The current is something I learned to revere and listen to. It’s the ever shifting expectations and perceptions, changing in shape depending on the setting and regulated by whoever I am in the presence of at the given moment. With the final say in what’s accepted through the filter of internal becoming external. I’ve only recently found the volume knob and I tend to lose it a lot of the time.
I’m pulled into other people’s perceptions of me. Like a tourist experiencing a foreign culture wanting desperately to feel something real and not just observe it.
It’s funny to me I picked to be a performer when I hate being perceived. There was a six-year-old version of me that thought it was cool to be a songwriter, not intimate in any way certainly. I didn’t know what feelings could really feel like yet. I cried when I got hurt and I laughed when I was having fun. A very simple and dependable machine inside, unaffected by whatever was happening outside.
I thought I had peaked at 10 years old. Becoming self-aware in my preteens was my downfall. The shift didn’t happen all at once, but it came through how I saw myself reflected in others.
I was told that I looked like I was angry a lot or that I sounded like I was not having a good time. I took the feedback and fixed a mask for myself. A very heavy, tiring mask to hold up for so long and now it’s hard to differentiate where my face ends and the mask starts.
Expectations became unavoidable and I started understanding the real life connections to those feelings in songs I had once only imagined.
I was so sad and confused why I felt so misunderstood. It felt like I was interested in going one way, but it was a lonely path and the pressure preferred to follow the others instead. I would listen to so much emo music, dissociating while playing Zoo Tycoon on my family computer.
That feeling of being misread would not be an isolated occurrence. Leaving the Midwest for New York was more like a tidal wave of change than the gentle flow of it. My perception of myself was challenged. I was just seen as “Asian” at home and then wasn’t all of a sudden. What am I? I thought I was cool and now I’m a suburban Midwesterner. What the heck.
That version of me takes up a big space in my cauldron of self. No amount of years between seems to be able to tone her down in my head. The origin story of my inner saboteur.
And now, there are versions of myself I encapsulate in a collection of songs that I release every few years and they’re preserved in cyberspace. It’s a bit of a nightmare.
By the time I started releasing music, the need to dissociate or distance myself had taken a more deliberate form. I created a cyborg to talk through on my last record. A helpful first step in being honest but still from the comfort of my concealed being. Performing seemingly unscathed. It left me feeling more like a shell of myself. I was supposed to be the ghost in the shell.
I chose to make music because it doesn’t need words to describe feelings. It conveys in an unspoken language. But I forgot that I had to write lyrics. I could have chosen not to sing, but there’s a part of me that desperately wants to be known.
Acknowledging my feelings puts me in the danger zone. Something that doesn’t feel possible without self-flagellation. I need you to know I know already, so I’m going to tell you up front the worst things about me.
The thought of someone understanding me more than I understand myself scares me deeply. I don’t like figuring things out in front of people. Nobody can know I’m not a master the first time I try something.
The idea that no one perceives you the way you perceive yourself really blew my mind when I first learned about this game-changing information. I was living with the wrong directions for so long. I thought the way of social flow was singular and agreed upon. We all saw each other based on a common frame. Apparently not though. I began to malfunction a bit because how was I supposed to move within something that kept changing shape depending on where I was. I could not please them all. Never crossing my mind the goal was not to please.
Drag queens are a special interest of mine. I like to have drag queen content on my tv at all times. I don’t want to leave room for a single thought of my own to enter my head. I must be consumed by their fully realized voices. Parasocially experiencing the joy of fearless self-expression. It’s addictive to me.
Watching that kind of expression made me reconsider what was possible for myself. Cringe becoming trendy really saved my life too. I was up to my neck in repression and avoidant to my core.
Moving into a time where reality can be bent at the hand of any human or machine. We can’t trust reality on our screens anymore. What’s been generated and what’s real. Weirdly it feels like the perfect opportunity to have fun with life as a human. No need to feel self-conscious of coming off weird when far weirder is out there. Mystery is somewhere I feel comfortable in, but now that reality is mysterious I feel safe to throw things at the wall that’s already been hit in every way possible.
I am releasing my next record that’s meant to be one big vulnerability exercise. I’m trying to let people see me, not just the version shaped by how I’m seen. Writing the record around a time relationships were leaving unwanted prints on me. I wanted to not be affected at all, but I looked back at the last couple of years and realized I had disappeared. I wanted to solidify who I thought I was at that moment so I couldn’t forget and couldn’t be tampered with by others. I could leave a flag that marked it. The current can’t penetrate what’s printed on this record. It’s forced me to accept and respect that version of myself.
It feels deeply personal and rewarding to have documented.
Even as I’ve been learning how it all works, I still want to hide inside with my dog sometimes. The current doesn’t really ask what I want anyway. The difference now is that I can feel it happening around me. I know I’m consumed by it and I know my skin is not impermeable. The filter, though, is now mine to control, and the less I control, the less I am controlled.
