Writing About Me – From Doodle to Bestseller

(Different) Choices

It’s been a while, almost six months.

To be transparent, I’d like to admit that this flux period has lasted longer than I thought it would. As such, this blog has been left by the wayside a bit. I have been writing, though, just nothing that is ready to be shared yet. I have also been thinking about this particular post for a while, too intimidated and not ready to write it. Suddenly, it’s all I can think about, with yet another immigration anniversary looming.

When you read this, it will be the seventeenth anniversary that I became an immigrant and arrived in the US for the first time on my first-ever plane ride. Last year, I reflected on the relatively better future I wouldn’t have had without that first plane ride. This year, I’m reflecting on something different, building on that gratitude from last year that has only increased in the past 365 days.

This reflection started, as it often does, as I thought about my identity, what labels I felt most comfortable with, what groups I felt were most welcoming. Shocking to no one except maybe me, none of the labels or groups that have been assigned to me feel right. There are those that do (cis heterosexual woman, for example), but those that don’t, and as I thought about why they don’t feel right, I came to the conclusion that they don’t feel right because I didn’t choose them. There are some that don’t feel right because they haven’t chosen me.

I’m still workshopping this idea internally, so please allow some incoherence as I present this idea with some anecdotes and recovered memories.

I immigrated to an area in the US that is very diverse, but that diversity was scary at the beginning. Coming from South America, I was already a minority within the minority. I was meeting kids from countries I had only heard of until my first day of middle school, and I didn’t even know of the existence of the Philippines until I met a boy from there in my first ESOL class. In a place where I didn’t speak the language, knew the customs or fit in, I already didn’t feel at home in a group of people that was meant to alleviate the transition, kids who didn’t recognize the words I used when speaking Spanish, the language we were supposed to share.

As I moved through the education system and before getting to college, I still hadn’t found my tribe. My group of friends in high school was still diverse, but the only thing we had in common was our class schedules and our obsession with graduating. In retrospect, a lot of the friendships there were out of convenience, which would explain why most of them didn’t last the test of time.

When I got to college, it was better, but not really. I was ‘too brown’ to blend in with my white friends, not knowing some key references and cultural phenomena that bonded them by virtue of their upbringing. I was also ‘too white’ to blend in with the few Hispanic and Latinx folks I ran into. My Spanish, again, was too foreign for them and my English too tainted with American expressions. My white friends treated my heritage as an anecdote and a party trick, and my non-white friends… I didn’t have many, but it’s not like we bonded over our ‘BIPOC person in a white world’ experiences either.

I oddly found a respite in Leicester, England, the first time I studied abroad. To everyone there, I was just American. I sounded American, and to them that was plenty. Even my other international student friends from European countries saw me as American, often forgetting that I spoke Spanish at all. I was just Vanessa to them, not ‘Vanessa who can also speak Spanish. Ask her how to properly pronounce “quesadilla.”’

These thoughts race in my mind lately as I think of choices, those I have made and those that have been made for me, and their consequences. Dissecting my life from the very first choice when I wake up to the last one before I drift off to sleep, my life is a series of choices from where I have been in the past seventeen years.

Although this way of growing up has afforded me many a choice, it didn’t come without its share of conflict, internal mostly, but also external as others also had a hard time putting me in a box I didn’t always fit into. I’ve been mocked plenty a time when I use a word translated into English from Spanish as it loses its fidelity, or when I pronounce something the British English way because it’s easier on my tongue and the Hispanic accent that sometimes comes out. But it’s not me humble bragging or putting on an act to be likable. It’s just… me. It was a breath of fresh air to read this Esther Perel quote: ‘A sense of different belongings as I express different versions of myself.’ This is more nuanced than code switching and expands into the person I have chosen to be, picking and choosing aspects of cultures, identities and places that feel right. The amalgamation that has provided a home in myself to always come back to.

I’ve felt at home when I wasn’t home, because my ‘home’ is just where I grew up. I don’t really feel a sense of belonging and attachment to the places that saw me develop before I left them. I don’t hate them either; rather, I hold a deep gratitude to them because they allow me to say I came from somewhere.

I am not making sense here, and this reflection was less peaceful than last year’s and more jumbled, but I’m workshopping my identity as I start my exit from my twenties. It felt like a good time to do it. All that I’m sure of, though, is that I am a reflection of my choices, choices I have made from the cultures, people, places and stories shared with me. Like a bizarre ragdoll made from different fabrics that somehow still resembles a complete person by the end of the process. Could I have come up with a better image? Probably, but the ragdoll image resonates somehow and not everyone is a fan of them (I think).

This whole business of feeling different is lonely. That was another thought that brought tears to my eyes when it came, that the feeling I’ve never been able to escape for the last seventeen years has been loneliness. Loneliness at not being able to connect with those I should connect with by virtue of having something in common. But if I didn’t find my place through school, through college or even through my family, where would I find my place?

It’s been very lonely, which is a feeling I have just learned to identify and be comfortable and uncomfortable with depending on the day. I very rarely feel lonely when I’m the only person in the room, but I have felt lonely more times while in a group of people. The same loneliness applies to people and how it feels when I don’t feel chosen even if I’m choosing them. It’s been a work in progress to accept that the biggest disappointments and hurts in my life so far I’ve experienced because I didn’t feel chosen by a particular person.

I am different, as my therapist kindly pointed out a few months ago. The context was different than the one I’m discussing today, but it’s all I’ve been able to think about since she said it, finding more and more examples of that reality every day. So I end this clumsy reflection and even clumsier blog entry with that: I’m different. And maybe I’m the same as everyone else in that they all feel different for whatever reason, and that’s okay. My story is and will continue to be different as it progresses, and maybe by my next immigration anniversary, I will have this neatly worked out.

Changed the Soil

My plants are alive and thriving. Because now I have plants.

No one is more surprised than me, but every time I go to water one of them I remember my prediction from a few entries back. Nothing has died yet, and the only worry I had was an aloe leaf that was starting to rot and yellow. After I cut it away, the rest of the plant still stands.

A lot of my success (so far) is likely due to the abundance of natural light in my space, which I didn’t have in my parents’ house. Natural light there is available, but there were only so many spots that a plant could live for fear of a pet chomping on the leaves or knocking something over if left unattended. And yet I can’t help but wonder… like the many plants that didn’t make it, was I not meant to thrive where I was?

What follows is a plant tour and some reflection – setting out expectations early.

The Avocado Plant. Yes, that is a Nando’s table stick I acquired.

We begin with my pride and joy: the Avocado Plant. It is one of three seeds I tried to sprout months ago for a second time, and one of the two that made it up here with me. I must confess here that I forgot to bring any of plants with me and I forgot to ask someone to look after them until I came for them, so imagine my surprise when, two weeks after I moved, there was a stalk coming out of the pot. No one had done anything to it, it was barely getting any sunlight, and the stalk itself was drying out. When I brought it home with me, it lived in the balcony for a few weeks, without any expectation or goal attached to it. One morning, bleary eyed and not ready to start the day, I noticed leaves coming out of the stalk.

From then on, the Avocado Plant continues to surprise me with its resilience and determination to grow and sprout new leaves. Against my mom’s plant advice, I kept it outside for a while thinking avocados like warm climates and so it would likely enjoy the summer heat. I brought it inside permanently once some of the leaves started charring and the soil was constantly bone dry.

It’s not the prettiest looking plant and it’s plain if we’re being objective, but it’s my favorite. I don’t see myself in any of my plants and rather see my growth in their growth, but the avocado plant does seem to prefer being inside to outside in the hellish East Coast summer like me. It’s a bit gangly and not particularly beautiful (like me until I turned 22), but it is consistent (like me always). The leaves that come in from the top of the stalk have looked the same for three rows now, and I’d bet the one coming in will bring two sisters with it.

Initially, I left the charred leaves as they were without pruning the burnt or the leaves altogether. A reminder of it not liking the hot outside and a badge of determination to keep growing when given proper light, water, and encouragement. But today, I pruned the burnt leaves before its photo op. Maybe, like me, it’ll feel good after a haircut. Maybe, like me, it’ll prefer the cooler autumn days in a few months. I stopped naming my plants after I had to throw them out when they were irrevocably dead, and I said I wouldn’t name any of the avocado plants I was trying to grow until I saw consistent and steady progress. If the Avocado Plant lives and thrives long enough to see if it likes to be outside in the milder autumn days, maybe I’ll give it a name then.

Lilly the aloe vera plant with my second Nando’s table stick that I acquired.

We continue with Lilly the aloe plant, and the one I’m most afraid of. Notoriously picky on the conditions they prefer and stuck up because of their health benefits, Lilly gets whatever she wants so long as she doesn’t die. She was a gift from a family friend we’ve deemed The Plant ER (although she couldn’t save my amaryllis; she returned its pot with Lilly in it), and I want to keep her alive purely to honor that family friend. I always tell Lilly she has to stay alive not for me, but for who gifted her to me.

I’m not sure how much I believe in things like this, but apparently aloe vera is one of the many plants that can ward off negative energy and bad vibes that people may bring into your home. I’ve only had to cut off one leaf that was growing yellow and rotting in the past two months that I’ve had her, when several people were in and out as I got settled, so maybe she’s doing her job. I don’t do much to her besides check her soil before watering or occasionally praise her for still being alive, which seems to be working so far. Perhaps we don’t know each other well enough yet so we stay out of each other’s way, wary of upsetting one another or causing distress. Perhaps it’s just enough for now that she helps me out by staying alive and warding off negative energy, and I help her out by not overwatering her

Up next, we have the IKEA plants. None of them have names individually and they’re here to have a good time. All of them low-maintenance and nondescript, they blend into the décor and are just happy to be here. They don’t demand individual names or to be kept together, and they’re all so far happy with their assignments.

The two cacti are my second ever cacti (their predecessor lived for a year and bit before I left it behind when I moved to London; it died shortly afterward of what I like to think as loneliness, but really it was from neglect and overwatering), and they get watered only on the twenty-second day of every month, with a light spritz in between whenever I remember it.

The IKEA succulent, who may be getting the name of Miss Keisha.

The succulent is the middle child of the four and was recently repotted. In true middle child fashion, it got an upcycled candle jar for a pot, with no drain hole, and I’ve toppled it over a few times, including when I was taking the picture. I even turned it around so the one yellowing stem wouldn’t show in the picture. I have high expectations for the succulent, and I’ve promised it that its next pot will be a brand new one and not a hand-me-down.

The snake plant that has no name but should.

The youngest sibling of the four that is the snake plant got priority for repotting. I picked the snake plant because of its slit down its big leaf and not in spite of it. I immediately liked the yellow tinge to the leaf and loved that it was the last one of its kind on the shelf, so I figured I’d give it a good home until the slit was the cause of death. Two months on, and the snake plant likes me so much that it bore two more growths, and so it got a brand new pot with a drain hole. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it may be getting a name soon.

The IKEA plants were the first bit of greenery in my new home, and they had a place in it before they even arrived. They were selected because I thought I was finally ready for plants and wanted something sturdy and low-maintenance, something I wouldn’t be distraught to say goodbye to should it die. Joke is on me, because I would be distraught if they (or any of their plant siblings) were to decide to leave me one day.

The African violet with its exponential growth of flowers.

We move onto CeCe, the African violet plant. CeCe was a gift from my grandmother and another one I was terrified to receive. CeCe and Lilly moved in at the same time and are kept apart so they don’t gang up on me, and because they have different watering schedules. CeCe came with four flowers and she continues to surprise me with new ones and small buds constantly, which I deeply appreciate since my favorite color is purple. CeCe also has to stay alive for who gifted her to me and not for me, but so far she seems happy to be with me as I am to have her. Her success is my success, or maybe she just likes the praise whenever I notice that there are more flowers than the day before.

Up next is the Cordyline plant. Ms Big Red. The new kid on the block. I think I jinxed myself with Red before we even got home because a) I named her straight away and b) I picked her out solely because I like the leaves, not because I’m confident I can keep her alive. I also picked her out of vanity, because I want to start my outside plants collection, like I won’t inevitably have to bring them all in when it gets colder. She will be monitored closely during her first few weeks with me, and with any luck she will growth with me and watch the cooler seasons pass from inside until it’s time to go back outside next summer.

We end with the herbal set. They’re my least favorite and I will tell them that to their face and for free should they ask. They were a gift from work, and work they made me put in. They came as seeds in a grow-your-own kit, and I made a gigantic mess when it came to planting them. I used one of my food prepping bowls to soak their soil along with other kitchen tools because I didn’t have any gardening tools back then, and although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited and proud of myself when the first leaves came in for all of them, the herbal set broke my cardinal rule of plant care: they made me get dirty.

There was dirt under my nails for hours after I planted their seeds, and every time I check whether they need watering, some soil ends up on the table or the carpet. They are my bastard set as they’re only here to do a job (give me fresh herbs) and have to work with whatever I feel like giving them. I know that an experienced gardener may tell me that is the reason they’re not growing, that they can feel my obligation-only attitude toward them, but I constantly tell Basil that I’ve been wanting fresh pesto for months and he’s not delivering.

There’s no big realization or profound comparison when it comes to the herbal set. They’re here to do a job and so far they’re dragging their feet on delivering. I hope that one day they surprise me and without even noticing I’ll have enough for a pesto, ceviche, chimichurri, and to season a chicken. Until then, they’ll be judged much harshly than the other green things in my home.

My plants are my gift to myself, a challenge and an opportunity to allow myself to grow with their growth. The plants added an element of play to my life that I lacked until very recently, of doing something just because. Yesterday, I went to pick up some gardening supplies (who, me?) and spent a few hours on the balcony when I came back, in the heat and sun, repotting, pruning, and talking to the plants. And I think I enjoyed it. No, I’m sure I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the fact I wanted to do it, that I had nowhere to be and nothing else to do but play with literal dirt.

I think the fact I enthusiastically talk about plants shows my growth. My growth in their growth. When I tried to keep plants before, I was frustrated and bitter about only my plants dying even though they were kept with my mom’s plants, which thrived and looked good seemingly effortlessly. But now, my mom’s plants are struggling. Nothing has changed about their circumstances or their care, but the money tree is now only a trunk, her own aloe vera (also a gift from the family friend who gave me Lilly) is hanging by a thread, and CeCe’s sister has never put out flowers for her in a year of being with her.

I wonder if I was right, that my plants sensed back then how stuck I felt, how I longed for a change of scenery to help me grow. Now that I’m in a different place and have different plants, perhaps we work off each other’s energies and try to prosper. I’m sure one of them will have their bad days or periods at some point, just like I will, but hopefully we can get through it with some water, natural light, and patience. Without even noticing, all of us may grow.

In Flux

Well, it’s been a minute. Three months to be exact. Looking at my last entry, it went live a few days before I stopped feeling so lost. On reflection, what I was truly feeling was a mix of lack of direction and impassiveness. I know I’m not alone in being bored of the waiting game the universe started playing with everyone in 2020 that keeps dragging out a year and a half on (#LoveIsNotTourism), but by April, waiting on major life changes I was ready for due to factors wildly outside my control left me feeling restless, angry, and depressive. I was really no fun to be around.

Then the wait was over.

Sitting atop a waterfall in Deep Creek, MD

On the same day, a promotion at work and an apartment landed on my lap. At least, that’s how it looked on the outside. However, neither of those things were given, and I had to put a lot of work in to even get to ‘compete’ for a spot on both things. After a lot of false starts and promises, I got to the point where I had resigned to being stuck until… the universe said I could move forward.

Once those two ‘gifts’ were given, within the following two weeks I moved out of my parents’ house and had an active role in hiring my second direct report. Neither of those things were something I’d done before, and I’d be lying if I said I had a wink of restorative sleep those two weeks. Setting aside the work aspect (because that somehow turned into the less demanding of the two), I spent those two weeks being incredibly scared. And I’m still scared.

I don’t do well with change. I’m a routine person through and through, and as I get older, instead of getting more easy going, I find there are less things I’m able to compromise on. I like to think that since I have a set of priorities I never compromise on no matter the setting (any outing has to involve eating at some point), it leaves some gaps for things I am happy to compromise on (I don’t care what we eat, as long as we eat something). So the upset of routine and change that moving brought sent me into an anxious panic for a period.

I’ve never lived truly alone like I do now (a safe thing to admit on the Internet? One to ruminate on later). I went from living at home to living at college, going back and forth for four years, then back at home, then with roommates and a boyfriend, then just a boyfriend, then back at home. Never have I been able to set up a kitchen how it makes sense to me, or know with absolutely certainty that absolutely no one will walk through the door at any moment. Never have I been able to eat brioche and potato chips for dinner because that’s all I could stomach while ill from second dose side effects. Never have I gone days without speaking to another person that wasn’t on the other side of a screen.

I count my blessings daily that I wasn’t forced to self-isolate or self-quarantine during the height of 2020, and I’m sympathetic to those who were isolated in cities far away from loved ones without any indication on when they’d be allowed to reunite. I will always think fondly of the five weekends in a row that my family and I played the same card game until all of us got good and had won at least once. And although the course of 2020 makes me appreciate my time alone that much more, there are things that are 100% more difficult because I’m alone. Loading and unloading the car takes twice as long, assembling a couch cost two broken nails, and hanging up decorations feels like an extreme sport.

I continue to be in flux, even two months in. I’m constantly scared and doubt myself, but I found refuge on an Instagram story that one of my friends probably had no idea would affect me so: if you can’t get rid of the fear, do it scared. That mantra let me carry out a long drive to my best friend’s wedding and back home by myself; it let me get on a mountain coaster despite my fear of heights; it also let me get the pictures on this post. There are bigger waterfalls in the world, but even a small waterfall is tall enough to make me queasy.

The change and the fear is also what’s kept me from writing for three months. During a time I had competing priorities, I was scared to sit in front of a blank page and have nothing come out. Or worse, have something come out that doesn’t deserve to be published. So, here I am, doing it scared. Scared to also give an update to the world should I fail and have to struggle through the changes I asked for, sought out, and received. Never once have I questioned whether I deserved what I’ve been given, but if I would be able to maintain it.

The jury is still out on that one, but the rent this month is paid, all bills are paid, I have food in the fridge, the A/C is working perfectly, and the plants I have managed to acquire are all alive and thriving. More on that next week.

Crystals and Oils

It’s been exactly two months since my last entry, and though I’m not sure my absence has been noticed (not that I started this project to be noticed in the first place), I must admit that I barely thought of this blog in the past two months myself.

As I start this entry, I don’t know what shape it’ll take, how long it’ll be, or if it will provoke any sort of response. I’m not sure I want it to, either, because I’m not making excuses or looking for sympathy. I’m simply writing to write. And I haven’t done that in a while.

I’ve been toying with entry ideas all week, but whenever I thought of one, I thought of a reason I “wasn’t ready to share that yet.” I probably didn’t want to share that idea to begin with and felt like I had to, and I’ve been slowly working to get out of the “I should” mindset and move into the “I want” mindset. There is one idea that I keep coming back to in general, and I think I’m okay sharing that here (if anyone even reads this, but again that’s never been my main goal).

I’ve been feeling lost. Not in the “finding myself during the pandemic” way, or “trying a different hobby during lockdown” way, or even in “trying the latest workout fad” way, but in the way of looking for lifestyle changes to make myself feel better. That may sound similar to the “finding myself” conundrum, but the difference is subtle. Here are a few examples.

There are days where, at the end of the workday, I feel like I don’t have more energy than what it takes to walk away from my home office and to my bedroom, where I lay down and watch TikToks for an hour, sometimes more. As I keep scrolling, it’s in the forefront of my mind that there’s something I should be doing, some way I should be being productive instead of laying down and scrolling. But I just… can’t bring myself to do it. I can’t put in the effort it takes to get up and find the “something” that I’m neglecting. That ongoing internal conflict is in my head every day, and when I notice that I’ve enjoyed having quiet afternoons because I’ve actively stepped back from side hustles, I wonder if I’m spending too much time doing nothing. Because I don’t know how to just exist. Unless I have something to do, I’m lost, and yet I’m often so exhausted getting out of bed in the morning that the first few hours of the day, I’m on autopilot.

While racking up the hours spent on TikTok, I saw multiple creators talk about moldavite. I know better than to think that’s fate and not the TikTok algorithm, but I still went and read more about it. I went as far as making a mental note to look into buying a necklace the next day because “it couldn’t hurt.” If a crystal could show me the path forward, or show me that I should stay on this path a little longer and be patient, I would fork over however many dollars it took. How did I get to the point where I thought a crystal would help me? I don’t know. While I respect people who respect crystals, I’m not educated enough in the subject to participate, and I know myself enough to know that this is not the right time to start learning. I’m lost, so I almost grabbed the green crystal life raft.

I’m not sure where this next one came from, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was TikTok, too, but I also found myself looking into CBD oil. As I’ve acknowledged my anxiety and its triggers, I’ve looked for ways to manage it and cope with it, and while I’m hesitant to research medication because I’m afraid of the side effects, I thought CBD would be a good halfway house. So I looked up the nearest shop, looked at their products, and thought nothing of dropping at least $60 for a vial of oil that could potentially, maybe, hopefully, take the edge off every once in a while. I never made it to the shop, because I realized it was another avenue I was looking at to make myself feel better. Buying (expensive) oils wasn’t who I am (or who I think I am), but I’m lost enough to wish it would be. I’m lost enough to put my hope in an oil that sits under your tongue and takes your worries away.

Even without the pandemic giving the world a write-off for 2020 and beyond, I know I’m not alone in my feelings. It’s not comforting necessarily to think that there have been others before and there will be others after me who feel just as lost at my age, mainly because if there are so many of us who feel lost during our twenties, it will eventually stop being so, yet here we are. It’s kind of encouraging, however, to come across articles like this, which essentially say that the late twenties are a pain for everyone. “Pain” is an adjective that was carefully chosen: my lower back has been in pain for so long, I can’t remember when it started, and I had an endoscopy yesterday as part of the process for finding out why my stomach bloats without warning and why it’s so painful to eat certain foods I’ve been eating all my life. My insides are as lost as my head, it seems.

Crystals, oils, mindless scrolling, and swearing off pork (after watching the Italian butcher shop episode of Chef’s Table). Will any one of these help me feel less lost? Is realizing that I’m looking for an easy, passive solution the answer itself? Even if I never followed through with any of them, maybe they achieved their purpose in being instruments to help show me “the way,” even if “the way” isn’t any of them. My thoughts are as convoluted as my sentences, but maybe if I acknowledge I’m lost I’ll be on my way sooner.

Quiet Isn’t Always Peace

We have learned that quiet isn’t always peace
Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”

Gorman’s poem had other, widely relevant and more poignant take-aways than this, but this part of the longer line is what stuck with me. Because that’s what anxiety is. That’s what anxiety feels like.

I had a complex about allowing myself to say I have anxiety because it felt like a disservice to people who have actually been diagnosed with anxiety. I haven’t been prescribed medication and it’s not an official diagnosis, but I do exhibit symptoms and have done so for as long as I’ve been alive (now that I know to look for them). It’s a term most of us throw around, like saying you have OCD because you need to have your coffee a specific way or you freak out (when OCD really is tugging on the knob of the front door three times to make sure it’s properly closed and look back before you drive away to make sure your cat didn’t run out without you noticing even though you saw her at her food bowl before you left and if you don’t perform this ritual every time you leave the only thing you’ll think about as you drive away is her running away when a dog or loud noise spooks her and how you’ll never see her again because she’s an indoor cat with no collar and no microchip), but most people exhibit different symptoms depending on their different triggers.

The existence of triggers is something I have come to understand and notice the more I notice a specific anxiety symptom. Why does my heart race and extremities go cold after I glance at the clock? Because I registered the time and that a particular meeting with a particular coworker is coming up, a meeting I won’t particularly enjoy and that will most likely demand a lot of my time and energy afterward. All this happens without my saying one word out loud.

When I stay quiet, my thoughts aren’t peaceful. My thoughts race, bounce inside my head like red balls. From a song to a memory to something I need to do back to the song then to what I’m wearing that day to the one thing I must not forget to do back to the song then to what I want for breakfast then how my hair is looking oily even though it’s only day two after washing then back to the song and then to noticing the mind chatter and making myself focus on what I’m doing at that moment. All before I’ve been awake for a full ten minutes.

The mind chatter has been with me for years, and what I thought was me being efficient and using my time wisely by always planning and making the most of all the time I had is actually anxiety. In recent years, I can recall two incidents that triggered my anxious tendencies and put me in overdrive to compensate for the fact that the situation was outside my control. When I wasn’t working at fixing these situations or coming out the other side of them, I was thinking about the work I still needed to do, and when I got back home, I’d take out my laptop and pick up where I left off lest the thoughts I had during my commute home would disappear. It was quiet, with no noise other than keyboard clicking or the noises of the train as it moved from stop to stop. My mind, however, was the opposite of quiet.

The quiet that isn’t always peace is what it feels like every day since that first triggering incident. It was a season of unpeaceful quiet. Of being so out of control and dependent on others even after doing everything I was supposed to do. During this season, I tried drinking black coffee for the first time. I was in an office and someone offered to go on a coffee run. I asked for a soy latte, and the person came back with apologies that the café didn’t carry dairy-free milk (what in the pre-oat-milk-craze hell!) and that he’d gotten me a black coffee instead. I drank it and it was vile. Yet passable. I winced as I drank it and my stomach was cramping within the hour. From that day onward, I take my coffee black. And I enjoy it. It’s been years, but that result of trauma and a trigger incident that became a trigger season has become part of my personality.

Now, I drink black coffee and it’s a toss-up between racing thoughts or simply enjoying the warm beverage (the benefit of being born in South America and drinking coffee since I was eight). All while staying quiet. Quiet isn’t always peace inside my head.

I have heard many times over the years from many different people that I speak too fast. I don’t notice it, on myself or others, and I wonder if that’s another anxiety symptom or just my personality. Like the black coffee. My brain works faster than my listener, so words flow out faster. If I can’t stop the thoughts from bouncing and racing and flowing too fast, why should my spoken words be any different? Maybe my listener should just keep up. Make their brain work faster.

Until my brain slows down, quiet isn’t always peace.

On My Immigration Anniversary

I’ve been writing this entry in my head for a while, and it will mark my serendipitous return to my poor, neglected blog.

This past Thursday, the 19th was my immigration anniversary. Sixteen years ago on Thursday, I arrived in the US for the very first time, not knowing a lick of English, not knowing any of the extended family that waited for me and not knowing what being an immigrant entailed then, now and for the rest of my life. Every year, I reflect on the years that have passed and often get stuck in the thought loop of, “What would I not have, have not been able to do or had not seen if I hadn’t gotten on that plane with my dad in 2004?”

The answer? Everything. Everything I have and hold dear, every experience, every memory, every friendship.

But, because it’s also been a strange year (few years, really) to be an immigrant, this year’s reflection was different. Like with anything or anyone you love and love well, you have to be lovingly critical, but critical nonetheless, when considering the good and the bad. This year’s reflection also started with a memory.

Little Vanessa. Circa 2002? One of the few pictures of my childhood that I’m able and willing to look at… for two minutes tops.

When I was eight or nine, I got caught cheating on a test. This was Ecuador, so the details are a little fuzzy because of Trauma and trauma, but the gist is: I was sitting next to my “best friend” and we were given a test that she hadn’t studied for. The classroom had those two-seater desks where two children fit comfortably, and to keep us from cheating, the teacher gave each seat of the two-seaters a different version of the test.

As the teacher dictated the questions, we were supposed to write down the answers for our version on a blank sheet of paper. On one of the questions, my friend nudged me and pointed to the blank space on her paper. I knew the answer, but I shook my head at her because I didn’t want to get in trouble for talking during a test. She kept nudging me, so I did the next best thing: I wrote the answer in tiny letters on a tiny piece of paper, folded it and handed it to her. The teacher happened to be walking by as my friend was unfolding the paper. When the teacher inspected it and saw it was written on, she snatched both of our tests and returned mine with a zero.

I can’t remember what happened next, whether I was sent outside while the other students finished the test, whether I cried or not, or what my friend did. What I do remember is feeling incredibly sad and ashamed, with that prickly sensation on the back of my neck that I can now identify as a panic symptom (Little Vanessa was panicking at the thought of getting a zero on a test and getting in trouble – that’s Trauma with a purposeful capital T). I also remember writing “zero” in cursive next to the numeral the teacher had written. My loopy cursive was self-flagellation, a habit I carry to this day as an almost-twenty-eight-year-old adult; no one is as hard on me as I am on myself.

The next day, my mother went to talk to the teacher, to plead my case, and I don’t remember what the resolution was. I want to say that my friend and I got half the grade we would have gotten had we finished the test without cheating, but I definitely remember that she didn’t get in as much trouble as I did. I found out later that the teacher was a friend of my friend’s mom. The quotation marks around “best friend” were not accidental. We didn’t speak after that and actually became frenemies until I moved to the US three or four years later.

Why that memory and why now? I don’t know. All I know is that the test did not matter almost twenty years later, and that friend got pregnant at seventeen and posted a lot of selfies on Facebook last I checked when I still had a Facebook account years ago. I know you’re not supposed to get pettily happy about things like that, that motherhood can come at any age and in any circumstance as long as the woman is happy and sees the child as a blessing. But, on behalf of that little girl who wrote “zero” to make sure she learned a lesson, I’m pretty happy I turned out nothing like that former best friend.

That was not the first or only instance of unfairness that Little Vanessa would experience, and certainly not the first or only instance of pain or panic symptoms at not being the best, brightest or best behaved.

What Little Vanessa did not know at that time, however, was that she would come to a place where such unfairness wasn’t so blatant, where tests were better administered and she would be protected from being manipulated into helping a friend cheat. Little Vanessa would come to have opportunities, to go to university although her family was in no position to help her pay for her education. Little Vanessa would come to speak three languages, an asset that would set her apart wherever she went and at every job she had. Little Vanessa would even learn to drive a car that she owns herself, which she would drive on bad days while singing along to the best of All Time Low to cheer her up.

Adult Vanessa, however, still struggles with the realities of being an immigrant, struggling to always be grateful to a country that has done so much for her yet has behaved so heinously throughout history, even as recent as the past four years. Kids in cages, police brutality, the student loan system… all that lives in the same system that gave Adult Vanessa the opportunity to think differently, to question ideas that would have been a given in Ecuador had she grown up there. Can a place that supported Adult Vanessa in getting a master’s degree in another country be the same place that does not support other immigrants who don’t have the privilege of migrating legally? To the point where they’re denied health insurance and are disproportionately dying from this unforgiving virus?

The answer is yes. Yes, it can be the same place. And that is the biggest way I celebrated my immigration anniversary this year: by accepting that two things can be true at the same time, and that my experience could have easily been different and harsher if I happened to belong to any other marginalized group. For that, I’m thankful. For the ability to be critical yet appreciative of my experience. To even have the right and privilege of speaking my truth.

Have I Seen Too Much?

In what has become a biweekly tradition, I will start this post with a poor excuse.

I haven’t neglected this space and have actually thought about this entry for about a week, but I haven’t gotten around to actually writing it because… life. Life and its many commitments (one of them being jury duty) and my newfound journey into being kinder to myself and unlearning the “I must work hard to earn time off” mindset.

A week and a bit ago, I did two things on the same day that were unrelated at the time but now I can’t think of one without thinking of the other. For one thing, I finished re-watching all of Sex and the City on HBO Max (honestly, adding that subscription to my roster probably contributed to my ~~neglecting~~, ~~procrastinating~~, not writing). For another, I went to a haunted forest for the first time in my life.

How are these two things related? In the first Sex and the City movie, Carrie and Miranda are walking around a Duane Reade looking for a Halloween costume for Miranda. As the two women browse the aisles side by side, a small child wearing a mask jumps out at Carrie to try to scare her, only for her to be unfazed.

“You can’t scare me after everything I’ve been through,” she says as the boy’s mom ushers him out of the way. I’m paraphrasing, but the point was that (spoiler alert?), after being left at the altar earlier in the year, she was not moved by an obnoxious child left unsupervised.

Although the remark is obnoxious itself and very Carrie-esque, I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I was, also, unfazed when walking through the haunted forest.

I couldn’t help but wonder, had I also seen too much?
(See what I did there?)

It has been nagging at me for over a week why I wasn’t scared at the prospect of hiking through a trail, in the relative dark, knowing there were things waiting to jump out and scare me. It was a very odd time to have a first-time experience of any kind, but those who had been during normal (read: not COVID) times told me that actors usually get very close to you, getting right in your face in their creepy costumes and forcing you to stop when you really should keep going. In COVID-19 times, of course, anything closer than 6 feet wasn’t advisable or safe, so no one came too close to me other than other hikers. To make up for that, it looked like the organizers put more budget toward the machines and scenery rather than rely on actors to navigate the trail themselves. One of the first few settings was a pitch-black tunnel that, every few minutes, lit up to show a giant fake spider with strobe lights behind it.

After the spider, there were haunted churches, a haunted cottage setting with two hillbilly farmers with chainsaws chasing us (with a 6-foot lead), a haunted pumpkin patch, a freak show section, a haunted museum section, a spaceship section with alien actors running around, ending with an escaped convicts section with a metal song playing loudly in a loop. Sections to overwhelm the senses and scare you, as the announcer said when we went in.

Except… I wasn’t overwhelmed or scared. I was alert. My heart beat faster, my body’s reaction to perceived danger, but I did not let out one scream. I kept walking, leaving my crowd behind a few times, letting my eyes scan my surroundings and stepping around actors clearly positioning themselves to jump out at the next patron. I was uncomfortable in confined spaces and refused to go first when going through doors (although I inexplicably led the way when we first walked into the trail), and that was the only expected reaction I saw in myself all night.

So, why was I not scared and just alert? It is the nature of my anxious disposition that I do not like not knowing what to expect from something or someone, so why was I happy to walk in first? Comparatively, I was very anxious and nervous when I went in for jury duty on Friday, since I’d never done it before, I didn’t know what to expect and I was afraid of getting something wrong.

I did some digging, and the research done so far added to the confusion instead of providing an answer. The least-contradicting source was this Huffpost article that isn’t too recent and is about scary movies, but at least it’s very much pre-pandemic so that’s as reliable as I’ll get for now. According to this article, there are a few reasons people don’t get scared while watching scary movies:

They experience the stress that the adrenaline causes differently, almost enjoying the reaction.
They are not highly sensitive people.
They may have experienced fear and discomfort (from age-appropriate scary movies and attractions) from a young age, so they’re more or less used to it.
They enjoy connecting with others over being scared.

I do not fit into any of these, starting with my last entry on my realization that I may just be a highly sensitive person. I do not enjoy the stress reaction of being scared, as the near panic attacks I get when I see a rodent or I’m somewhere higher than the first floor would indicate.

Going back to my Sex and the City connection, perhaps I have seen too much. There is a lot of trauma and Trauma I’ve experienced, like anyone and everyone, and it takes specific stressors and fears to trigger an adrenaline- and panic-led response.

Knowing that everyone in the haunted forest was an actor and wasn’t allowed to get closer than 6 feet for their own and my safety didn’t scare me but, rather, gave me a task: to finish the hike.

I saw It: Part Two recently, so I knew that killer clowns are in vogue and very much not real, but seeing a rat in the streets of Baltimore on Saturday night sent me into a near panic and walking faster to the car.

Walking through the haunted cemetery section, eyes alert and open to dodge the next actor, only meant that I had to walk the trail and watch out for loose branches that may have tripped me. That isn’t nearly as terrifying and anxiety-inducing as the paralyzing fear I feel in my gut when I think of any illness, accident or disease that could affect my dad as he gets older and isn’t in the shape he was 16 years ago when I started living with him full time.

So, after doing skimpy research, reflecting and writing this post, I’m still not any closer to figuring out why I wasn’t at all scared during a sensory-overload experience meant to overwhelm and scare. At least I know I have the capability to be scared, paralyzed and overwhelmed. I have but to think of standing on a rooftop with mice and rats scurrying around my feet while my dad is being rushed to the hospital to feel my heart race and ears ring, like the actors wanted me to feel while walking through the haunted forest.

Orchid

Bloom where you are planted.

If a flower doesn’t bloom, you don’t change the flower; you change the environment.

You’ve come across both of these inspirational phrases before in times of adversity, or in motivational posters in a doctor’s waiting room.

But what if I’m an orchid?

When orchids are cared for properly, they bloom, wilt and bloom again for years. They require precise conditions to survive and thrive: too much or too little water can harm them; too much or too little light can make them wilt; too much or too little humidity and they won’t bloom another year. Orchids are the flower that you shift your life around to make sure they live, shifting around furniture to let them receive south- and east-facing light, and even adding a humidifier and humidity meter for good measure. Yet sometimes, even with the right amount of light, watering frequency and repotting, orchids don’t bloom.

I have killed many a plant this year, and some haven’t even grown roots. None of them, however, have died out of neglect. I have watered them or removed their water supply if I was advised to. I moved them closer to the sunlight and away from it. I’ve protected them from the cat’s curious reach and let her have free reign of the one that was safe for her (cat grass; a gift for her twelfth birthday). I even tried planting one from scratch: I planted the habanero seeds and tenderly packed the soil before watering it, diligently ensuring that the soil was moist everyday so it could germinate. I watched as two hopeful sprouts emerged from the soil, only to watch them die over the following weeks. I got a miniscule Venus fly trap as a gift and was commanded not to touch it. Only to look at it. Three weeks later, what I tenderly dubbed Cheryl Blossom withered and died a slow death.

There are plenty more plants in my house, plants I’m not the guardian of. These are all thriving: the small aloe vera grows greener every day, promising to have stems large enough to cut for face masks one day. The money tree had a few singed leaves from too much sun exposure, but a careful shift two feet to the left, and he’s growing teeny new leaves. If you sat and watched these plants, they would mock you with their growth. There is even a small red pepper plant that bore a small pepper even though it was left outside all summer, was never repotted and never watered.

Are my dead plants trying to tell me something? To change the environment? That they can’t bloom where they’re planted – they can’t even germinate. Are they a reflection of me and my lack of bloom this year?

Like many a plant optimist, I have said, “This is the last one. If this dies, I’m not getting any more,” only to grieve and flagellate myself for a few weeks at the failure when one more dies before attempting a different kind. I tried my luck at starting an avocado plant from an almost-discarded pit. All guidance said the pit would take two to four weeks to sprout roots, some taking as long as eight weeks. It’s week three, and there aren’t any roots, just tiny white dots forming a ring on the bottom half of the pit, teasing me at becoming roots. This, too, I tenderly look after as much as I (read I) need to and have the common sense to: changing its water once it gets yellowish and ensuring it’s receiving just enough indirect sunlight.

What if this attempt doesn’t bloom either? I have held off giving it a serious name until I see a sprout.

Bloom where you are planted. My dead never-would-be flowers disagree.

What if, like my plants, I can’t bloom where I’m planted? What if I need a different environment? Like an orchid.

I recently read about orchid children and how they take special care to bloom. Most advice is geared toward parents raising sensitive children, even providing a handy 23-question quiz to determine if your child may be sensitive, an orchid. Curious, I took the quiz myself, keeping in mind what I remember I was like as a child and what I’m like now. The threshold for sensitivity in the quiz was 13 – I scored 15. At almost 28, I may have to accept the fact that I’m a highly sensitive person, one who may have been born wired that way and developed into a highly sensitive adult from the trauma and Trauma I’ve endured.

Orchid children are sensitive to their environments and tend to become overwhelmed in loud places, in front of strangers or after a radical, surprise change. Often confused with being shy, a highly sensitive child may prefer to sit in the back of the classroom and not raise their hand even if they know the answer, may be wary around strangers until they get to know them better and may notice the distress of others and withdraw or get upset.

Classic perfectionists, orchids do not do well when told to toughen up, to deal with the stressful environment they’re thrown into. Parenting advice today encourages routines, grounding techniques when the child seems anxious, and balancing the line between letting the child explore, gently pushing them to try new things, and coddling them when they become overwhelmed with a big change. Most of all, parents are encouraged to nurture the highly sensitive capabilities, not belittle them as if they were a weakness.

Because they’re not weaknesses.

By sitting quietly and playing alone, a child can be observant, noticing the colors of the changing leaves or the sounds in the street. Wary of strangers, a highly sensitive teenager may take longer to make friends, but the friendships they form will be lasting and genuine. The sensitive adult who doesn’t participate in workplace banter and watercooler visits may get their work done quicker and be more focused, but will always remember a coworker’s favorite meeting room dessert or ask deep, meaningful questions in meetings that are impactful and useful. The sensitive child will grow up to be an adaptable adult.

Orchid children, like their flower namesake, are highly sensitive to their environment and, if they don’t receive the right care and attention from early on, they grow to view the world as a place to protect themselves from. They learn to always be on survival mode, to retreat when the environment disagrees with them. At least that has been my experience now that I have a term for my personality.

It seems like survival mode hasn’t just been my default this year, but for as far back as I remember. The last time I think I can recall not being in survival mode to some degree was 2015. When I wasn’t constantly thinking, “Just until X happens, then I can breathe easy.” What if my orchid tendencies have been showing through and I just need to find the right environment to bloom out of survival mode?

“Watch me while I bloom,” sings Hayley Williams in the eponymous Watch Me While I Bloom. But orchids don’t bloom on command. When is it my turn to bloom? What does my “blooming” environment look like and how can I get there?

Maybe I’ll get an orchid when I find out.

An Update, Six Months On

When I joined the blogging community, I was conscious of the crowded space I was joining and how difficult it would be to stand apart from the rest. Although that was never my main intention, I knew that most of my voice would be lost in the void. It would have been nice to be noticed, but I never started this blog for anyone other than myself.

I’ve been noticeably absent for a while, and I have to admit that I’ve only given this blog a passing thought this week. Two weeks ago, I prioritized paid work again, and thought I would devote some attention this past week. Then I sprained my wrist.

The sprain doesn’t keep me from typing (obviously), but it did make the beginning of the week kind of painful. I have a brace now that slows me down in everything including typing and writing long-hand, so I have been preoccupied with that this week, doing the bare minimum to go about my daily life while being mindful of activities that may make the pain worse and recovery longer.

If we trace back the order of events that led to this long-healing, irritating injury, it’s COVID related, which is obvious. COVID has also affected the life of this blog and the plan I had for it earlier in the year. Like it has affected many a thing around the world.

Long story short, I was doing a boxing workout using my at-home gym. I’m being generous – my at-home gym is a freestanding punching bag in the yard. I’ve been using the without major issue all summer (it’s a great stress relief), last week I threw a punch the wrong way (or the right way, if I’m optimistic that I hit too hard) and I sprained my wrist. During that same workout, I under-rotated a kick and hit the top of my foot against the hard part of the bag, but (miraculously) my foot was spared any damage.

Where does COVID come into all of this? The only reason I got the punching bag was because I didn’t feel comfortable going back to the gym once it was allowed to open after quarantine, so I figured I’d add a fun way to workout to my routine. A sprained wrist and constantly-bruised knuckles later…

Besides my workout routine, COVID has impacted my writing schedule, aims and goals. Because I’m always home now, endless distractions, chores and lack of discipline has affected what I envisioned as a weekly task. I planned on working on the new novel (and that’s still a goal), but one of the new aims for this blog is now exploring my writing style and habits, and that often means deviating from the content plan I created at the beginning of the year. Not to mention that lockdown drove my friend to create The Artist’s Way group. After finishing the workbook, I know that what I learned informs how I write and create in general, which means I’ve had to be flexible with my content plan.

I worry that the more I write about this, the more this will sound like an excuse for why I haven’t bothered to write for two weeks, and why I haven’t touched my novel in even more weeks. However, this is the best I can do with my current circumstances, and maybe tomorrow will be different. After all, now that boxing workouts are out of the question for a while, my afternoons are free (until I find another way of gym-free working out that I enjoy) and I will make a conscious effort to write more, even if it’s just a few paragraphs.

If I don’t, no one else will. Or, what’s worse, someone else may.

The Baby Incident

It has been almost two weeks since I wrote last.

Well, wrote and published would be more accurate. I’ve been doing plenty of writing, not least for the daily and weekly tasks for The Artist’s Way. I realize now that I haven’t talked about that much on here and now the group I’m doing it with and myself are almost two weeks away from completing it.

The Artist’s Way is about healing, healing one’s creative self and allowing it to flourish and be the guide for our creativity after it’s healed and unblocked. A few weeks ago, one of the tasks was to think of ways to forgive ourselves, to acknowledge whatever the situation was, remember it and let it pass as something we can’t control and to forgive ourselves. Since my biggest self-flagellation weapon of choice is being too hard on myself, I remembered ways I’d been too harsh about my writing, berating myself for not being productive at every instance of downtime I had, feeling guilty for taking out any sort of free time without feeling like I’ve earned it.

This week, as I took two days off work to not exactly go on vacation or disconnect but to be away from my desk (currently writing from the couch), I tried to allow myself the luxury of not planning my time off to the minute and to allow myself to recharge. I realized I hadn’t posted in a while, and when I went back to my content calendar to find planned posts I’d skipped over in the past few weeks, I found another way I like to self-flagellate: ruminating on embarrassing stories.

Those embarrassing stories that nag at you, bouncing around your head and making you wish you could go back and pull yourself away to spare yourself and those around you. Unfortunately, by allowing myself downtime to do nothing, my brain came across this memory from last Christmas, one that still makes me cringe and want to hide under a rock. In a hole somewhere. Close to the center of the Earth. Inside a locked room.

So, enjoy. It’s not fiction today, but storytelling, which I enjoy doing just as much, although I do wish the story itself were fiction and had never taken place outside my own brain…

Image of an adorned Christmas treeing the foreground, with two people blurred out in the background. — Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash

December 2019. A Christmas party. Not a work Christmas party, but a colleague’s of my mom’s. A direct report of my mom’s. This is important to the rest of the story.

My whole family, including my sister’s boyfriend, was invited, and I was grateful I wouldn’t need to drive everyone home at the end of the night. I started drinking, buzzed on being at the only Christmas party I’d been to that year more than on the free-flowing, self-poured mixed drinks. I didn’t know a great many people, and I was self-conscious that I’d come in as part of a crowd made only ore conspicuous by the fact that my sister was on crutches (she’d broken her foot weeks earlier). The solution to that was, of course, drinking and mingling with those people I did know.

No, this isn’t a story about my making an ass of myself by drinking too much and dancing on a table at a practical stranger’s house party, a practical stranger that would have to see my mom at work come Monday. I knew that going in and I knew to behave myself, to be polite, to introduce myself and be chatty enough. However…

I tried keeping to my crowd, talking to my mom’s manager whom I’d met before. She is talkative by nature and wasn’t drinking as she’d come with her young daughter, so she provided as much conversation fuel as I’d needed. The night went on with party games, raffles and nibbles, and I was even more self-conscious when my crowd kept winning prizes. A stuffed animal here, a reusable water cup there and we were one number away from winning a scanner-printer. I felt people staring and their spiteful thoughts at the back of my head – but I just liked winning free stuff so much…

The first slip happened as some groups started leaving, those with young kids. The living room emptied and there was more room to sit. One of the hosts shouted over my head to those behind me, “Before you head out, let’s do a Sherwood picture.”

Sherwood sounded familiar. It’s the high school up one of the main roads in the city, in the more affluent side of the county. I heard once, forever ago, that while some high schools had yearbook spreads of students with cars, Sherwood had a spread of the best student cars, with Mercedes and BMWs making the cut while Subarus and below didn’t.

This memory played in my head as I said, “Oh cool, you guys went to Sherwood. I went to Wheaton.”

I realized I hadn’t talked to this host much, so in my drunk mind this was my way of making conversation. Sober me would have noticed that he was busy entertaining and organizing his guests for a picture. Sober me would have stayed quiet, especially after his reply came.

“Yes, but forever ago,” he said without meeting my eyes, preoccupied with assembling the crowd.

Drunk me caught the slip, too. Of course. These people were older than me, not by much, but significantly enough that they were obviously adultier than me. By my calculations and by my mom’s intel, they were in their mid- to late-thirties. They had missed my high school years by a lot for me to casually want to spark a conversation about where we went to high school. Even talking about where we went to college would have been too far removed.

If I could have shrank and melted into my seat, with my drink in hand, I would have.

As it often does while you’ve been drinking, time started moving in quick bursts, and my actions were erratic. My crowd and I moved to the garage, where I was told there was a ping pong table and a photobooth. That occupied my time for a while, though I couldn’t say then or now how long it actually was. If I were skilled enough to learn Photoshop, those pictures would be edited to look like they were taken over many occasions, not one monopolized instance. Our crowd was big enough that we monopolized the ping pong table and darts board in the room, but we were conscious of that fact and kept ourselves out of the way, long enough for a young couple and their baby to come and take pictures at the photobooth.

Reader, this is where the story turns.

The baby didn’t look older than one year old, year and a half to guesstimate high. He wore a red onesie that would have looked adorable on anyone else, but it looked particularly striking against his white complexion and blue eyes. His parents held him and took picture after picture, trying to get him to look at the camera. My drunk self tried to be helpful, momentarily forgetting that I did not know these people and that I do not like babies. I was being obnoxious. I tried to get the baby’s attention, suddenly stopping when I realized I was cooing at him like I do at my dog, but luckily by that point the parents decided that they had gotten enough pictures and thanked me, much more gracefully than I deserved.

After they left the room, my dad started ushering the rest of us back to the living room too, trying to herd us like drunk cats. I sat with my parents for what felt like half an hour but could have easily been an hour or two minutes. They were waiting for my sister and her boyfriend to finish taking pictures and join us in the living room so we could grab our coats and go home, as I learned later on.

My parents chatted with the host who had invited us, my mom’s direct report, and it wasn’t necessarily shop talk. The young couple from the photobooth were with us in the living room, too, changing the baby and getting him out of the red onesie.

“We have one more Christmas party to go to, and this outfit has to last that long,” the mom said and chuckled. She handed the baby to the host, who was sitting next to me.

He hugged the baby as he sat on his lap and said, “I really want one.” My mom chuckled at that and the young parents continued to gather their stuff and rearrange the baby bag.

When the host turned slightly away from me to chat to the young parents, I tried my attempt at a joke. I looked at the baby, looked at parents and, very deliberately, scooted away from the child, as if I were repelled by him. I continued to look at him over my shoulder, aware I still had my audience, and scooted away a little more. The mom grabbed the baby away from the momentary sitter at that time, and I turned and giggled at my parents.

“Let me get you guys’ coats,” the host said and stood up, leaving me in plain view of the mom as she tried to put the baby in the car seat. I looked as she strapped him in, wincing a bit as the baby started wailing, not wanting to sit outside someone’s arms.

“I’m just going to leave this right here,” she said to me, pointing to the car seat on the couch next to me. “Is that okay?”

“Oh yeah, totally,” I said, casually and very much oblivious to her tone.

She went to grab her and her husband’s coats from the host’s arms, and they were gone shortly after, wailing baby with them.

Drunk me thought I was being funny. Drunk me was doing a bit about not liking babies and being put off by them. Drunk me did not see how that “joke” could have come off completely different to another audience with higher stakes on the butt of the joke than I had.

Before she left, the mom saw me inch away from her child, who wasn’t doing anything other than sitting and looking around at things he didn’t have names for yet. I was repelled by an innocent child who was doing nothing. To her, I was offensive.

I’d learn this weeks later, well after Christmas, too late to realize my mistake but soon enough to be full of shame. I tried to rationalize my behavior, to excuse it, really. Parents shouldn’t expect their child to be well-liked everywhere, especially not if they come across me. Parents shouldn’t expect people at parties to want to hold their child or want to hear stories about the latest development milestone, especially not me.

But every parent should expect their child to be well-received, not offended like I had done, joke or not.

We’re closer to a new Christmas and I’m still haunted by my behavior at that last Christmas party, with the baby incident only the culmination of embarrassing behavior of the evening. I was the boss’ daughter, acting out and showing off like a spoiled child, earning disapproval for her and for me, for our whole family.

Before COVID and its ramifications, my mom said we’d already been invited to the host’s yearly pool party in the summer. I had been thinking of ways to get out of this invitation since I received it, not wanting to own up to my mom that I was still embarrassed about the baby incident, and wanting even less to run into the young family again. They were close friends of the hosting couple, and they would no doubt be at the pool party, and an apology from me wasn’t enough or needed at this point. Of course, that’s a moot point now.

All I know is that even if we’re invited again, even if it’s two years from now and it’s safe to gather again, I will not be going. They probably forgot about the incident by now or would have done by then, and I would like to keep it that way.

For what it’s worth: Graham, Graham’s mom and dad, I’m very sorry.