Dec. 2023: My hair is rainbow

Looking back on years of becoming

Dec 29, 2023

Dear friends,

I write from my parents’ house, where the four members of the Zheng family have been gathering for this end-of-year season. The Christmas gift exchange was lively (that and the tree are pretty much the only things we do of Christmas). Even the cat got gifts. I received my yearly gift of irrelevant fashion from my mother, as well as a Squishmallow caterpillar that I have named Cilia because she looks more like a round eukaryotic cell with hairlike projections. And I daringly gifted my father a self-help book for paranoia, because we all know that he has his problems, too.

Not a day passes without my parents trying to give me advice about my “condition.” However that is defined now, for I am such a soup of neurodivergence. Two weeks ago, in the span of three days, I had an autistic shutdown and a meltdown, both in public, from sensory overwhelm. What’s worse is that during the shutdown, someone called the police on me, so just when I had mostly recovered, I now had to anxiously convince two medics that I did not need to be taken to the ER, which I know from experience is a sensory nightmare. Luckily the medics let me be, but this is why if you see someone who might need some help, it’s best to first try asking them what sort of help would be desired.

Contradictorily, I want to tell my parents, “I am not like you; stop talking as if you know how my brain works,” but also, “I am like you, I come from you; will you not get to know yourselves?” They are not interested in weaving an origin story of the weirdness that we obviously share. They are not interested in weirdness, because all their lives have required them to assimilate to normal.

Anecdote 1: Rainbow hair

A couple weeks ago, while chatting with my mother, I told her that I think I’m autistic.

My mother, in Mandarin, said, “Stop talking about you having all these problems!”

Now, the term for “problem” that she used was 毛病, mao bing, literally “hair sickness,” basically meaning that you’re making a big problem out of a little hair.

So I responded to my mother, in Mandarin, “My hair is rainbow! It’s not a hair sickness, it’s just rainbow hair!”

Or in Mandarin: “我的毛是彩虹的，不是毛病，是彩虹毛！”

Which ends up being a perfect Chinese-specific metaphor for the neurodivergence paradigm (or for queer liberation).

Earlier this month, I posted an essay on my attempts to figure out if any of my relatives are “weird” like me. It’s one of my favorite essays that I’ve written:

Narratives

My Neuroqueer kin

Margin Tianya Zheng

December 8, 2023

“Ba, is your oldest sister like me?” I ask my father about one of my aunts, his oldest younger sister, who is the only child of his family to have never attended college. She dreamt of being a fashion designer and left high school to try to chase her dreams, but was unable to achieve them due to her family’s poor rural background. In adulthood, she ran…

Read full story

The memorial concert on Dec. 4th for Nathan Moore went well. My performance was really not my best technique-wise, as I was unusually nervous to the extent that my hands were shaking, but it carried intention. In the second half of the piece, I sang and played at the same time, singing a wordless prayer of hope. Before I performed, I shared a few words about how Nathan’s spirit accompanied me in my own crisis, and how we must extend light and grace to everyone, for we don’t fully know what they are going through.

Afterwards, a student came up to me and said that I spoke like a preacher, and that I might consider that line of work. It struck me. It has never been an option for me, as I have not taken interest in religions that have preachers or pastors. But I was always very inspired by the story of Leonard Bernstein, whose father wanted him to be a rabbi, but who fulfilled a rabbinical mission through music. And yet my artistic identity has recently felt so diffuse. My formal training is in piano and in composition, but when I create, I so instinctively tap into voice, language, embodied expression, even visual art at times, that I really no longer feel like just a musician.

Anecdote 2: Led by a calling

I once asked my middle school general music teacher, “Why did you pursue a career in music?”

He answered, “Do you know what a religious calling is?”

I answered “sort of,” so he explained what a calling was, and said, “That’s what it’s like for me.”

It was in that moment that I realized, the only way I could do anything, was to be led by a spiritual calling.

In the beginning of January, I’m participating in Pig Iron Theatre’s annual workshop “Something from Nothing,” in which I will be learning Pig Iron’s method of creating ensemble-devised theatre. This is really exciting, as I’ve never had formal training in theater, but I loved collaborative creation in a course on performance art that I took during my last semester of college. I’m nervous about if my artistic background is a little unusual for the workshop, but it seems that the participants have a variety of skills and interests. I’m ready to learn something new!

The disruptions to my life that my mental health struggle has caused have given me time to think about and recalibrate my life goals. I started to have a strong sense of what my dream career would be. I dream of teaching/facilitating at a non-traditional school that values self-directed learning (there are many different types, but they’re often called “free” or “democratic” schools). And alongside that work, I want to be pursuing creative projects in whatever ways I feel called to, without the pressure of having to specialize in a particular artistic skill. Maybe this is too idealistic, but at least I know what I am aiming for and what skills I need to develop to reach my goals.

Anecdote 3: Spiritual or biochemical?

There were a lot of weird occurrences in the first semester of my sophomore year in college. After all, I was growing into myself during a pandemic, a time of reckoning for social justice, and a period of rapid changes in my bodymind that I could not fully understand.

But after a period of three days of extremely weird happenings, my therapist urged me to see a psychiatrist. I don’t think she understood what was going on; I think she was worried and just did all she knew to do.

Yet I did not feel that I needed a psychiatrist. I had just had a number of experiences that felt spiritually significant, and I felt that I needed help to process what was to me a call for deep spiritual transformation. Indeed, instead of seeking medical help, I emailed a philosophy professor whose work resonated with me and who I thought might have a useful perspective on what I was experiencing.

Later, during the winter break, I did seek a psychiatrist. It was easier for me to consider medications when my brain felt decidedly “broken” than when it was intensely occupied with meaning. And years later, I look back at this juncture in my life, and I think that I was right, and my therapist was right, all at once.

There are many perspectives on mental/spiritual health. The key, for me, is to not be too absorbed in any one.

As 2023 comes to a close, I am processing through all that the year has brought me. I feel stronger about who I am than I ever have before. I feel clearer about my strengths and my kryptonites, and I experience my Madness and neurodivergence in a more nuanced and meaningful way. I graduated from college, successfully completing two majors (which almost didn’t happen — a story for sometime later, I suppose). I created some cool art, and I started this Substack when I was manic and inspired, which was one of the best manically inspired decisions I’ve made.

I’ve never been enthusiastic about New Year’s resolutions, as I’ve never trusted myself to keep up a routine or enact a big change in my habits. I will, however, use the turn of the calendar to revive the morning and night routines that I tried to maintain in between my first and second hospitalizations this fall. Focusing on feeding my spirit and soothing my mind (and reminding myself to do basic hygiene like toothbrushing and showering, which can be difficult with my executive dysfunction). And I want to further explore ways to enrich my spiritual life, tasting of different traditions as interests me. For example, in these last few days of the year, I am experimenting with an “energy cleansing” kit that I got from Five Below, with crystals, white sage, and palo santo.

I want to thank you all for accompanying me on the wild journey of life post college graduation. I will continue to write essays and life updates in the new year. And I’d love it if you can comment on my posts, share them with folks (including through social media, if you wish), or even suggest topics for me to write about. A reminder that you can pledge a paid subscription to my newsletter for when I activate the paid option; it will help me to discern when it will be right to open up that option.