They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

please don’t do this, don’t leave me alone in this world, don’t take away my best friend. I need you, I said. I love you so, so much.

I needed Yush to know that he was my world. I needed Yush to know that I would crumble without him, too.

“You’re a really good sister,” they said. If I were such a good sister, I thought, none of this would have happened.

But none of us—including Yush’s therapist—had picked up on how unwell Yush was or that he was on the verge of a psychotic break. That is how good Yush was at meeting the expectations of others.

We didn’t know that by trying to forget, we were more deeply committing ourselves to the very circumstances and problems that had caused the explosion in the first place.

Ripping up a journal is ripping up a soul.

Too loud or too outspoken or too opinionated or too independent—traits that Papa had encouraged when I was a girl but found threatening as I became a woman.

“In a crisis, I’m not going to call the person who isn’t reliable day to day,” I told Yush. “I will call the person who knows how to show up for me consistently.

I didn’t need to meet so many conditions or work so hard to be worthy of love. Maybe love was simpler than I thought: Maybe it was a willingness to witness someone, to be curious and empathize with them, as they are.

In a capitalist society, the measure of wellness isn’t a person’s actual health or happiness but how far one can rise or how much wealth one can accumulate. Somebody seen as “unwell” is unable to produce and to achieve.

His approach was no longer to feel and respond and grow but rather to understand the expectation that others had of him and to react within those bounds.

My insecurity over my identity had turned culture into a performance rather than something I inhabited authentically.

I don’t want you to be surprised at the racism you experience—you know that the world, that these white institutions, are racist. The question I want you to consider is: How do you accept that reality and not let it take your power from you? How do you stand tall in those moments, when white women speak down to you, without becoming as small as they want you to become?”

I did not say that a man who forces you to prove your worth is a man incapable of seeing it.

If all of this was true, he had far exceeded the success we’d both been raised to achieve. Why gamble with his health for such an invasive cosmetic procedure?

The truth that Red Pillers believed, according to the website: Women are “Machiavellian by nature,” and feminism is an extremist, hateful “female supremacy movement.”

“If you are weak, depressed, small, poor, uneducated, unconfident, or anything else that prevents you from being powerful, nobody will care about whether you live or die,” the website read. These men were clearly not much kinder to one another than they were to women like me.

Western culture has a long history of trying to emasculate Asian American men—particularly East Asians—going back to the 1800s, when Chinese men emigrating to the United States during the gold rush

Anti-miscegenation laws, formed in the 1660s to bar marriages between white people and enslaved Black people, expanded in the late 1800s to include the small but growing population of Asian Americans in an effort to preserve whiteness. These laws remained on the books until 1967,

For men who are forced to disconnect from their emotional needs and then further alienated by society’s narrow conception of masculinity, the belief that success solves all problems offers a sense of power. It was easier to believe that people would automatically respect someone tall and rich than to accept that no one can ultimately control how others see them.

“There’s a huge social stigma in our culture against body modification. Basically, if you change yourself through what sounds like ‘extreme’ measures to change yourself or whatever, it comes off like you’re just really insecure,” Yush wrote in the email. “In the future, it’s probably going to be totally normal for people to get body modifications like cybernetic implants and stuff. At that time, getting longer legs is going to seem like a pretty mundane thing to do. I just don’t hold the same stigmas that other people do on how I should behave.” But in his pontificating, Yush was talking around the emotions of the issue: What problem did he think being five foot ten would solve?

The best way to honor Yush’s legacy, to me, was to learn from the pain that had taken his brief life.

We had each been raised to believe that every unknown could be resolved through willpower and intellect, a message reinforced by America’s rigid conception of who we are supposed to be. The truth is, society doesn’t raise people to aspire to be kind or compassionate or happy. It pressures adults to achieve and accomplish. It teaches people that what matters more than their character or how they treat others or how they feel about themselves is how much money they can hoard, who they know, how famous they can get, and how much power they wield over others.

I had believed that when I love someone, I should hold on regardless of what else I have to give up in order to keep them. The more one gives up, the greater the love, I thought. To love someone well was to perform perfection for them, and to be loved well was for them to perform perfection for me. But that is not true love. That is self-abandonment masquerading as love.

Now I understand that intimacy can form only when I accept someone as they are, not as who they can be for me.