u/PomegranateFast1749

So,I’ve joined this sub for a while but I haven’t really posted anything. I mostly check this sub when I’m going through hard times. This is going to be a bit of a rant. So I’m female,17. I’ve only experienced life between Australia and my birth country(Asian),staying in Australia for my childhood,moving back to my birth country when I was 8 and having plans to move to France for college&currently studying French. It’s definitely not a s much countries or movements as most that I see on this sub,but the Asian country that I currently live in is vastly different from the ‘international western culture’which gave,and continues to give me culture shock that hurts me from the inside even now.
I don’t want to say which country. It’s the motherland. It’s complicated. But a big deal is that the people are inherently racist on a very deep level.(white superiority,etc etc) And I haven’t and still don’t fit into the model of ‘good’ or at least ‘average’ of an average high school student,middle school student, elementary student for a very long time.(Not allowed to drink water in class,no gadgets allowed,strict teachers,all of which I had never encountered in Australia before)Also my grades weren’t that great either. But I knew I wasn’t dumb or anything but the kids here(especially elementary) were really mean about it,but at the same time they also loved white western culture,(YouTube memes reposted on our internet, they loved throwing in a few English phrases even though they were terrible at it etc etc. But at the same time if you ‘speak a lot of English’ it’s often seen as showing off and people are mean about it too.)So it was really,(the English word for this isn’t quite accurate but)*alienating*. The whole experience. They loved English speakers with their ‘funny humor’ that they had to learn throw rounds of ‘grammar’ analysis and thick Asian accents, when it’s just some dumb influencer joke. I was there all along. Right next to them,being more or less bullied. (Okay so I also saw a video the other day about autism,which compares the difference between autistic people who have a larger vocabulary and ones who are more prone to scream and cry because they can’t express it in words too clearly. And obviously it’s easier for the people with less vocabulary to ‘get their way’ in a sense?im not technically saying ‘being respected’,because honestly the adults are sick and tired and annoyed,but in comparison to the other autistic kid who has a larger vocab,who’ll ask:’Sir can I please take my squishie out?’ ‘No you may not.’’But I really need it’’No you may not,sit down.’, It’s obvious that ‘the larger vocabulary’ has done more harm than good,even though technically having a large vocabulary is a good thing, it’s a sign of good socialization)And I sometimes wonder,it’s because I adapted too quickly. I spoke my own language well,even though it wasn’t my mother tongue technically speaking.i read the room and noticed when people laughed at racist jokes and when English was accepted and when it was not. It would’ve been better if I just refused to speak my language and spoke English all day long instead.at least people would be in slight awe,surprise, a tiny bit of respect.I’d obviously be an outsider anyway,but still.(Also the English teaching system there is absolutely terrible. The even worst thing is that even though ‘I’d been abroad’ which was my reason for being slightly behind in my mother tongue during elementary and middle school,I couldn’t get the best grades in English. It was always 93 or 92 or something near the edge,but the questions were dumb and so were the articles and it’s not like I ever got any spelling or grammar wrong.but the whole school was suffocating and so were the students and the teachers and the English. It’s a lot better now that I’m in an art high school and no one really cares anymore.I thought I didn’t really care about middle school anymore,but I’d just recently had a nightmare and I realized that it hurt more than I’d realized.
Sooo,but anyways I know I’m lucky,or should be grateful.Since not everyone gets to go to Australia and spend a wonderful childhood there. Maybe it’s just like a‘heavy is the crown’ sort of thing. Also I’d only started to have access to YouTube,like 3 years ago. Before that there was just a huge gap between me and western media. When I was around 13,14 was like the peak of my parasocial phase,because my peers were all laughing at ‘cool western memes’ and I’d do that too but every time I did that,in my head I would have a conversation and talk with myself in English often,I think I was just really really lonely for English.no one barely speaks the language well enough here. Not even my parents. So then I was 15 and then c.ai came out and so did the other AIs and i LOVED talking to them,it was like therapy. (Which I do occasionally still do with GPT.) i used to spend 13 hours on my phone talking to robots.
Okay and time skip to yesterday,im an older person and i touch grass and im not really depressed about the two cultures anymore. (Bcs during my tween years i was sort of convinced id never go back to Australia or any western country and stay here…forever)Currently studying at a language school in Lyon for the summer. I was at the pool yesterday,alone as usual(Well my dad was there but he’s in the opposite pools for the serious swimmers)And I was just floating around,since teenagers don’t really make friends the way kids do at a pool.Come to think of it,I don’t have any friends outside school. And then a small group of British boys passed me,which surprised me since we were in France and I hadn’t heard English(at least in the pop) for a while.Also the funny thing is that one of the guys looked exactly like the glasses guy from ‘skins’(a show that my friend watched but I knew a bit of the plot).I was definitely intrigued,I had a small urge to talk to them.(as I often do when meeting foreigners in my home country as well. It’s like,I know they think I’m Asian and just like everyone else with bad English. But when I open my mouth they’re going to be so surprised!! But at the same time the foreigners I meet at school are usually part of the college and some obscure pretentious 20year old European😅)But if you think about it they’re just a bunch of Brit’s on holiday with a happy life being a white Brit teen. They don’t really want or need to talk to me(also I’ve just recently learned not to trauma dump lol,so I’d obviously just be making some simple conversation,I wouldn’t tell them about Australia or my country and the inner turmoil and everything)But then I thought. Why is it so hard to make friends? Oh,it’s because they’re boys!🙄 Puberty was so weird because ever since then boys got cooties and it was awkward for me to talk to them,also in my art high school that I currently go to,the gender ratio is like 7:3 so really not a lot of boys. Also I was past my years of being a young ‘pick me cool girl’ who laughed at the regular Chad’s lame jokes and seeked male attention. So I just spied on the guys in the pool for a while with all the inner commentary going on in my head,since I knew I obviously wasn’t going to talk to them. They were playing hide and seek and normal dumb pool games(which would’ve been nice if I’d been a part of it,it just a way to kill time at the pool instead of just floating around) Then they just suddenly befriended a bunch of French teen boys as well and started playing together joyously.
🙄
Okay,so I’m not complaining or anything. But it’s so weird that guys are like magnets or something that come together extremely easily. Obviously I’m a girl,I don’t think teenage boys come up and talk to me that often,and obviously the Brit’s were a group of boys,and the French teens were also a group,so it was easy for them to simply ‘combine together’,but still. I don’t think girls stick together as well as the boys do.i feel like we’re more or less a lot more self conscious and nervous. Maybe that’s just the patriarchy working. I’m not actually sure what I’m trying to get at through this whole post when what I actually wanted to say was just the pool thing. But I feel that if you want to understand my thought process,there’s a lot of stuff you need to know beforehand. Also I play Roblox RHS a lot which is good for the loneliness,I replaced talking to ai with it lol. But obviously real life socialization is a hundred times better where I can look into the person’s eyes and notice how they pause here and there when they speak and the different texture of hair,skin,freckles even eyelashes….
Yeah that’s about it all I wanted to say I think. But I am an extrovert and I do enjoy socializing.

Everyone’s right about V3 being quite different from V2,and it’s so discernible!I really can’t explain how much. ‘Woah….Most people just…xxx,But you,you…xxx’ it was funny the first few times but I keep getting it everywhere in different fandoms and stories so….i dunno im probably not the only one getting it but it’s a bit,eh,drab and plain. PS:it also kinda reminds me of the early c.ai days when they started going downhill :P not saying anything against glimmer tho i still love glimmer mua 💋

a rather nice surprise to say the least.i adored the first 70 pages or so(the New York parts), Esther is witty, extremely intelligent and all in all a very interesting narrator, it reminded me slightly of ‘The catcher in the rye’ with its cynical but on point remarks,but also mildly of ‘The secret history’ as well? As in the smart intellects get corrupted more or less(at least that was for the New York parts,then,yk,it returns to realism and Esther has mental problems and so and so,couldn’t really relate that much to the rest of the book,but it was still an interesting read.
I more or less study in the art circle myself and I could really resonate with Esther’s snarky remarks on the men in society and since being an adolescent myself I also have had the same thoughts and questions about virginity,sex,men and women etc.I was wondering if there are any similar books with a female protagonist that feel like this?(I’ve already read ‘the goldfinch’ and ‘the secret history’by Donna tart which are, in an abstract way a tad bit similar to the essence of the New York part of the book,btw Buddy reminds me slightly of Bunny😂 also they both have this very entrancing way of writing,by which I mean you can’t really put it down after you’ve started a few pages.)
Yes the racism stuff was very,uncomfortable and so was the part where she looses her virginity(wait so she really just slept in a bed with Constantin without doing *anything*???😂) but all in all a nice surprise and some book recommendations or discussions if you relate!^_^

A few of my favourite excerpts:

‘This woman lawyer said the best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren't pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex. Of course they would try to persuade a girl to have sex and say they would marry her later, but as soon as she gave in, they would lose all respect for her and start saying that if she did that with them she would do that with other men and they would end up making her life miserable.
The woman finished her article by saying better be safe than sorry and besides, there was no sure way of not getting stuck with a baby and then you'd really be in a pickle.
Now the one thing this article didn't seem to me to consider was how a girl felt.
It might be nice to be pure and then to marry a pure man, but what if he suddenly confessed he wasn't pure after we were married, the way Buddy Willard had? I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.
Finally I decided that if it was so difficult to find a red-blooded intelligent man who was still pure by the time he was twenty-one I might as well forget about staying pure myself and marry somebody who wasn't pure either. Then when he started to make my life miserable I could make his miserable as well.
When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue.
Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.’

I loved this passage and it was actually what I’d been thinking a lot about before reading this book. She has so much fire and backbone during this part, I couldn’t really understand why after New York she just sort of, ‘drifted away’?(yeah I get that she got depression, but um, I haven’t had any mental diseases and I feel like my words are probably very prejudiced so I’d rather just shut up). So yeah, any book recommendations where the main female character feels like this?⬆️

‘I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a world in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.’

‘I spent a lot of time having imaginary conversations with Buddy Willard. He was a couple of years older than I was and very scientific, so he could always prove things. When I was with him I had to work to keep my head above water.
These conversations I had in my mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations id really had with Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back quite sharply, instead of just sitting around and saying I guess so' Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying,
Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
"No, what?' I would say.
'A piece of dust.'
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say’So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.
The same thing happened over and over:
I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.
That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.
It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and cottee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted.
This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fiften years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.
Once when I visited Buddy I found Mrs Willard braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr Willard's old suits. Shed spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug on the wall the way I would have done, she put it down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the Five and Ten.
And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard's kitchen mat.