Our Worries: A #MeToo Narrative

Make a ghost of your poise.

It is a wonder that the fleshed-out female body is both so ghostly and alive. The script that has written itself over this sedimentary stack of skin and bones is that of time, is that of wear, is that of climactic change. I often sit quietly to study the ghosts that surround me, but of course those opaque forms that find themselves present before me, that of course is not the whole story. How far back do we go?

Inside you is a mother wounded from the death of her mother.

Inside her is a mother who never recovered from the birth of her children.

The traumas are not all mine. But what we inherit, we pass on. The wounds cannot always be seen, are often forgotten but somehow felt. I think about the concept of han and how this speaks to more than just the presence of a historical trauma. It manages to weave together the presence of an unresolved corporeal history and the impossibility of articulation or expression in relation to questions of experience, loss, shame, guilt. Sometimes, one can feel guilty for being alive. Sometimes, one can feel guilty for having merely survived.

We learn bodily ire from our mothers—how to run out of our own flesh—

My mother claimed that her psoriasis started the day after I was born. I used to have beautiful legs, she would say. Now they are destroyed. This is the price of motherhood. I learned to hate my body from my mother. She would make me walk around the house with stacks of books on my head. Good for your posture, she would say. You've got walk straight, with your shoulders back. Show that you're a confident woman, but not too confident. She would make me walk straight lines, pointing at painted white lines on the asphalt and instructing me to put one foot forward, then the next. As I tried to correct my duck-footed gait, I could hear: Keep your feet straight. No man is going to want a duck for a wife. My mother also instructed me to pinch my nose when I was idle. Asian girls sometimes have pig noses, she had told me, and to insure that I would mature with a small, narrow nose rather than a wide, fat one, I would constantly pinch my nose with my fingers, as if I had a nosebleed.

I was taught bowing all the way toward those walks in evenings:

I never knew how benign standing upright was, until I did it one day.

We inevitably learn how to survive from our mothers, not only from them, but through them, by surviving daughterhood, by surviving their by persisting.

Carefree is one form of amnesia.

As a child I admired those outgoing, carefree white girls. I didn't understand my shyness, my worries, my constant anxieties. What was wrong with me? Why couldn't I just be confident like those other girls? I was so shy I was afraid to raise my hand during class to ask for permission to go to the bathroom, would risk peeing my pants, would always have a sweatshirt on hand to tie around my waist to cover the urine stains, and walk home crying and ashamed. The constant worrying must come from my mother, I thought. My mother, who was tall and beautiful, had constantly reminded me that I had only inherited the worst traits from my parents: my mother's wide feet and my father's thick legs. Little did I know how right I really was, how closely linked to survival these feelings of perpetual discomfort were, how necessary, how torturous, how cruel.

At what age do we

talk to our children about when

to fuck, why to take changes, and how to

outlive love? Who encoded the planned

obsolescence of an emotion?

What my mother taught me about sex was to avoid it at all costs. Men are all wolves, she would say...