JE #3A: Cultural Schizophrenia

There are numerous ways in which I feel my identity being pulled between between contradictory and opposing values.  My name encapsulates this struggle well.  Most people I know well call me M.J.  This is ironic because this is not a name that I invented myself.  During the eighth grade, a white teacher straight out said that I would have to have a nickname because my actual name was too difficult to pronounce.  From then on, I’ve been known to most people as M.J.  There are many reasons as to why I kept this name.  Mostly it is because the majority of people that I meet mispronounce my name into oblivion and M.J. is a much better alternative than Maria, Mariah, Myra, or Mee-ray-ah.  Secondly, I’ve always felt a strange discomfort with my name.  While I find the cultural origins and the phonetics of my name to be beautiful, I’ve always perceived it as being too feminine.  Since I can remember, I have struggled against my family in trying to feminize me through dress, behaviors, and namely, well, my name.  I saw this as an opportunity to adopt a more androgynous, unfeminine moniker that more closely resembled who I see myself as.  In one way, this marked one aspect of assimilation to Anglo/American values as it signaled a further push from my actual cultural origins.  But in another it also gave me the opportunity to better reflect who I see myself to be.  

Another instance of cultural schizophrenia can be found in my sexuality.  Since my sophomore year at UCLA, I’ve been out of the closet.  I’ve gone through a few different labels to describe myself, but for the past 3 years I’ve always identified as non-heterosexual in some fashion or other.  Outside of UCLA, my queerness is less well known.  Outside of my mother, father, older brother, and a handful of cousins the rest of my extended family does not know that I am queer.  Sometimes I get comments about whether I’ve met a man or jokes about my future life with a husband.  Even typing this I see how far off these outside perceptions of me are to how I really am.  But I play these roles in order to reduce conflict, as both sides of my family are very religious and much older.  These are a few reasons as to why I tend to be more distanced from my family because I know that as long as I am closeted I can never speak or act who I am freely.  

This used to led me to question the legitimacy of my sexuality and my feelings toward my name for these reasons.  In these past few years I have unearthed a more unambiguous view of myself but I know that when I leave Los Angeles that I usually have to put on a mask of silence and isolation in order to keep who I am intact from a constant barrage of misperceptions and prejudice.  More recently, it has not lead to an identity crisis but actually to a solidification of who I am and has also caused me to move to protect the core of my identity even if I have to temporarily feign someone else’s straight, feminine persona of myself or keep my mind and voice tempered and quiet.