For the longest time when anyone asked me what I wanted to do for a career I had no answer.
I left home at an early age, for the first child of a Chinese immigrant family. I always felt I didn’t belong and our values were misaligned. This was a household of heavy conflict between my parents, my brother and myself, or alternatively parents versus the children. I was often labelled different and difficult as I was stubborn and pigheaded. I refused to listen to experience, I would argue, but felt I was right in doing so. I often spoke from a place of emotion as apposed to the logic everyone else was on, thus creating a childhood filled with tears.
This led to me being told I was too sensitive and too emotional, often asked to let things go. This has caused me to have guilt towards my emotions, and to pent up my feelings. A move that has only ended in negative repercussion. I remember one specific elementary school class where all the suppression bubbled over and I lashed out at a teacher, calling her a choice word in front of my grade school peers. This resulted in suspension and further turmoil at home as it disturbed the mantle of “good girl”, and “good student” that I was trying to frantically fit. However this felt like a size 2 dress, and your girl has always been a 6 at smallest.
Fast-forward it took me running away from home to escape what I deemed as a prison of my own creation. (Long story short a boy was involved and I was in my rebellious era). Although in hind sight, this was what I needed to learn what it was to be me, outside of my family. However, even though is has been many years since I’ve been under that roof and have been told that I have to listen to what my parents say, so long I was as I was living under their roof. Their hold on me still feels like a death grip that chokes and withers.
Here, I should add a footnote that it was my decision to leave home. A spur of the moment move where I ended up living with the above reference boy and his mother for a month. My original home felt suppressive, where I had a tight leash around my free spirited neck. This caused me to flee. However, in truth, this was all my doing, considering my pour choices and actions prompted extreme reaction from my parents in order to put a bridal on me. But I digress that’s another chapter for my future memoir.
This brings me to where I am today in this decision that I have made. I am going back to school. Something I thought I’d never say, and I thought I would never want. I have only been strong armed into post secondary institutions to take classes and work on degrees that would lead me to nowhere. A bachelor of arts to only end up in retail management. A certificate in business management and human resources management to only end up doing outside sales.
Now nearing my mid life mark, I finally know what I want to be when I grow up. Seems like a humourous statement, considering I have lived many decades. But it is thanks to the accumulation of all those past lies and these former versions of myself, that I needed to get through, to get me to the one writing this heartfelt post.
It was the onset of Covid that really brought my life into perspective. Working in an essential service sector. I continue to work while the world shut down. I continued to enjoy my life, while all those around me were bound to home.
It was doing this time and this personal growth that I started telling people and if I could do anything and be anyone it would be like Sue Johansson.
I am really dating myself here. She was once a late night TV sex educator. An older woman with a tall and lean frame. She had gray and pepper curls and thin rimmed glasses. During her hour long TV segment, she sat behind a desk and took questions from live caller. Men and women calling in with their questions on sexuality, be it about their own physical body or something they might have been too afraid to ask anyone out loud. There was nothing off the table and she addressed each professionally and factually.
I have always been curious about sex, and growing up in a household that didn’t express any feelings of love for one another, let alone sex, left me with a lot of unanswered questions. Questions that I remembered going to my local public library and Google porn to learn. Questions that resulted in my brother and I sneaking into my parents bedroom and watching sex scenes of R-rated movies on the black box. Questions they had me staying up late and watching Red Shoe diaries to learn how to interact with the opposite sex. And questions that eventually brought me to foot of TVs only sex educator.
As a side here, I do want to tell a humourous story of the time my brother and I watched fragments of Striptease and Showgirls when they became available on my parent’s Black Box. One of the scenes had a character planting fake beetles into yogurt in order to get a settlement. This obviously struck a chord with my younger brother, as during a future meal with my parents were all having yogurt for dessert and he made a joke, referencing the beetle. Everyone at the table laughed. Then, just as sudden as the laughter broke out; an exchange between myself and my brother, and my mother and my father took place. Everyone knew and understood the reference and what happened here, but we never discussed it. Just one of the many sexual references that could have sprung into a healthy conversation, but instead was suppressed.
But I digress. It was at this point in my life that I knew I wanted to be like Sue, but for Asians. To help coach a culture that does
not typically discuss such topics. To show them a comforting face and that it is okay to have urges and needs. To give the talk of the birds and bees for those who never learned where babies come from. A topic I feel that is more necessary than ever with the Internet and exchange of ideas. Where sex is becoming more visible and more excepted as a recreational activity.
TV shows like 16 and pregnant and sitcoms that depict students in sexual scenarios are rampant and idolized. People are seeing sex as a resource, something to be traded and given away, like skill or a commodity. And all this changes the perspective of the act.
Similarly, images of sex are so easy to come by. My first experience was going to the local public library with a guy friend and trying to search up porn in both Internet Explore and Netscape, where we failed. Now you have access to porn in your hands, with your phone. And children as young as 6 have their own. This accessibility will undoubtedly affect future relationships, alongside of popularizing of such terms as “side piece”, “baby daddies”, and “friends with benefits”.
So I will be aged and at the ready to help those individual tackle this dysphoria. I want to be one of the voices that help to dispel the grey, and to aid those looking for functioning relationships that includes intimacy.
Given my open and honest personality, and my penchant to speak freely on the topic, I feel like this is a good calling for me. And many of those who know me, echo this sentiment.
I have never been so excited for so much change. I have never been more steadfast in my resolve, to focus and work hard for goal I know I want. For once in my life, I can see a future of happiness.
I have spent almost 9 years of my life, supporting an ex through his dream of owning his own business. I supported him emotionally, and even more financially, to my own ruin. I left a relationship with not a penny and him declaring I owed him more. However, I am now at a place with a truly supportive and caring partner and a good support network of friends. That now it is finally my turn to focus on myself, so that I can achieve my own dreams and my own goals. And I can tell you from personal experience it is never to let late.
