I Resent You For Being Tall

I’m currently reading Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability and Making Space by Amanda Leduc and it’s very good. The passage that got me hooked comes in the very first chapter when Leduc discusses her parents and writes:

When I was a kid, I used to obsessively read parenting books and magazines. I always loved my parents and I knew they always loved me back and moreover, I always think they did their best on me so I’ll always forgive them when they wrong me. It was 20 years ago but I have this hazy memory in my head of my parents being barred from the hospital room I was being treated in when I got pneumonia as a 4-year-old. I’m not sure it even happened but if I look deep within myself, I think I can see my mother crying in a faded pink salwar kameez, which she hasn’t worn at all since we moved to America a year later and did almost too good a job assimilating.

I think that some part of me always yearned for a guidebook for how to be a parent because in those books, maybe I’d learn how to be a child in turn since I was never very good at it. While some part of me feels eternally youthful to this day, a Disney channel star lookalike when my hair is in its long braids (or so I’ve been told), another part of me has felt aged, barricaded from entering the world other people inhabit since the day I was born. Existing sometimes feels like constantly missing a step when going down the stairs, like that swooping feeling of not knowing what’s happening, of not being in control of your body and not in the fun way like on a roller coaster.

I sometimes have vivid recollections trailing back to my early childhood about ways that I didn’t fit in at all, of being kept apart from my classmates in K1 because of my “unique intellect,” of being genuinely excited there was a group time-out during recess in the 3rd grade because for one day, I didn’t have to endure the shame of walking the perimeter of the playground alone with a book on my head (my novels would never last the whole recess) since I had no friends, of leaving a birthday sleepover in the middle of the night in the 5th grade because I was uncomfortable with an activity and subsequently being ganged up on and derided for my standing my ground (to this day, I remember a girl in my class telling me a few weeks later that she’d stood up for me at that party when she’d done no such thing).

But to my frustration, there wasn’t anything I could pinpoint as “wrong” with me; I don’t ever recall feeling unintelligent or unattractive or even particularly awkward, which annoyed me because it’d have almost been easier if there was something concretely wrong with me instead of being comprised of an ambiguous amalgamation of seemingly mundane traits that somehow made up a person whose entire existence was like trying to fit a square peg in a round role. It was like I missed the lesson in K1 where everybody else learned to be a human because I was occupied with learning division facts and reading chapter books (yes, at the age of 5 because my teacher was right, my intellect was unique and in a profoundly alienating way) and no matter how much effort I exert, I’m always going to be playing catch up for the rest of my life.

As a teenager, I wanted there to be a reason I felt the way I did, why I was who I was, and I couldn’t find it, which predictably drove me into an existential spiral of anxiety that I was doggedly determined to break open, a modus operandi that’s not nearly as acceptable in melodramatic 16-year-olds in flowered dresses as it was in 18th century Enlightenment philosophes who had the privilege of being white and male and not 16 in the Microsoft dominant Seattle suburbs. There was a period where I got extremely religious, thinking of my existence as a series of rewards and punishments, bargaining with some unseen God on a nightly basis to make me normal and sane (in other words, not myself), but that dissipated when I realized I loathed the rules that come with religion as well as the very suggestion that I was anything but the judge, jury, and executioner of my own destiny.

I’m not a rebel and I doubt I ever was; I even see the benefit of following the rules so to speak like those D.A.R.E (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) seminars from elementary school in 83.23% white Coppell, Texas really stuck with me, which is lucky since I have a very addictive personality by nature. However, I also have a borderline unhealthy disrespect for unearned authority (which I designate myself obviously) as well as an extreme disatate for social dictates, including unsaid ones, that I am sometimes unable to fully rationalize. Needless to say, I’ve been censured for this tendency more times than I care to remember and a tiny part of me believes I secretly deserved even the worst of the backlash. This tendency also embarrassingly turned me into a libertarian for a few months before I screwed my head on straight and became a solidly left-of-center-left but still completely rank-and-file Democrat.

In “Relay,” Fiona Apple sings, “I resent you for being raised right/I resent you for being tall/I resent you for never getting in any opposition at all.” I hate that I work as hard as I do to be liked, to be communicative and understanding and empathetic, when I’m not shown that consideration in in return. Deep in my bones, I am angry and frustrated and most humiliatingly, in despair that whatever I do is sometimes still not enough. I don’t actually think that I’m jealous of people who are tall, who never got any opposition at all, whether institutional or societal, and in fact, I think that my facing the level of social scrutiny that I did made me stronger and smarter and kinder when it comes down to it, made me a woman that I’m proud to be. But, my dirty little secret is that I sometimes want to scream and cry and throw things but if I let myself do that, I fear I’ll never stop, that I’ll immediately lose all the progress I’ve made to be who I am today and I’ll have to start the race of life all over. I sometimes muse that if it were an option, I would trade some of my “goodness” so to speak, lie and cheat and maybe even litter once in a while (the horror), if I could undo some of the hurt I’ve been wrought and the hurt I wrought myself but the reality is, I can’t do that. I feel almost painfully guilty for the very few times I’ve unintentionally wronged others so I can’t imagine intentionally doing wrong even if it’d benefit me. That being said, I still wish I got cut nearly as much slack as I give to people who always were given infinitely more slack than me by the world but I can’t change other people, can I?

In college, people would tell me that I should never have biological children because I’d pass on my essence and that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to place that fate on an innocent child. At the time, I listened and nodded and laughed it off with a pithy comment but in retrospect, I wish I’d fought them, pushed back on the notion that I was born broken so to speak, that I shouldn’t ever be a mother because of who I was before I crystallized into my adult form. But I didn’t do it then because some part of me believed that they were right, that I was fundamentally to blame for how I was made and who I made myself to be, that I would forever be repenting for the grievous sin of being born the way I was born. I’m not sure exactly how I came out of this mindset but I don’t believe that anymore. And it’s downright wonderful.