My roundabout journey to finding myself

Or, how a girly-girl grew up to be androgynous and wild

There was a time when I wanted my breasts to grow. At age nine, I voraciously read books like The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls and The Girls’ Book of Glamour. I was a tiny, delicately-framed girl, so stereotypically Chinese-American: smart and unathletic, passionately honest and rule-abiding, good at maths and at piano. People thought that I was pretty and cute, a paragon of a good child. I was my parents’ treasure, a role-model eldest child, their beaming pride.

But I was tired of being a good Chinese “little girl.” Inspired by these books that I treated almost as Bibles of becoming, I threw myself whole-heartedly into the project of learning to be a tweenage American “girly girl.” I wanted to be mature, a grown-up girl. I argued with my mother about clothing choices, rejecting her preference of cuteness and pastels and demanding sequins and fuchsia and bikini swimsuits (she eventually let me wear a “tankini” instead). I set my sights on becoming one with the “popular girls” in school, not really because I wanted to be popular (I was already a well-known and generally respected kid because of my academic and musical talents), but because those rich white girls were the best model for my thoroughly assimilationist aspirations.

This was the age when I consciously stopped speaking Chinese at home as frequently as I did prior, when I learned to dislike Chinese school though I was a passionate learner of languages. Having learned that my Western zodiac sign was Leo, I made myself to be buoyant and extraverted, a leader and lioness. I had my first ever — and only — birthday party at age 10; it was Hawaiian-themed and at my house, where I invited a bunch of my female classmates over. But when the organized activities were finished and everyone started casually chatting, I no longer knew how to interact. I realized I was not as naturally social as I wanted myself to be. And in that moment, it hurt.

One of my birthday gifts that year was the novel, The Mysterious Benedict Society. It’s about four kids who are identified as gifted in different ways — most of them intellectually, but one physically and spatially — who are sent on a secret mission to stop an evil genius from brainwashing society. By chance, at around the same time, I was introduced to the book The Gifted Teen’s Survival Guide, which discusses the psychology of academic giftedness and provides resources for students to advocate for themselves in and out of school. I devoured both of these books and became hungry for more.

Gradually I became less extraverted and more introverted, less social and more brooding, fixated upon trying to understand my relation to giftedness. Sometimes I even pretended to be more philosophical than I was at that age, though I definitely was already more so than average. The Gifted Teen’s Survival Guide introduced me to the concept of intensities, also known as overexcitabilities, which some people, especially those who may be identified as gifted, experience. The five basic intensities are intellectual (intense pursuit of knowledge), psychomotor (needing to move when thinking or mentally excited), sensual (intense experience of sensory or aesthetic input), imaginative (intense desire to create), and emotional (intense affective feelings). The book also listed intensities of purpose (needing to achieve a mission), spirit (needing to help others), and soul (needing to seek wisdom and ask deep questions).

All of these have been part of my experience since I was a kid. But it was at this age that I began to let myself show them more unabashedly than before. I let myself pace around when thinking, cry when I thought about the ill-functioning of the world, and delight in the senses and imagination. I began to have more emotional struggles than before, as I let myself think and feel more. I even became anxious about public speaking, even though during my girly phase I had been exuberant with any presentation I gave.

My elementary school guidance counselor encouraged my exploration of giftedness just as she did my exploration of girly-ness, even though both were intense. I am so happy that she did, for I would not be who I am today without these passionate explorations. They were both my way of trying to understand my relationship with the labels that society gave me. What does it mean to be labelled as a girl (especially an American one)? What does it mean to be labelled as intellectually gifted? Though by the time I was in middle school, I became embarrassed about my “girly” and “gifted” phases because they seemed so extreme and in some ways artificial, they were the thesis to my later antithesis, my renunciation of the concept of labels.

Middle school me got into trouble with my teachers for correcting them, had emotional breakdowns during class, and struggled to connect with peers. At this age, I was obsessed with psychology, and I began to form some hypotheses about myself. I wondered if I was autistic. I wondered if my teenage moodiness might later develop into bipolar. I read about (binary) transgender children, and I became fascinated with how confident these often very young children were about their genders. I wondered what toddler me would have said if I ever had been asked about my gender identity.

I ended up being put into the Student Assistance Program (called CARES in my school district) because a lot of people began to worry about my emotional and social issues. The CARES coordinator was an amazing woman who in her office gave me space to be myself, where I could develop a self beyond labels. I remember one day I said to her, “I think I have anxiety.” She responded that I did not have to think of anxiety as a thing I have, but rather an experience I pass through. Perhaps some people might hear that as invalidating, but for me, it was powerful and freeing. I could be more anxious than most, but all emotional states will pass.

So with the guidance of the CARES coordinator, I began to develop a self independent of labels, social or diagnostic. I came up with paradoxical, poetic ways of describing myself: a logical psycho (flip it around!), a spiritual intellectual. I became more confident in myself and in my self-expression, within the limits of my environment. If I had the freedom to explore masculine self-expression or more overt autistic stimming, I probably would have. That was not yet an option, but still I grew.

I continued to be indifferent to social labels for myself when I was in high school. I didn’t strongly identify with my assigned gender, but I also didn’t really identify with my race. I wanted to be free of labels, including that of political orientation: although my friends were mostly liberals or progressives, I did not want to choose a political identity without first considering all the different perspectives. And though I believed that I could be diagnosed with some psychological condition, I did not want a diagnostic label to affect my sense of self.

I realize now that this desire to be free of labels was partly due to the marginal, ambiguous nature of my true identity. I knew that I didn’t feel like a typical Asian girl, so having no other option, I quietly distanced myself from both identities. My mixed neurodivergence also made it hard to identify with prototypical examples of autism or ADHD. Only after I got to know my non-binary and neuroqueer identities in college would I be able to reclaim my Asian identity, in my own neuroqueer way.

Yet all these different stages of identity are still part of me in some way. The boldness of my “girly” stage and the contemplativeness of my “gifted” stage have become core to my personality. And even as I claim and embrace social labels as part of my identity, I really prefer my own language to describe myself: yin yang ren, a person of yin and yang, of bountiful ambidextrous energy.

In many ways, my internalized, ageist desire to appear more mature obscured my neuroqueerness as a child. Because I wanted to be more mature, fourth-grade me desired curves and femininity so that I could be treated like an older girl. And in middle and high school, my clothing styles often imitated the business casual of my female teachers, again because I wanted to look more mature, which at that time meant less teenager-ish. But once I entered college at age 18, I no longer had to perform “maturity.” I was already considered an adult, so why did I have to prove that I was one? Instead, I found a new freedom in dressing in a boyish manner and allowing myself to be more playful and childlike. Because I could never be myself as a child, I started craving the childhood that I never had.

People’s journeys to finding their true selves go in many different ways. My journey has in some ways been all over the place, one year declaring myself X and then the next year deciding that I’m Y. I used to feel ashamed about this, thinking that, for example, my childhood “girly” stage contradicted my more recent belief that I was non-binary. But there is nothing wrong with exploration. Indeed, I feel more full in myself having explored all that I have.