From Me To You

Someone said to me last week, "Julia, I feel like I don't know anything about you and you know the world about me.  Why is that?"  I guess it's pretty obvious: I'm an incredibly private person.  Even though I'm much more open now than I was say, ten years ago, people still look at me and see a brick wall.  The irony is that friends and colleagues have described me as friendly and personable.  I can carry a conversation with someone better than most.  But when that conversation's over, chances are that I'll walk away knowing more about that person than letting on about myself.  I don't do it consciously, but I guess it's true that I'm better at drawing people out than letting people in.

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My mother once slapped me across the face really really hard.  One fierce smack across the cheek.  We had just pulled out of the driveway onto City Avenue passing the school's main entrance on the right.  A classmate was in the backseat directly behind me.  He was the only other Korean kid in my year and we were giving him a ride home that day.  Uhmmah was unusually inquisitive about how my day went.  She was sweet as pie.  Her tone was purring, almost exactly like the way she talked to my father when he returned from one of his gambling stints: grateful that he was home; pissed that she had married a superstar loser; totally ignorant of the fact that her acting as the doting wife would not change him (but isn't that the way these things usually go...).

I had been struggling at my new school.  I felt like I had no friends.  I had pretty much lost touch with all my close friends from my old school (with the new workload, I literally didn't have time to even take calls from friends, no less hang out with them) and couldn't fathom connecting with my new peers.  All the kids stepped out of Jaguars and BMWs and Volvos in the mornings.  They bought whatever they wanted at a cafeteria that offered hot vegetables and hot roast beef sandwiches on fresh rolls and soft serve ice cream.  I was thrown into an unfamiliar world of privilege and returned every night to my family on the other side of the tracks.  It was confusing.  Really Freaking Confusing.

I was not interested in answering my mother.  I had been like this for days.  Fed up with my gruffness and adolescent depression, she berated me for being sulky and at the red light, mid-scream, planted a slap so hard that my head swiveled 180 degrees to the right forcing me to stare at the driver in the car next to us.  There were many rough spankings (well, I guess they were beatings since she left bruises) when I was younger, but this slap, well, it was new.  For one, it was a singular stroke not to be followed by any further physical violence, just verbal.  Secondly, I was twelve and in the eighth grade; it had been a long while since she last laid a hand on me.  It shook me.  And Andy was in the car.  How humiliating.  You're too stupid to make new friends at a new school!  It's been long enough that if you don't have friends by now, YOU'RE doing something wrong!  Who would want to be friends with you as sulky as you are?

I'm nearly thirty and it still sucks when I remember that my mother was such a bitch to her own kid.

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I have to work on letting people in.  I don't recommend telling horrible stories about their mother as a conversation starter, but I felt like I needed to do so here.  There are plenty of times I've started posts that end up sitting in my drafts folder.  They're there because I wonder that if by publishing, I'll let on too much. But here's the thing: I am who I am from where I come.  There's no changing that.

So that's all.  I just wanted to say that my personal narrative is uglier than I care to know; my past, my present, and my future are all informed by this narrative.

Yeah.  Here's a little bit of me, from me to you.