Invisibility: AAPI meets LGBTQIA+

As a queer woman of color, I actually blend in well into the background. I have the privilege of hiding my identity away in a crowd. When you first picture a queer woman of color, you would not picture me. And for that, I’m lucky.

But as a queer woman of color, I am also invisible to fellow queer women of color. I look like I don’t belong with them. And for that, I’m lonely.

I am Asian. Asian-American as a term covers a wide diaspora, yet we are frequently left out of the conversation. We’re so often missing on the graphs about bias, the tables about discrimination, the papers about health disparities. So does that mean we don’t experience them? That’s certainly what I thought growing up. I’m never concerned I’ll be stopped at the airport. Never afraid I’ll be arrested for unfounded reasons. Never worried I’ll die from receiving poor healthcare. No one taught about us in school, so our suffering did not exist. But our names were Westernized to erase our differences and our foods tamed to wipe clean our oddities. Our bodies fetishized and our eyes mocked. We’re still never going to be White. The conversations were never about us. We sit quietly in the corner, watching as our fellow BIPOCs rightly stand up against their oppression. Am I allowed to join them? Is my suffering sufficient? I’m the robot math nerd, the humorless weakling.

I am asexual. Asexual as a term also covers a wide spectrum, but usually the queer acronym is too long and we’re cut off. We’re also usually missing on those same graphs, tables, and papers. So again that must mean we don’t experience those same biases, discriminations, health disparities. Right? I never have to fear about being assaulted on the street for holding hands with a person I love. Never wonder if I’ll be denied service because of the person I’m attracted to. Never worry about which bathroom I can use. I only have to live in this sex-positive world where everyone should love sex. Where we let doctors try to fix us because sex is “fundamentally human.” Where we can be subjected to corrective rape until we “find the one.” But we’ll never be heterosexual. Is Pride even for us? How do we be proud of something we lack? I’m the robot again, the freak show alone.

Sometimes I feel like the straight White man of queer women of color. I don’t have the same entitlement, but I have the same privilege of blending in to today’s society. But I’m still a queer woman of color. And erasure hurts. It leaves me lost, like my existence doesn’t matter. How can I find a chosen family if my options are faking it with the majority or feeling unwelcome by the minority?

Maybe this is tone-deaf, if it is let me know. And for the love of god, if you’re an Asian asexual woman, please scream out your existence.

Plugged-in syndrome

| How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?

Symptoms: Inconsolable restlessness. A feeling of impending doom. Unexplainable loneliness. Strained thumbs. Sore eyes. Excessive yawning.

Risk factors: Working from home. 3+ devices. 20-something disorder. Environmental allergies. Autoplay.

Treatment: Log out. Close the laptop. Silence the phone. Lie down on grass (avoid on rainy days). Close eyes. Breathe. Dream.

Through the filter

| What quality do you value most in a friend?

Sometimes, most times, I don’t know why my friends are friends with me. So, one day I reversed it, and I made a list of all my friends and tried to write out exactly why I’m friends with each one of them. Like a sociopath would.

It feels like an odd and narcissistic exercise. If they woke up and didn’t offer me those qualities anymore, would I just stop being friends with them? Maybe.

I used to find the common denominator among my friends, who often weren’t friends with each other, to be that they actually heard me and they persisted. I have existed through this world with what feels like a filter surrounding my voice. Few people manage to hear my real voice through the filter. Even fewer people persist as the filter gets finer. I don’t know why, and my therapist is working on it. But so far, it’s led to a shortlist of lovely, diverse individuals, so the filter is doing some valuable work.

What I value most in a friend is their ability to find value in me.

Hustle culture

| What jobs have you had?

“None, because when you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.” Ugh.

I’ve always felt left out by that phrase. To me, the specific word “job,” versus “career,” “profession,” or “occupation,” is distinctly about what you do out of duty. “It’s my job,” is an answer people shrug off when asked why on earth they do something that seems terrible. You can love your job, but there are always aspects that you will hate, and it will feel like work.

I’ve had jobs as a receptionist, a food worker at a Chipotle knock-off, a research assistant, and as an office worker with a boring bureaucratic title. All for a duty to my boss and my need to live off an income. I’ve had jobs as a sister and a daughter, a duty to my family. Jobs as a student and a teacher and a mentor and a mentee, a duty to the education system and the pursuit of knowledge. Jobs as a citizen of my country and a voter in my district, a duty to civic engagement and social trust. There are other reasons to exist in those roles, but to call them jobs is to call them duties.

If we view our lives as a series of jobs, we’re always hustling. Always fulfilling the duties we pile on top of ourselves. When was the last time you did something that served absolutely no one and absolutely no purpose? Is that possible?

How would I know?

| Do you practice religion?

Should I?

I was raised by science-based atheism, grew up around Jewish and Catholic kids, studied Buddhism in college, and am surrounded by Protestant Christians today.

To believe in something without hard proof is admirable. Something that exists, against all odds. I even sometimes question the validity of causality in the randomized controlled trials that guide my field today. How can you possibly be sure of anything in this world?

To practice something in all your actions is aspirational dedication. I’m fascinated and scared by it. How do you know if what you’re practicing is the right way?

I could give a list of activities I treat “religiously” or secular beliefs that are more like morals than religion. But isn’t that watering down a term meant for the divine?

I imagine if I practiced a religion I would stop asking these questions and have some answers.

It’s not all bad

| Do you remember life before the Internet?

I think the trouble with reminiscing about life before the Internet is that we were all younger then, so of course life seemed simpler. Was it the Internet’s fault for making life more complicated as we aged?

I do remember life before accessible Internet, when maybe only one shared computer in the house could access the world wide web. I remember the moment when the Internet no longer became optional to exist in society. I remember getting trapped in it, manipulating it, rejecting it, and then making peace with it.

A lot of people wish to go back to the past, but as a woman of color, I always choose the future.

This again?

| What are you good at?

This question is hard af.

As I draft my personal statements and fluff up my CV for residency applications, this question persists in the back of my mind. What good can I offer to the world? Tell me, they say.

I’m good at being patient. Waiting. Hoping and wondering. Believing that one day things will be better. Thinking about how that can happen. I’m good at walking with time, not racing against it. Tell me how that makes you a good doctor, they say. Tell me something else, because what you’re good at is no good if it’s not productive, they mean. Perhaps patience is the opposite of production.

Maybe this question will become less hard. We’ll see.

All or nothing

| What does “having it all” mean to you? Is it attainable?

As a woman in her 20s who feels like she has nothing, “having it all” feels like both a ticking deadline and a chance to dream.

It’s got a history as a loaded phrase to shame every woman who doesn’t figure out a way to have it all. Because for some reason society judges only women to “have it all.” But isn’t “all” different to everyone?

I think it is attainable if you acknowledge what “all” means to you. If it’s a reflection of our goals or a to-do list to be checked off.

Sometimes it meant the clock shaming me to find the loving husband, the perfect kids and the status-climbing career in time. But the loving husband was only there because there was a spot on the blueprint for him. The perfect kids were rigidly stuck in place. The status-climbing career hid its bureaucratic meaninglessness.

Sometimes it means running a successful primary care-psychiatry clinic for the underserved with my best friends. Sometimes it means coming home from work to a beautiful house in the woods to two young daughters waiting to greet me. Sometimes it means everyone in the world cherishing my writing while I live in an art-filled apartment in NYC with my dog.

I told these separate dreams to my friend once, satisfied by just one of them happening.

And she simply asked, “why not have it all?”

Tell me about it

| Who would you like to talk to soon?

I’m actually more of a listener.

Are we all imposters?

Everybody here has imposter syndrome. The people who don’t probably have a personality disorder. – One of my attendings

Wellness is a hot, honestly, over-talked about topic these days, and medical school is no stranger to trends. But wellness exercises in medical school have only made me more aware of my imposter syndrome that I’ve felt since day one.

And what I’ve recently learned is that medicine is filled with so-called imposters. Maybe we’re all imposters. After all, part of adulthood is learning that adults actually have no idea what they’re doing most of the time. The mirage of put-together grown-ups we had when we were kids just shatters one day. I’m discovering the same in medicine — the perfect genius doctors I visited and shadowed and learned from actually have doubts every day. But no one wants to see a doctor who doesn’t believe in herself.

I thought I’d be over my imposter syndrome by now, but I’m not. As becoming a doctor gets more and more real, I’m waiting for someone to find out that they made a mistake and shouldn’t have let me get this far. My attending kindly reminded me that I might be waiting forever, and that feeling may never go away. It probably won’t. But it gets quieter, and it becomes nuisance rather than a debilitating fear. And honestly, that feels far more achievable than these articles claiming to help you overcome imposter syndrome. If I were to never have imposter syndrome again, I would probably still feel like an imposter, pretending that I didn’t have imposter syndrome. Knowing that it will be something I learn to live with rather than fight against with all my might is…real. It breaks through the black/white perfectionist tendencies that imposters have. Maybe I’m an imposter, but maybe I’m not. Maybe I’ll never know, and maybe that’s ok.

At the very least, I have this disastrous blog to remind me that there are definitely things where I’m not a fraud, I’m actually just this bad at being successful in writing.