On Loneliness and Likeability
By: Vichet Ou
Tags: White Supremacy, Anti Asian Racism, Misogyny, Authenticity, Healing From Trauma

This is the face of a child who knew what it was like to be called chink.

Content warning: anti-Asian racism, white supremacy, trauma, misogyny

I’m trying to think of a time in my life where I ever felt safe enough to be myself.

It wasn’t when I was a child. I grew up in a household with parents who were only a few years removed from starvation and mass murder. And I learned what a landmine was along with my numbers and ABCs. None of my problems ever felt large enough to mention.

It wasn’t when I was in grade school, when kids called me chink and made something of my Asian-ness almost every day I attended from first through eighth grade. The bus ride every morning and afternoon were my twice daily fifteen minutes of shame.

It wasn’t in high school where, even though I was in a diverse space with a noted lack of daily racial harassment, I found I was a painfully shy and awkward child who didn’t know how to talk to people and had nothing interesting about myself to share because I’d spent my last eight years making myself a smaller target.

It wasn’t at Cornell, where I found myself vastly out of my depth, surrounded by kids who had an idea of what was going on and what to expect out of their college experiences, who had friends and parents that had had their own dreams and ambitions before their children were anything more than concepts. Those children received gifts of dreams that I could only pretend to have because I was never taught what the fuck anything meant if it wasn’t called “survival.”

It wasn’t in my aimless post-graduation year, working in New York because working in New York was the thing that everyone seemed to want to do. I didn’t have any better ideas, and with my degree in English lit and the lack of drive to actually create a body of work that could eventually become a career, I was happy to continue surviving with a paycheck, splitting a house in Weehawken with possibly the coolest people that I never got to know, a pod of queer artists that, if I had lived a life with a capacity for dreams, I could have gotten some direction from.

I was fired from my job because I was bad at it, and I was beaten down by life too much to even pretend to care. I moved back home, lying to my parents that I’d been downsized — though that would have been true within a couple of years of my firing with the recession. I spent a couple of months in their basement in a daze, wondering how I would continue surviving because surviving was the only thing I had the imagination to do at the time.

I never, ever in my life had a plan for anything more than a year out.

Maybe it’s my suspected undiagnosed ADHD. Maybe it’s the fact that there was a portion of my life where I didn’t think I would survive to reach adulthood.

Whatever it was, I was now at home without a job, without a plan, and without any independence — independence being the closest thing to a dream I had ever had for myself to that point.

So I got to working on something that seemed like it came easily to all of the people whose lives I envied, because I was too exhausted to have my own vision of the future.

I started working on my likeability — that positive, surface-level perception of me in the eyes of people that I met.

The idea of being loved has always been a sticky concept for me. I know that there’s an idea of being loved. I know that people express this to each other in varying ways. I know that, at different times in my life, there have been people who have loved me.

I know I’ve tried to show it in every way that I wished I could feel it, to everyone I’ve ever cared about.

There are a lot of barriers to me feeling and believing that love.

I fully admit, these barriers are something I’ve built for myself. At first for protection.

No one wanted me to be me for years. I remember what I was but I’ve put up so many layers of paint on my own personality that my childhood self looks like a stranger.

But then, some of those layers of paint — the ones I chose in my “fake it ’til I make it” years — drew people to me.

But those layers of paint were barriers all the same. A fancy wall is still a wall. Because I’ve only just begun to name these barriers and understand their height and breadth as I near the age of thirty-six, it can be hard for me to hear the reassurances of proven friends and hold their words and care in my heart the way that I do the demonstrated truth that almost no one has ever liked me without my having put in a massive amount of conscious effort.

Forgive me if it’s hard to trust others’ well wishes, because of how much I’ve had to work to even show up in the same room as someone and be acknowledged.

“Oh, you’d -love- Vichet,” is something people might have said to others about me in the last ten years.

What they’d love is all of the things I’ve practiced over the course of thousands of random conversations and interactions with strangers — oftentimes women, and in those cases because of the irredeemably toxic expectations that men and masculinity place on other men.

The situations that others would find cringy or unpalatable because they ARE cringy and unpalatable, are the kinds of situations I intentionally placed myself into, multiple nights per week, every week, between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six.

Tuesday through Saturday, I’d go out and try to see how many women I could convince to give me their number purely based on how I asked, saying anything short of outright lying about who I was and what I did for a living.

I never lied explicitly. They always got my name. They got facts about my past. They got whatever information they asked for.

The lie was how I was telling them. The smiles. The jokes. The confidence. The easygoing personality. The hidden, crushing loneliness that I did everything possible to hide. The need to extract value from the interactions.

I got a lot of numbers. I got an astronomically higher number of rejections — either outright, or two or three dates later after my mask of likeability reached its limits and no real chemistry or connection appeared.

Sidebar — I was always conscious of how my race played into meeting new women. If they were white, lived most of their lives in Philly or went to a college where lacrosse was a legitimately popular sport, rejection was the most likely outcome. If they were people of color, had attended schools with higher populations of people of color, and if they were more progressive, rejection was less of a foregone conclusion.

I still got a lot of rejections. I think more than the average person could bear. Not that I bore it particularly well. I leaned on that mythical resilience all of us seem to have and get praised for, while at the same time never receiving unsolicited offers of help.

Some well meaning white folks might think I’m being overly sensitive here, but I doubt some of those well meaning white folks had approached anywhere close to the thousands of women I had spoken to in some interaction or another.

Quite literally, to become that person that many people see me as — likeable, approachable, interesting, funny, whatever — I put myself through a social gauntlet that sounds completely alien and at least a little insane to anyone who has ever had a fulfilling social life.

At the same time, I was also keenly aware of how much white supremacy had affected my dating choices, even if I never admitted that on paper before.

I sought out white women. I still seek out white women. I internalized a deep self-loathing of my Asian othered-ness.

I figured if I could get white women to like me, that meant I made it, right? That I’d beaten racism?

This is the internal logic of a deeply traumatized person.

I have a lot of friends who will see this and remember these parts of my life. I envision a light switch flicking on in their head, a sudden understanding that half of the ridiculousness that made me “unique” and “fun” was a gamified strategy to reduce my loneliness and increase my chances of meeting people who could fill the void I had in me and be proof that I was “good enough to deserve love and affection.”

It was a simple calculus: the more women I met, the more I could feel good about myself in the fleeting moments where I could believe their desire for some concept of me that existed in their minds.

This was a huge driver for me to meet more women. It was the closest I could get, to feeling liked, loved, and desired.

I learned to talk less about my boring job, and more about my dancing, the languages I knew well enough to order a beer, the fact that I went to Cornell, and not the fact that I almost flunked out. The places I knew in the city. The dishes I knew how to cook. My “dreams,” which were just things that I thought “sounded nice” but I had never truly envisioned, planned for, or placed myself in.

Remember. Survival Vichet never had a plan for more than a year out.

I had my list of things people almost universally found interesting about me, just as I had my list of things never to talk about. Those things were just as much a part of me, if not moreso, than anything that anyone ended up liking about me.

My ability to scan a room for negative perceptions was already razor sharp from a childhood where if I thought someone was talking about me behind my back, they usually were. My latest social experiments caused it to develop and intensify with every interaction, regardless of success or failure.

After a while, that ability began to detect when I did things well.

I learned how to guide conversations so that they stayed on fun topics that my conversational partner wanted to talk about. I learned to be “honest” about myself about things that I wasn’t at all embarrassed to admit. I learned to elicit deeply personal information from people by offering tidbits of myself that I had no problem sharing.

I became the kind of conversationalist that fucking true crime shows did profiles about.

I hated it.

I tried to justify it to myself a hundred ways. This is the way it is. All relationships are transactional. No one cares about who you are deep down, they only care about what you can provide.

If you can’t be loved, be likeable.

I have been a fake at so many points in my life to so many people.

I’ve been fake so often in my life about what I want to talk about, what I’m going through, and what few small dreams I can afford that when I do speak the truth about who I am and where I’ve been, my friends probably wonder if I’m going to commit self-harm.

I want to give you and them all the peace of mind that I’m not in that place.

But at the same time, I’m so exhausted and I don’t have the stamina to continue being likeable for people just because I’m afraid of being alone.

It’s not like the last ten years of being likeable have fixed the loneliness anyway. I know I can handle being lonely for a little longer, at least. And maybe I’m learning that my loneliness is something that I’ve been dragging around even though there are people waiting for me to see our connections for what they are: real ones, in all our imperfections.

But, here I am, at nearly thirty-six years old, and I have yet to meet anyone new in my life without a contingency plan about how I would act if they didn’t immediately like me.

I’m not even sure I know what “being myself” means anymore.

But I’m starting with honesty.

The last five years of my life have been about getting to this point, where I can be honest. Where I’m not afraid of the loneliness that has been with me every day of my life no matter what I did or who was there for me.

This is who I’ve been. This is who I am.

And who I want to be is someone who cared. Truly cared. Not caring because of some concept of fairness or reciprocity. And not someone without boundaries and self-respect. But someone capable of caring from a place within, without the question of loneliness making him doubt that his care was real and true.

In the same breath I want to be someone who was cared for. Someone who knows that his friends are there for him, not because of what he can provide but because of what he needs and who he is.

I want to be someone who helped people who needed it. To be there for people who were like me, treading water with no hope that anyone would come and let them know that they don’t need to be strong all of the time to be worth it.

Someone who could help bring peace and joy to my friends. Someone who felt deserving of peace and joy in return.

I have no idea what I’m doing, where I’m going, or how it will end up.

I just know I don’t have the strength left in me to keep doing what I have been, for it to only end in feeling like a fraud, or heartbreak.

If you’ve been in my life and you are reading this, know that in all my imperfection, I always tried. Oftentimes, I was misguided: anything that I did that resulted in walls being erected between us was never going to be the answer. I did that because of fear and selfishness.

But, there was always a direction in my heart, pulling me through all of this.

And that direction is love. I choose love.

I love you. In all its imperfection, you have my love, friend.

I hope you can believe that, the way that I want to believe it for myself.