{"id":4191,"date":"2010-04-01T20:32:24","date_gmt":"2010-04-02T03:32:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/2010\/04\/01\/4191\/"},"modified":"2010-04-01T21:24:17","modified_gmt":"2010-04-02T04:24:17","slug":"4191","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/?p=4191","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Why I like big cities and to travel, arriving as a stranger? Because it hides the fact I don&#8217;t really fit in anywhere. You live in a big city, or if you&#8217;re just traveling through, people assume that even if you don&#8217;t exactly fit in here, there&#8217;s an understandable reason. You&#8217;re not from here. That explains why you seem different. But if you&#8217;re living some place, and people see you day to day and start to realize, hey, she&#8217;s different&#8230;it&#8217;s a lot harder to hide.<\/p>\n<p>My own family thinks I&#8217;m an alien. Maybe that&#8217;s a strong word, but they always say, &#8220;Where did you come from?&#8221; Which says a lot when I have Michael next to me, easily taking so much of the attention off me.<\/p>\n<p>When I was young, I had a power. Over boys. They did what I told them. I seemed to always get what I want. It made my parents uncomfortable, and made the mothers of the boys extremely uncomfortable. But the thing was, those boys never did anything they didn&#8217;t want to do.<\/p>\n<p>First you have to understand. My dad is a lone alpha and my mother&#8217;s an alpha. What else could I have been but an alpha? I was born into my type. Put me in any group of boys my age or younger, and I would emerge with the reins. They looked at me as a leader. And because I was also born with a sunny, magnanimous personality,\u00a0 I wasn&#8217;t abusive with it.\u00a0 It was persuasion, like hypnosis. You can&#8217;t make anyone do anything they&#8217;re morally or instinctively opposed to, and I never asked that of them. The worst of it was, if they got a new toy, I said, let me see it, and it was in my hands stat. The best of it was one hell of a fucking adventure (my mom said that every party used to end up with all the boys running around the house screaming like a pack of rabid wolves with me at the front, and it didn&#8217;t stop until someone had an asthma attack or someone got so overworked their nose bled. This really embarrassed my parents, how feral I could be).\u00a0 I was driven by an insatiable curiosity, and they either believed in that cause or believed\/trusted that following me would be to their best interest. And even if the result was we all got in trouble, they sometimes pointed a finger at me, but they never blamed me, at least not enough to not follow me again.<\/p>\n<p>Well, as they say, there&#8217;s no such thing as an endless party. And that kind of power in a 5 year-old girl is probably scary, so my parents had Michael, who doesn&#8217;t do what ANYONE says. And they said, here you go, good luck.<\/p>\n<p>Well, that&#8217;s not exactly how it happened but on some levels, it did. Whereas I never conceived of a force I couldn&#8217;t handle or tame, life suddenly tamed me, from every direction. And I lost my powers for a long time. I didn&#8217;t believe in myself anymore.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had some major unhappiness in my life, a lot of things that have made me look back at my childhood as being under an overcast sky. But I think about all the things that happened, and I realize that I wouldn&#8217;t be who I am today if those things hadn&#8217;t shaped me. Sometimes it&#8217;s our worst, most painful experiences that teach us the most, build the most out of us. I often think that these things do happen for a reason&#8230;maybe if my power had gone unchecked, by 3rd grade I would have been a queen bee BITCH. When you have power but lack maturity, it&#8217;s so easy to misuse power. But I didn&#8217;t have the opportunity. I learned the value of kindness, that it is the most precious thing on earth.\u00a0 I learned the value of compassion for the same reason. I learned about fairness, acceptance, and standing up when you get knocked down because there&#8217;s no other option. I learned sometimes it&#8217;s about giving second chances as much as it&#8217;s about getting.<\/p>\n<p>3 years ago, the power started coming back. I started believing in myself again. I think it&#8217;s different now. Whereas, when I was younger, there was nothing to restrain me, the world taught me values and responsibility first, what it&#8217;s like to have no power, and be bullied for it. I was angry for a long time, I was filled with hate and vengeance, but when I understood that these things weren&#8217;t real, the past didn&#8217;t change me, didn&#8217;t brand me and I could be whoever I wanted to be, I let all those things go. It&#8217;s more important for me to feel positive, to be light. And through that transformation, I started to be able to see my potential. 3 years ago, I started to get my power back.<\/p>\n<p>I would like for this not to be a trick.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve risen up before, only to be knocked down by people smaller than me who feared me. If the world will let me unleash, I am willing to show that I will use my power responsibly and reasonably humbly, that what I dedicate myself to is transformation in the name of healing. That has always been my chosen path. To comfort and heal. I promise I will not start a religion, though I may pass on &#8220;teachings,&#8221; but I will do my best to leave a positive and progressive legacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why I like big cities and to travel, arriving as a stranger? Because it hides the fact I don&#8217;t really fit in anywhere. You live in a big city, or if you&#8217;re just traveling through, people assume that even if you don&#8217;t exactly fit in here, there&#8217;s an understandable reason. You&#8217;re not from here. That [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sbl5mn-4191","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4191"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4199,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4191\/revisions\/4199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}