indiana I felt pressure to label myself, to identify with either the straight or queer community, and to declare myself right away, as others did. This occurred academically and socially.

  In my initial encounters with peers, I was surprised by how many identified vocally as queer—surprised not because they were queer, but because they felt compelled to declare aspects of their identity so immediately. It felt akin to her telling me, I’m straight.

  After we became friends, I asked one of my peers about her strident queerness. This is my identity in Lafayette, she responded knowingly. It isn’t my identity in Portland, or Seattle.

  As someone who has never identified with or trusted group identities, who only figured out as a thirty-year-old how to say the order of the letters in LGBTQ correctly out loud, it felt dishonest to claim knowledge of a collective with which I didn’t identify. Yet it felt dishonest, too, to claim no experience of knowing what it is to love a woman.

  My aversion to group identities is a lifelong trait. I’ve never encountered a group whose rules I felt I could wholly abide or endorse. I’m wary of subjugating individual consciousness to the whims of a group. I wonder if any group label can truly allow individuals to embrace all their complexities and quirks, without compromise.

  I’ve often been surprised, and touched, by the protectiveness and generosity of those who identify vocally as queer. I’ve seen how queerness can make space for others, to exist as they are. Yet I’ve seen the downsides, too: the ways that protectiveness can lead to overdetermination of others’ identities, to dismissiveness, to gatekeeping, to control.

  In relation to my sexuality, I’m hesitant to accept any dominant narrative as my own. Internally, my beliefs and values didn’t shift significantly. What I dread, instead, is confronting shifts in how my identity is perceived externally, and retold to me. Those most likely to tell me who I am have been those who identify as queer, not straight.

  For myself, I believe labels applied by others do not accurately capture my experience. I believe that for many women, including myself, sexuality is fluid, not binary and divided.

  I feel the same way about my sexuality as I do about being Asian-American, or being female. That I don’t move through my day thinking of myself as Asian or as female, until someone else treats me noticeably as such.

  I’m impatient with the need to divide identity into categories, for convenience, for the sake of the outside gaze. I think of myself as infinitely changeable, not as a fixed entity. I believe in possibility. I didn’t think of my relationship as being primarily same-sex in nature, until I saw how we were perceived by others, when together in public. It is only under the Gaze—of strangers, or at times, each other—that she or I remembered.

  Behind closed doors, too, it was undeniable that we were both women. Gender was a part of our relationship that added its own complexities, joys, and confusions. Yet that—gender—wasn’t the primary foundation of our relationship, either, any more than sex was.

  * * *

  Unlike her, I hadn’t been tortured by my sexuality. My life had been overshadowed, instead, by the illnesses and violence of my family.

  I wish I could take away all your pain, she told me once.

  I told her in turn, I wish you didn’t have to bear witness to it.

  But I told her, too, because I know it is true, that it will always be a part of me. That pain doesn’t go away. Yet her willingness to see all of me, without turning away, and her desire to do so with care, helped me heal.

  She was the first person with whom I could be both unapologetically strong, and unapologetically broken and hurt, too. She could see that my strength and weakness originated from the same place.

  When she asked me later what I wanted from our relationship, I told her, I’m so used to love that takes. I want love that doesn’t take.

  * * *

  When she told her father that she’d never known love like this before, his response was gentle.

  That kind of love comes along once in your lifetime, if you’re lucky, he told her. Cherish it.

  I, too, hadn’t known that kind of love could exist—without compartments, without barriers, just the fusion of all the things. She was the person with whom I could go to raves or symphonies, wilderness or cities, museums or readings.

  I wouldn’t want to subtract any one element, or to over-privilege any singular aspect. To do so would be reductive. Something—the intangibles of chemistry, perhaps—would be lost.

  I don’t identify with either male or female, she told me. She recognized androgyny as a state of being in herself. Even though, of course, I’m female. In other moments she said jokingly, I was basically a little boy when I was a kid.

  Unlike her, I hadn’t been mistaken for a boy. But I, too, believe gender is a social construct. I, too, believe in the androgynous mind—particularly for art. Being an artist is my gender, Mary Ruefle said in a Q&A, and I agree. With her I believed more strongly than ever that love itself is ungendered. Love is intersectional.

  The surety in our relationship came not from individual aspects of our id
entities, not from the wounds we carried, but from confidence: that we could love each other as we needed. That we could share in each other’s joy. That we could heal each other.

  * * *

  We never did finish writing the artist residency proposal. Our best form of collaboration had been, quite simply, in loving and supporting each other.

  For both of us, our relationship allowed us to reclaim parts of ourselves. For her it meant reclaiming her sexuality, climbing, and the centrality of intellect to her soul. She worked anew toward her dreams of an art MFA, edited her portfolio and artist statement, attended her top pick.

  For me it meant moving into myself unapologetically and giving myself permission: to write, to value happiness, to choose faith over doubt or criticism, to choose, however temporarily, self-worth over the power of negative commentary and judgment.

  For both of us, our relationship meant shedding layers of defense. In receiving each other’s gaze, in being seen fully, in confronting each other honestly, there was nowhere to hide. Stop hiding, we told each other, with regard to different aspects of our lives.

  This nakedness allowed us to access new understandings of not only ourselves—and our work, and our creative visions—but also of how boundless, rewarding, and generous love can be.

  Part Two

  If our beginnings were tangled and complex, our ending was infinitely more so. The ways in which our relationship imploded would require its own essay.

  I wanted to believe that a first queer relationship didn’t have to be tragic. I wanted to write a happy essay about love. Life interfered.

  When queer people heard of our breakup, I received more than one knowing nod. “First queer relationship,” I heard, alongside comments about how unsurprising it was that it ended in catastrophic fashion. A shorthand, subjective version of our ending might include her stepmother and father’s dislike and disapproval; resultant friction in our relationship, from which we couldn’t recover; our breakup; and, in the days after, her father’s death in a tragic accident.

  Even so, I can’t ascribe our relationship to a category like mistake or regret. There was an inevitability to it. We met as our suppressed desires were surfacing and intersecting, as new worlds were opening—for me, writing and art and emotion; for her, climbing and a return to intellectual pursuits.

  I still have the sheepskin rug she gave me, a handful of her paintings on my walls. Life moves on, but these vestiges remain. They remind me we shared something beautiful, once.

  11 GOLDEN DAYS

  There are the days, after a walk on the elevated abandoned-then-converted train track a few blocks from our apartment, snowflakes blowing and slapping me lightly in the face as I walk, when I lie next to my girlfriend in bed, her lips moving slowly as she reads words aloud from her book, edited by my mentor, me reading essays as research for the book I need to complete. She shares opinions on each story as she reads. I share stories about the workshop drama mentioned in the book’s introduction. We snack on popcorn, salted and garlic-powdered and dusted with nutritional yeast. I wonder, if, despite everything, these are my golden days, our golden days.

  As soon as I uncovered the diagnosis, on a piece of paper, while I was sorting through my latest mess of medical bills, I texted her the news. She was in Abu Dhabi, en route to her family and home. We received the diagnosis, both of us, absorbed the shocks separately.

  The month we spend apart clarifies this fact: we want each other for the right reasons. Our happiness is genuine, and it’s intensified in light of health emergencies, not diminished. We’re happy as two otters in each other’s company, slipping and sliding and tucking their paws under their chins. I can’t point to grand gestures to signify. Love comes in simple forms.

  My best work has always included her. Nothing comes across so clearly in nonfiction writing as intention. To us, at least, the pureness of our intentions for each other is clear. But then I wonder, too, how pure love can be, once need enters the equation. That’s why these days feel the golden ones—because the truth is known, life is hard, and yet. And yet we’re still happy as we ever were, stronger than we’ve ever been.

  This is remarkable given everything that’s happened in months prior. I signed with a literary agent; sold my first book; due to the possibility of such a sale, suffered a fracturing blow to my tenuous remaining relationship with one of my sisters. I received word of my mother’s worsening condition. I landed in a state-run mental hospital. I lost my mother to her decades-long degeneration from early-onset Alzheimer’s. My girlfriend and I moved in the middle of Chicago winter from one apartment to another, after conflict with our previous landlord over a heating system that was never fully constructed, an electrical system that was never brought to code, rat feces making us both ill, cockroaches, and every other plague. This litany might seem unrelated, but for the diagnosis: schizophrenia. A disease in which episodes are triggered by stress, by family hostility and turbulence, by triggering of past childhood trauma, by the death of a parent, by economic adversity such as we faced with our landlord. A disease, too, whose risk factors paralleled many of the themes I’d been writing about: childhood trauma, abuse, ethnic isolation.

  In the hospital and in the lead-up to checking myself in, I was afraid of everything, including my girlfriend. She was the one who convinced me to commit myself voluntarily, who tricked me into going into the hospital by claiming that she felt sick. My second episode was the first time my mental illness intruded on the life we built together, in tangible ways, in real-time. She and I experienced, in tandem, two different versions of the same reality.

  In the first emergency room we went to, she explained to doctors what she knew of my history, from before we met: a first psychotic episode, a suicide attempt. To her frustration, they didn’t listen to her, the person who knew me best, when she said something was wrong. Instead they chalked up my combativeness to personality, discharged me with nothing more than a headache and insomnia written in the treatment notes.

  I landed at another ER after I worsened, after my girlfriend called an ambulance. She explained my history again, and this time the doctors listened. I took an Ativan, which helped me sleep, but did nothing for my suspiciousness, my distrust. She reached out to my oldest sister to learn the medications I’d been on in my previous episode, and again, doctors listened to the information she passed on, and this time I got the help I needed.

  Other, lesser, more self-protective people would’ve walked away. Unfamiliar with the coldness of American institutions, the rules that barred her from sharing with me what she’d made with love, she made kaali dal later and brought it to the hospital, instead.

  During this time I was lost in my own nightmares, which I didn’t share with anyone. This, I think, is why people stigmatize and fear diseases like schizophrenia so much—because they sympathize with the people who have to deal with the outbursts and symptoms, rather than the person with the disease.

  It was my girlfriend’s presence during this episode that clarified what I hadn’t understood the first time around. I could reconstruct the narrative, both my own crossing from reality to unreality, as well as from her perspective.

  “They don’t know your personality, so they don’t know you’re different,” she told me, about the doctors she encountered, those who ignored her words. As events unfolded and after, she was fed up with the American medical system and its unpreparedness for mental health emergencies. “It’s so obvious, when you’re fine and when you’re not.”

  My girlfriend experienced the same frustrations I’d experienced with my mother’s illness, which my oldest sister and father had refused to acknowledge, and which doctors had, as well. Throughout my teens and early twenties I’d been the unwilling caretaker for my mother, in the decade before she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. I resented it. I resented dealing with my middle sister, too, both her temperament and her struggles with an undiagnosed mental condition, because of the toll taken on me. I was young
. Given my youth, as the youngest in the family, and my general quietness, I had been easy to ignore.

  My mother went to the doctor unaccompanied. My oldest sister and father didn’t live with my mother’s behavior and changing personality, or her, day to day, and they chose not to pay attention to my warnings. They left me to deal with her fears and her caretaking, on my own.

  As I recovered from my episode, I could see shadows of my mother’s behavior in my own in my weeks alone at home. I wondered if I would be able to take care of myself, to cook again, to live independently. I remembered her checking ten or twenty times in a day if she’d turned off the stove. I remembered her burning dishes, rendering them inedible by leaving out nearly all the ingredients. I remembered my middle sister shrieking for hours, when the food was burned.

  When I received my own diagnosis, I cried as much for my girlfriend as myself. I knew all too well what it is, to be on the other side—to be the “healthy” person, the voice of reason, bearing the weight of responsibilities invisible outside the home.

  * * *

  “It makes more sense now,” my girlfriend told me after seeing me in an episode. Before my diagnosis, my prior suicide attempt hadn’t made sense, to either of us. She’d said before, “You love life more than anyone I know.”

  Even in the moments where I had been trying to end my life, because it seemed the best, the only option, I was also aware I didn’t want to. I simply wanted not to feel unsafe. I didn’t want to feel as though others were out to hurt me, and I felt I had no other options remaining.

  My actions hadn’t fit with my background as an average, well-educated individual; nor had the legal problems I’d incurred as a result. Now, with the clarifying lens of diagnosis, my past did make sense, as a typical trajectory for someone with schizophrenia. As with my mother, the degree to which I am cognitively high functioning masked my condition.