the fantasies of what you don’t want

make sure to reset the flavor of your dreams

Everyone thinks “fantasy” is always “something positive” something you desire and yearn for that’s “good-coded.” This is actually not always the case. A fantasy is simply a tapping into the unreal, the illusion, excess from your psyche. A fantasy can also be a desire can be something really horrible. When you worry constantly about someone killing you, that’s a fantasy too ya know.

I fantasize about what I don’t want probably more than what I want. I curl into the fetal position and rock and rock and rock.

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Lately, I’m remembering things I tried to forget. Like how Mom used to tell me, good Chinese girls should not be outgoing. Good Chinese girls should not be talkative, not be philosophical, not think about the big picture. You should be “normal.” You should live a “normal” life. You should not be a burden. You are a burden when you talk a lot, when you’re too interesting, when you’re not mysterious enough.

It wasn’t even about “how to find a husband.” That was part of it. But more so, it was literally also her conception of being a non-inconvenience, someone easy to model, someone like her view of herself.

I tried to be “proper” all the time, always wanting to monitor Mommy’s emotions, always wanting to be “good,” always wanting to fit in, and failed miserably, got put in time out for reasons I couldn’t understand when I cried about it so much my elementary school teachers couldn’t figure out what was wrong, freaked out about it for years confident that God would knock at my door one day and tell me I was unfit to continue living.

When I got my period in fourth grade, months before I even learned what menstruation was, I was convinced I’d done something bad and I’d be scolded for surely almost killing myself. It’d go away after a week and come back. On month 4, I shakingly told my mom that I was pretty sure I was dying because blood kept coming out of my pee pee.

“Oh,” she said, “that’s pretty normal, don’t worry. I guess you got your period early.” She gave me a pad. I sat with my renewed lease on life, but still never having shared my dark secret — “I feel like if I mess up, you’re going to keep not loving me and I’m going to keep fearing I will die.”

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Now when I fear I’ve been improper, when I’ve been audacious, I look around in fear that some Big Other authority is going to scold me and punish me for being myself. I feel malnourished, hot, anxious, nervous, desperate for satiation, unable to get redemption. I self soothe by sitting on the couch or walking around Manhattan counting the blocks until I remember I do not live in 2005 anymore.

I fantasize about bad things happening to me to align with how I thought life should’ve turned out.

I try to run fast and fast until I can stop feeling this way. And then I turn my head and I see some Asian girl who’s the ideal of the one who deserves love, insofar as my mom would prophecy. And fuck the fantasy comes in of who should’ve been her daughter. Someone who’s mysterious, cool, image-focused, practical, dainty, quiet, someone who’s easy to be around, someone who will mommy you without needing anything from you, someone who is helpless without being a liability, deserves the validation of this monstrous voice in my head that goes, see, you couldn’t even be like that if you tried… how pathetic.

Maybe that’s the kind of girl that deserves the love I wanted so bad.

Suddenly, another fantasy of my mom’s ideal daughter goes out of my head, and now she’s my lover’s ideal woman. An image of who is most convenient for him to love and adore, someone who doesn’t need anything, someone who’s just there to appease and please and exist as an avatar for pleasure, not a real, overly candid, mopey, sad bitch like me!

My mouth gapes with horror. Every Asian woman I’ve seen myself be replaced by my whole life because I’m a liability, because my feelings are too real, because I myself am too intense swims in front of my face. I wish to escape. Some days I can. Recently, I can’t. Recently, after deciding I didn’t want to live in a world where I need the approval of people who are never, ever going to get it, all the memories flooded back of the times I wanted love and tried to make myself so small that maybe I’d get an inch. That didn’t work.

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Now I try to live bigger. Just in case I can escape.

I wake up screaming from nightmares that even the people I love now can’t handle the real me, that these people who shower me with adoration will one day leave me too, because maybe it is too good to be true and maybe I am too big for this world and I will have to live treacherously, arduously, and in a lonely perview.

When I feel loved, it feels less bad. Because I didn’t try to be someone I’m not, yet those who saw more now have stayed. When my friend hands me an extra lemon bun, when I get head pats from my roommates, when I’m at a party and everyone wants to hear what I have to say, when you turn to softly grin at me from your position by the sink, I remember suddenly how I am working on escaping this prophecy anyway.