Origins of my Lack of Self-Confidence

I arrived in country December 19th, and set off to school - 2nd grade - in January.  The standard policy at the time in that district was for newcomer ESL students to be held back a grade, but my dad refused.  So 2nd grade it was.  In the next couple of months, some math testing took place where the teacher proved to be less qualified than one would hope (that's all I remember about the situation), and next thing you know, I am finishing off the school year having been skipped into the next grade.  Come September, I'm starting 4th grade and ESL is basically a technicality for me, as the pull-out class is a bit of a joke, and I had the summer I guess to pick up the language. 

Fifth grade in the same school goes without a hitch.  Made a few friends in my neighborhood, even ventured to be a substitute bus patrol for a few weeks.  Went to my first American birthday party. And then summer between elementary and middle school, we moved out of state.

New school, new town, new experiences, and not good ones.  Sixth grade proved to be where I found out I was a nerd and a dork and a geek.  I still had my dad pick out my outfits, and I found out - after being asked point-blank how frequently I wash my hair - that weekly hair washing wasn't going to cut it.  A boy in my math class referred to me as an It - I was apparently too androgenous in a newly adolescent landscape. Also, apparently, leg shaving was a thing.

On the bus, it was especially clear that I was out of my element.  All the cool kids sat in the back.  I kept quiet, but I also committed a faux pas unbeknownst to me - I dared to look at the cool kids.  I was quickly cut to size when Shawn Gray turned around in his seat and stared me down, making sure the other cool kids saw him trying to intimidate me.  I guess they wanted to see what I would do.  I averted my eyes. (So is my less-than-stellar eye contact really a sign of autism?)

When they asked me where I was from, they probably just meant to point out that I was the new kid.  But I assumed they meant "originally", so I told them I was from Poland.  Enter: Polak jokes and being told to go back to where I came from.

One of the coolest girls on the bus had a brother who, for some reason, was one of the geekiest kids.  The cool girls thought it would be fun to try to set me up with him - Stephen King (I kid you not.  I had not heard of the famous author yet.)  I felt bad.  It's not that I wanted to make him feel bad, but I just wasn't into him in that way.

Her friend, Richa Giri, was an Indian girl who lived on my street.  She once borrowed a quarter from me.  I was very particular about money, taught to never be wasteful at home.  So when weeks passed and she kept "forgetting" to pay me back, I finally came up with a clever way to make my peace with it.  I told myself (and later her) that she was bound to make a charitable donation sometime in the future.  When she did, the first quarter of that money would be from me.  She never did pay me back.

Sixth grade was brutal.  I set off to change things the following year.  Seventh grade for Halloween, I dressed up as 80s Madonna.  It was so out of my character, but the end result was... I guess a sexy outfit.  All of a sudden, I was on the map.  Boys took notice.  Including boys that my female friends were interested in.  I hadn't yet figured out the nuances of navigating who was and wasn't off limits.  I enjoyed 7th grade, but I upset friends as well.  

For 8th grade, I swung yet again in the direction of dorkville in order to win back my fellow dorky friends.  I still managed to have a couple of boyfriends.  In fact, all older boys, two grown (18 & 19) guys whom I met at a friend's church.  Nothing illicit went down.  It was all very innocent, but still inappropriate considering the age difference.

By high school, I had found my groove, I guess, and there was no more bullying.  There were other problems, which I'll save for another time.  But bullying stopped.  In retrospect, however, the damage was done nonetheless.  Especially since I never once shared with my parents or teachers that I had been the victim of bullying. I didn't know I shouldn't have had to go through that.  There was no zero-policy on bullying at school yet.  I didn't know that's what it was called.  It was just survival of the fittest, and I was trying to figure out how to assimilate. 

But that scared and insecure bullied little girl never healed.  Today, she still anticipates mean people making her feel bad.  She still naively expects people to be kind nonetheless, but has no skills to protect herself with the occasional adult bullies that still roam the earth, having never received healing on their end, either.

I haven't yet learned that I can show up however I am, and it's good enough.  I don't have to perform.  I don't have to impress.  I don't have to compare myself in any way to others.

But this is a knee-jerk reaction built on top of an earlier legacy of performance-based conditional love and acceptance that first reared its ugly head in my childhood prior to migrating - courtesy my maternal grandmother, the matriarch of our family's enmeshed system, an undifferentiated mass rather than a group of individuals.  

She, too, taught me to be keenly aware of how I am perceived by others.  It was made known to me early on that people are always watching and judging me.  I was to be polite, smart, pretty.  The only thing that changed was what qualified as those things in my grandmother's eyes versus my middle school peers' eyes.  The commonality was: people judge you all the time, so you must always be hypervigilant.  You do not want to be caught not living up to expectations.

In the business of trying desperately to fit in, I didn't have time to explore my likes and dislikes, my strengths and weaknesses, my hobbies and talents.  Everything was being filtered through a preconceived lens.  Some characteristics were too strong to be held back by my vigilance, but it took years - decades - for me to relax long enough to sit back relaxed, and start thinking about how I want to show up in the world.  Who do I want to be? 

One final word on bulling.  I finally looked up the definition of what it even is. One version I found resonating with me: "unwanted behavior from a person or group that is either: offensive, intimidating, malicious, or insulting; or an abuse or misuse of power that undermines, humiliates, or causes physical or emotional harm to someone."  With that definition, I can see that my peers tried (successfully) to intimidate me because it made them feel superior.  Therefore, they clearly had their own issues of internalized inferiority that hadn't been dealt with.  

As far as my grandmother, since she saw me as an extension of herself, an appendage of the family that oscillated around her, any sign of perceived weakness or even just divergence that wasn't fully within her control made her fearful.  She wasn't trying to harm me in any way.  She simply was emotionally unavailable and therefore neglectful, and the resulting gaslighting in my formative years led to a starkly delayed ability to individuate and form healthy boundaries, because I didn't have early models to mirror.  I had to wait until such models - and the corresponding vocabulary explaining it all - became available to me.

Moving Past Community Belonging

I'm a Third Culture Kid.  But these are usually made up of military/diplomat/missionary "brats" and global nomads, not one-time child immigrants.  

Ok, so I'm a child immigrant.  But immigrant communities are focused heavily on race and ethnicity, and as a "white ethnic", I'm seen for my skin color first, and white privilege and it's assumed twin - socioeconomic privilege - are assigned to me regardless of my actual lived experience.

Maybe I'm a weirdo on account of my autism, which was finally diagnosed when I was 43?  Except that I do not feel at all like I "found my tribe" among other autistics.  Ah!  It's because it turns out I'm also ADHD - ok, so AuDHD is my flavor of neurodivergence.  Except that there's something off....

Twice exceptional, as it turns out, confirmed (ish) in a roundabout way by having both my children tested and identified as gifted.  So then my quirks and challenges come from a cognitive profile that isn't frequently found among my peers.  Ok, that's what it is!

Except... my kids are "mildly" gifted.  Their evaluator swears up and down that "this counts" and that "they're in" (metaphorically speaking), yet the groups, books, and podcasts I turn to for community make it pretty clear that giftedness begins at a magical number that is just a little bit higher than my kids' numbers.  So we (because by extension, I include myself in the gifted category now due to recognition and ChatGPT correlation) aren't quite top notch brainiacs for the creme de la creme, but find ourselves adrift among more "typical" peers.

When forming our family, we turned to adoption.  But the traditional adoption routes proved not to be in the stars for us.  Instead, we found our children thanks to embryo "adoption" (donation).  Depending on a person's politics, we belong either with the adoption crowd, or with the donor conception crowd.  When you ask my children, they sort of have a foot in each. Yet another example of our destiny of living in duality.

And so it goes.  I'm white but my husband and children are not.  But none of us are Black. So just how privileged are we? 

I'm all kind of neurodivergent, but according to the medical model, these are invisible disabilities - disabilities not recognized by those around me.  So I'm expected to buck up and I feel gaslit at every turn, unsure of what a healthy boundary is, and what is an excuse I give myself on account of "my labels".

I was brought up Catholic (culturally anyway), but after a decades-long journey ending in a deconversion, I find myself in a spiritual no-one's land.  There are no groups that mesh with my understanding of the world at large, and the values by which I navigate life.  And after being mostly unchurched now for about a year, I find it hard to find the value in reengaging even in online Unitarian/Universalist circles.

My people must be fellow homeschoolers then.  Surely, we are such a small bunch.  Generally, we can see past the specifics of our chosen educational philosophies and methods and just come together around the fact that we customize and facilitate our own children's education, rather than delegating it to a school system.  Except so many homeschoolers do so on account of their religion, that it brings up a major disconnect.  And the secular ones are often pretty hardcore unschoolers, which on the surface would be fine, except this comes - more often than not - with "unparenting" - something my husband and I cannot get on board with.

And so here we are, a community of the four of us.  Belonging pretty much only to ourselves and each other.  The opportunity there is to belong also to one more realm - that of the human race... and in fact all creation as a whole.  But who do we talk to about that?  How do we make friends like that?  How will our children find life partners like that?

So we go back out there, into the general public if you will, and let go of expectations.  Let go of wanting to find cognitive peers, or kindred spirits, or people who get it.  We embrace being our own advocates, not relying on anyone else to get us in order to accommodate us.  We pick and choose and see people as individuals, not as members of their various identities.  And thus we are able to access unlikely friendships, fascinating world-views, and ironically, a way to be seen by seeing others - by recognizing others for their individuality, we start to move through life in the world also as individuals, not as labels, categories, or group members.  And then we vote accordingly, we donate accordingly, and we spend our time accordingly. 

People will want to pigeon-hole me so they don't have to do the hard work of actually getting to know me.  I don't have to let them do that.  I can stand my ground in the liminal space of "both/and" and insist on being seen for who I am, not for who they want to quickly judge me as being.

Perhaps that's the life lesson I'm here to learn - once I can respect each person as an individual, I can then come full circle to how we each together make up the Greater Consciousness.  Because only individuals can do that.  Stereotypes cannot.