The get together is popping, but my smile is falling. Gathered before me are mostly men, and I’m starting to realize, after a few deep conversations in, that I actually am overwhelmed.

Also, they’ve been playing the movie in the background for a while, but now it’s at the famous scene where Robin Williams is handing his therapist’s file on Matt Damon’s character to him. Anyone who’s seen *Good Will Hunting *knows which scene I’m talking about.

But it’s hard for me to stomach seeing, right now, tonight, after what I’ve just let myself start processing.

I’ve just started realizing how insanely in the dark I am.

I get up. Unusual for me to need to take a breather, but I decide it’s time for a brisk walk around the block.

Good Will Hunting was pivotal to me realizing men had *feelings *and inner worlds. Somehow I completely didn’t know how much I didn’t get this until recent years. And it terrified me to realize how little I could comprehend virtually any interaction that was positive or intimate that I’d had with men. Realizing half of my previous romantic experience was steeped in *fantasy *was nervewracking.

The only way to accept that this sad, sad fact is true is to walk it off

My friend lives by Times Square. I exit his building without replying to the doorman’s greeting, huddle in the cold with my coat on, walking straight into the beaming white light of the H&M billboard, shaking my head at hot dog vendors and rolling my eyes at pretty girls strolling by me. I put on the song I’ve been obsessed with lately, the Wheatus classic, “Teenage Dirtbag.”

I absolutely love and relate to the narrator, and I wish I’d known of this song in middle and high school. The unrequited longing, the grumpiness at her not that great bf, the self loathing of him being a freak… so me.

I remember having a crush on the tallest blonde boy in eighth grade, and watching him make out with the petite dark haired popular cheerleader at school. I remember people asking me if I thought he was cute, and feeling obligated to lie so I wouldn’t piss her off. Damn, I was a piece of dirt alright. Was that when I started thinking I should only like guys that looked like me?

I remember wishing someone would just, ya know, *read my mind *and know my inner thoughts and want to hear them. But I didn’t feel like I related to all the kids who wanted to play video games or go to the mall or talk about anything except what really mattered. So I just waited until high school came around, and I could go sit in school and be a “nerd” the way everyone said I was.

Jk. I quickly found out I’m too dumb to be Asian, but not dumb enough to fit in with the white kids.

Why is this memory hitting me now,

Girls are easier to understand. Girls were easier to understand even when they were mean. Also when they were nice. I didn’t notice how easy it was for me, and how it hurt almost more yet almost less, to be able to know what’s going on. I’ve never really had to complain *too *extensively at women being confusing, or had a problem befriending girls in basically any context even as I seethe about them in private.

“It’s too bad you’re not a lesbian,” my friend says. “You’d probably do better if a woman pursued you because you’d know what she was thinking constantly.” Ironically, even though I claim to dislike women and have my own extensive trauma about them, I’m very good at making female friends. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever misread a woman. I can’t say the same about men.

I’ve spent much of my day stressing about realizing how in the dark I am, getting a stomachache, flooding my friend’s bathroom when I was supposed to be cleaning his house, worrying about a core existential question while letting my work fall to the wayside. Am I allowed to not have to do it all myself?

I’m thinking lately about the fact that I only really obtained guy friends after I moved to New York. Before, I only had the privilege of being close with maybe 3 guys ever prior to 2022, one of whom is now deceased, one of whom’s girlfriend doesn’t want me in his life, and another who I didn’t talk to for 5 years because my best friend hated him. Now, I’ve met a wide variety and befriended many, been told I’m “sort of a guy’s girl” with how often I’m able to have a sort of sisterly dynamic with men by default, keeping them at arm’s length with some variations of intimacy that never genuinely devolves into true flirtation in 90% of cases.

“It’s just because I don’t trust women much,” I cheerily say. That’s not true. It’s because I don’t trust men that I’m desperately seeking more of them as friends, platonically, for the days that I’m aware falling in love actually is going to retraumatize me.

I only recently noticed I have oldest daughter trauma, and a bunch of weird informally diagnosed OCD. I get pissy if people can’t read my mind and notice what I’m doing, when often it’s lost to interpretation. I began burning out from tirelessly initiating, and noticing that I was doing it because of a deep fear of, if I don’t do it, I’ll be forgotten, and I am deeply fucked for having to be the only one who can handle my own needs.

Crying and crying and crying as a kid, trying to explain things to the ones in charge and never having anyone listened, gave me both a victim and savior complex. I studied psychoanalysis hungrily so I’d never be left without tools to help others — tools that I’d never gotten access to as a kid, and wish had been used on me.

It only occurred to me that I’m resentful of others at times because I’m unusually good at *I wouldn’t say *modeling”, but *forming a conception of someone’s behavior that’s entirely based on a theoretical framework that helps clarify their reasoning if I look at the objective data of their behavior… but if the gaps I fill in are informed by trauma where I’ve grouped them into *other unhelpful categories, this is where I go wrong. *The only people in my life I currently don’t resent are people that are also sharply good at perceiving these things. But what happens when people don’t know, or don’t see?

My failure mode is additionally intense when I’m a big culprit of letting my fight or flight instinct get triggered. I’ve noticed I’m associating feelings as inevitable tragedy, a symptom of getting my needs shot down and told they’re unnecessary.

When I’m told that men often don’t mean to hurt women, and are oblivious but earnest and eager to please, I think of how my father would just go, “whoops!” for years every time he misunderstood my mother or completely ignored me, yet expects me to want to go home. If I go home, the only person who will pay attention to me will suffocate me. If she’s at work, you’ll just ignore me. I’m realizing now that that’s worse.

I’m “home” for the holidays at least, in NYC. I’d rather let the arctic wind hit me in the face as I walk off my tears, because at least I have a warm place to return to, where friends will hold me as I wail to them that I don’t want to grow up, I want someone else to read my mind and know what I need, that I don’t trust my ability to pick people that won’t abuse me when I ask them for anything, that I’ve had to learn to be hyper vigilant and sociologically minded to cope for the fact that I feel unsafe every time I get attached

I do have abandonment trauma, just like Will in the movie, except for me it’s *psychological abandonment. *I don’t want there to ever be a scenario in which I’m sitting in a house, there’s food on the table at least, but you look up and you don’t *see. *You look up and you don’t *care. *In which I’ve told you everything about me yet you have not *listened, *and I don’t know anymore if my words are actually hearable and falling on deaf ears, or I have opened my mouth and failed to make a sound.

I remember all the people who looked at me and didn’t hear me. I remember when I was upset I wasn’t invited to my lover’s birthday party because he *forgot *and he told me he would simply invite me to the one next year. I remember when A told me I was crazy for noticing he was attracted to me and I started thinking I must be hallucinating. I remember when no one wanted to deal with the fallout of being gossiped about by F and told I was “simply starting drama” when he was hurting me and maybe I should just study more.

As Teenage Dirtbag says, “He doesn’t know what he’s missing!”

In 2023, not 2008, the bridge to the song plays.

It invites an idea of a fantasy I had myself when I was a teenager, one that still strikes me now when someone I want so badly my bones ache, gives me attention, such as that night when you walked over to me in that dimly lit bar on the Lower East Side:

Lo and behold, [he’s] walking over to me,

This must be fake,

My lip starts to shake,

How does he know who I am? And why does he give a damn about me?

Is he just a teenage dirtbag like me?

I get back to my friend’s place. I look around at the people who promised to be there for me, by kicking my ass if I self sabotage with asking for things I want, who will remind me it’s okay that I am “behind” at relationships and romance, that the realest thing I had was a 2 year situationship that ended with being blocked that caused me to flee the last city I loved, that I feel like mold every time I remember kindness from a love interest makes me worry it’s a trick.

“It’s not your fault,” I whisper to myself.

**Me: **Fear of abandonment? Is that why I can’t speak up?

It’s not your fault.

Yeah, I know that.

It’s not your fault.

I know.

No. It’s not your fault.

I know.

No, no, you don’t. It’s not your fault.

What sucks is, it’s still my responsibility to speak.

I’ll never, ever, again, get a shot at just sitting back and having someone just know the right things to say.

I’ll never have a lifelong friend who knows me like the back of my hand, giving me the benefit of the doubt and making it easy for me to trust others.

I’ll never have you just come up to me with two tickets to Iron Maiden —

I guess it’s not my fault though.

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