comphet

01 Jul, 2026

I don’t talk a lot about my adoptive dad, but I actively miss him every day. He felt extremely left out of the weird relationship my adoptive mom and I had, which baffled me as a kid. What he was actually observing was our enmeshment, and I guess he thought he wanted in on that. That’d made me sad.

Really, I’d had an incredibly normal and healthy relationship with my adoptive dad—just terse. Maybe he wished I’d asked him more questions. He never pushed me to overshare. I guess I didn’t want to be pushy, either. His favorite poet was William Blake. He was always very lonely. I don’t discuss him very often, except for when I’m describing dementia caregiving or, less frequently, the KKK’s actions toward Catholic immigrants in Philadelphia during the Great Depression.

I once asked my adoptive mom about Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. I was especially interested in men being the heads of households: Women, submit to your husbands as they submit to God.

Yep, she said.

“Well, then what’s going on at our house?” I asked her, perfectly sincere, and she absolutely flipped out on me.

Some time ago I was ruminating in bed when I realized the queerest thing is being capable of treating your partner like an equal, and I cried and cried. And every time I remember this something catches in my throat and I have to force myself to stop thinking about it.

It’s impossible, I realize. Everything is impossible.

One day in the very early 2000s I was opining to my boyfriend, who worked with me at the college radio station.

“Every subculture rises up around one cool guy,” I said. One visionary. Why I was heated about this, I cannot recall. “Everyone else is just imitating that one guy,” I said angrily. It’s how you end up with a mob-enforced aesthetic, I mused—a subculture that can be commodified, marketed to others. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was making a René Girard point¹. (Later, at my first job, I’d stumble upon the term “cult of personality”—describing the success of our podcasts—not realizing a) this is already a term, and b) all cults were, at some point, ones of “personality.”)

Still in undergrad (Asian American History class, fulfilling my history prereq), I would write about women of color inevitably forced out of male-dominated subcultures—flapper and punk culture, literary circles²—out of spaces that, as third-culture youth themselves, they’d initially fled into. In the paper I paralleled the public writing careers and personal lives of Flora Belle Jan, Alene Lee, and Mimi Thi Nguyen³. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was making yet another René Girard point—that communities relieve growing interpersonal tension by recasting their most vulnerable members as ‘interlopers’ and ostracizing or eliminating them. It was a premonition of what was going to happen to video games, I guess. I got a B, maybe a B-. The assignment had been to write about “any Asian American woman.”

There was a particular day that I stopped attending sociology class entirely. The professor had claimed that all relationships are transactional, whether you’d like to believe it or not. It was just simple math: a relationship’s longevity could be predicted by algorithm. It all came down to one person feeling like they weren’t getting as much value as they’d put in.

Is everything just that easy? I felt sick. I stopped showing up.

A year later I emailed the professor. “You won’t remember me,” I began. She and I had never spoken. I’d never introduced myself. There was no reason for her to know who I was.

“The girl from the back row,” she replied, “by the door, four seats in.”

Oh. Great. Anyway, I was emailing because I needed someone to talk to about Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs.

I tried to explain to the interviewer that I’d had two sets of parents. (“I probably won’t get into all that,” she said to me congenially.)

But it’s crucial for understanding I actually grew up playing “TV games”—mostly the Atari 2600—and then, when I’d moved to live with legal guardians, my new mother had taken video games away from me. I’d grown up with them, and then whoosh, they were suddenly gone. It felt like I was being punished for something someone else had done.

So what made gamers’ hostility toward me so psychologically bifurcating was, I understand what it’s like to have mom issues, to know your mom is well-intentioned but also wrong, to want to hide something from her because she just doesn’t get it and she’ll flip if she sees it.

And when you’re always under a certain kind of surveillance, playing a computer game is akin to… finally having a private life, one your parents can’t get to, can’t ruin, don’t know the password to.

I am not trying to take anyone’s games away, I told the interviewer firmly. But I do wish people would stop projecting their mom issues all over me, because I still have my own mom issues to contend with.

I think the way to look at the cosmos is, you have two parents who got a divorce at some point, and now they’re both fighting, inside you, for your allegiance. Or at least, it constantly feels like they are. (I had four real-world parents, so the War Within is especially fraught.) One parent is screaming for you to conform⁴, and the other wants you to dance like no one’s watching. One creator gave you your dirt shell of a body, while the other gave you the ability to think for yourself. One stresses the survival of the material above all, while the other stresses the integrity of your spirit: two extremes, a horseshoe, with something potentially survivable hidden somewhere between them.

“I’m soup,” I told my best L.A. friend, “and I just need… I need to go into the food processor for maybe two or three quick pulses.”

A friend recently hit me up for yet another life-and-death loan. I said no. I told him the truth—that I’m financially wrecked, utterly depleted—and that he needs his own savings account. (He replied. He replied again shortly thereafter, “Crisis averted, I found it.”)

I thought about what else to say. I thought about it for a couple days. I didn’t really owe him further explanation, but it also felt unkind of me, callous, to abruptly cut him off. So I followed up with a text about what to expect from me in the future. He joked that he ought to be sending me money, since his cashflow is fine, it’s just that he has an unsustainable burn rate.

Uh-huh. I think a lot about the gendering of burn rates, of risk-taking, versus resource management and conservation. Men are systemically set up to be the breadwinners: less education goes further, their experience is perceived as more credible, their failed experiments aren’t a death sentence. In a partnership, one person’s career path might take priority just because actual real life prioritizes it: the one with the material earnings cap is already trapped in the backseat. If a ‘cool girl’ partner refuses to ‘nag’—never pushing back, never saying no—she is the one to blame when resources are inevitably depleted. She was a poor steward. She should’ve pushed back harder, should have said no. She enabled this! She was so controlling! She was way too submissive!

Anyway, I texted an extremely short, curt, facts-based, noncombative version of that to my cash-strapped pal. I said that he needed to hop on figuring out his savings, while I need to hop on figuring out my cashflow. We both have something to work on. I told him I am sitting here with a pen-and-paper budget in front of me; I recently splurged on erasable gel pens. I’m about to plan so hard.

He texted a very long response to my several short ones, but the takeaway from his text was how astonishing it’d been, in the past, the way I’d immediately bailed him out of trouble without asking any follow-up questions or… or even replying to him at all, actually. That was why I’d moved to the “top of his list,” a ride-or-die—someone who could ask anything of him at any time.

“Thank you, that’s very sweet,” I replied. He started to text something else but reconsidered. I sat at my desk in silence, thinking.

At that very moment, my best friend sent me a reel on Facebook. “Corpus on CNN today,” she texted.

Yep. A Texas city surrounded by water, “the Sparkling City by the Sea,” is out of clean water. Not a drop to drink. The city’s own residents are being treated like the cause of the shortage, are commanded to make cuts to their own essential needs, to collect rainwater in barrels, to conserve. However, it is reaching a breaking point because there are no other cuts to the population’s basic needs that can be made. (This is, once again, deflection marketing, where collective responsibility is being shifted onto individuals who do not have the power to correct a systemic ill. Worse, these citizens are the resources; the oil being perpetually drilled out of the bay is incidental. The local corporations are only able to grind away because they’re robbing the people around them.)

What has happened to Corpus Christi’s water supply is fated to happen everywhere: it’s a cyclical reckoning, where we’re forced to itemize and evaluate the true cost of things once they’ve been aggregated. In Corpus’ case it’s a result of, not data centers, but good old-fashioned oil refineries. The outcome is still the same, though: no clean water. Poor stewardship, poor resource management. It’s the people’s fault, it’s their water consumption. It’s Mother Nature’s fault, it’s the drought.

I watched the CNN reel. Then I told my best friend about the text I’d just sent to my cash-strapped pal. It’s all the same, I told her. It’s all finally sitting down to calculate the true cost of things, trying to budget for the future.

As for my pal, who’d managed to avoid crisis by scrolling through his phone contacts, “I’ve thought about it and I see the answer, but I don’t want to tell him,” I texted her now. “But I want to say, ‘Buddy, love will continue to evade you until you sit down and redefine for yourself what a good mother looks like, and then be that for yourself, rather than expecting your female friends to step in and be that for you.’”

This is what I’m working on for myself, too, because my exhaustion with one person is just an indictment of my self. Could it be that, until now, I’ve obnoxiously outsourced the invisible labor of momming to all the other people around me?

So I have to decide. Is the ideal mother a cop, a critic, a nag? Or is she a coach, a producer, a product manager? I want to learn how to sit down and stare at the hard stuff, even though I experience a full-body freeze every time I try.

I was still thinking about this when I thought I heard the dog scrabbling around in the hallway. I poked out my head. The sound of scrabbling had not been a dog at all, but a small child, who was at that moment attempting to secure a Bitty Baby doll in a size-appropriate stroller. I greeted her. I apologized for thinking she was a dog.

The child’s mother walked in. “Hey!” she said to me. She asked us if we wanted to build a LEGO set. Of course we did. I was ecstatic.

I walked to the table and waited. The child met me there.

“Oh, I didn’t bring the LEGO set over,” I said to her. “I didn’t want to monopolize it.” The child stood up and retrieved the LEGO set from the kitchen counter. “You play a lot of Monopoly,” I continued. “Do you know what it means to monopolize something?”

She informed me that she doesn’t play that much Monopoly. I sighed. Sure. When you’re a kid, if you haven’t played much Monopoly in the past month, it means you rarely play Monopoly.

“Okay, but you remember. The goal of the game is to take control of as many squares as you can, right?” I said to her.

She thought about it. “That’s right!” she exclaimed.

“That’s what it means to monopolize something,” I said. (I already frequently apologize to the child for monopolizing her mother’s attention. “I just need to talk to her for five more minutes,” I will tell the kids.)

Then the kiddo told me she always beats her grandpa at Monopoly. I nodded. I think she’s still upset that I won’t let her win at Don’t Break the Ice. Listen, I haven’t been beating her at this game on purpose.

For LEGO, I turned into a project manager. I flipped the instruction manual’s pages for Kid like sheet music. Instead of pouring out all the bricks at once, I rummaged around each numbered bag, meting out the bricks Kid needed, placing them in front of her. No muss, no fuss. (For our previous build, I pulled out disposable paper bowls for color-sorting. I think she enjoyed sorting pieces by color more than building.)

We completed the build in record time.

“Hey, look at this,” I said to her at one point. I tap-danced the next two pieces toward her.

“They do look a little like shoes!” she exclaimed, not believing what she was saying at all. Ohhh, she thought I was an idiot. I cackled. Anyway, it was a whole lot of that type of thing.

Eventually I returned to my desk. I glared at my erasable gel pens. I sighed and opened TikTok, ready to procrastinate. Here is what started playing:

There is no war between men and women. That’s a lie they tell you to distract you from what is happening right in front of us.

The same culture that taught women their worth lies in how much they can nurture, carry, sacrifice, and give, has spent centuries treating the Earth in very similar ways. The more she gives, the more giving is expected.

People hear the word ‘patriarchy’ and imagine a conflict between men and women, but that’s far too small. Women were never targeted simply for being women. The ‘feminine’ was targeted because it stood for something fundamentally different: a way of relating to life that couldn’t be reduced to ownership or control. And every civilization based on domination eventually finds itself at odds with that. That is why the suppression of women and the destruction of the Earth move together: they are not separate stories.

That seemed right. I mean, the point was being made by an extremely problematic white lady who has another video captioned “voting and protesting won’t change anything,” but I basically agree with her, since a ‘battle of the sexes’ is just more self-defeating biological essentialism, and I’ve already spent all my time on this blog writing about colonizers, “billionaire brain,” and wetiko, which are coded as masc but are obviously gender-agnostic and maybe more to do with ethnocentrism.

But then my TikTok algo went back to the way it usually is, and now it was showing me the claim that men’s brains structurally evolved for individualistic survival—putting the Self and its needs ahead of others’ no matter the cost—while women’s brains have structurally evolved for collectivism. That’s because hunters have to travel far from the community, endure constant threat, blah blah blah.

My eyes narrowed. Supposedly the claim comes from Stanford. I fundamentally knew none of this was true; I just hadn’t worked out how yet.

We should be skeptical about any just-so stories about our hunter-gatherer ancestors, whether it’s about neanderthals or dietary needs, or gender. Like, it’s just using a flawed history we don’t actually know anything about, to prove a present-tense reality we still misunderstand. It’s the historical equivalent of “men are from Mars.”

That is, we’re using the lens of present-day bias to reevaluate a little-known past, to justify the present-day bias. That isn’t science; that’s storytelling. Astrology is observably more reliable.

I got up from my desk and loafed around the kitchen, looking for my baking sheet. I checked under some other baking sheets.

I was thinking about how sad I am. Now that I’m financially wrecked, I have no room for stuff, which means no space for all my childhood papers and trophies and photos and shit.

History is written by the winners, I thought to myself grimly. I know the history of me is just my ego, my family’s ego, all of it just as fake and transient as any other history. I guess I just hadn’t imagined the imprint of my family being swept out to sea so soon—sooner than other sonless families get wiped out. It’s more of a question of when, I thought to myself. Do you want to disappear in the sands of time now, or later? You’re really just delaying the inevitable.

Stop that, I thought to myself sharply of this nihilistic spiral, that’s your dad’s insufferable ego. Pull out.

I stood in the kitchen, sad as fuck, holding a baking sheet in my hands. Your task now, I told myself, is to relinquish this ludicrous desire to feel seen or known or understood by anyone else. Knowing yourself is your job alone. Tears sprang to my eyes. I preheated the oven.

And erasing my own history? Tossing it in a dumpster somewhere? I stared at the pantry shelves. The words of an unsympathetic managing editor returned to me: “Do it again, but better this time.” Wow, God really can use anyone. Anyway, the introject of my managing editor is right. I’m due for a rewrite.

I thought about this Stanford claim. I already know there’s a very antisocial, petulant man inside of me. Early PTSD (physical threat) and CPTSD (relational trauma) give me traits that are veeeery suspiciously similar to autism; Simon Baron-Cohen theorized autism is the “extreme male brain.” Which means we’re defining maleness itself by behavioral traits, like individualism and isolationism, that come from physical and relational trauma, from fear, from the perception of threat.

If a person supposedly wired for collectivism is traumatized often enough—if she endures enough constant threat or surveillance—she will eventually self-isolate. This neuropsychiatric evolution occurs through the course of one lifetime, if not one childhood.

And what about all these councils and old boy’s clubs? And Reddit? What about lone-wolf lionesses? The gender swap has already happened, as easy a transition as the Victorian shift from pink to blue.

I tore open an expired frozen pizza.

My best Californian friend texted to ask what I was up to. “Would you like to FaceTime?” I texted back. Her answer was that she was going to go pee. “Same,” I replied, “I’ll check back in five.”

She’d returned home after a wildly entertaining and invigorating trip full of friendship and belonging. Now she was alone again.

“A hangover,” I said to her, laughing. Anyone can have one.

She didn’t want to hear anything else about how much fun I’d had while she was away. She gave me a dark glare each time I mentioned her friend to her.

“Hey!” I said, folding my arms. “What happened to your—”

I didn’t actually know the word.

“Compersion?” she asked. I nodded. She sighed. Then she threw her hands in the air. “It’s not jealousy!” she exclaimed. “They belong to me, and you belong to me!” It was darling. I laughed. Of course I understand wanting to be baby.

“Well. I think we bonded over how much we both love you,” I said, raising my eyebrows.

“Really?” my friend asked, her hands flying to both sides of her face.

“Yes,” I said to her seriously, although I was very tickled. “So you were absolutely present with us, even if you could not sense it in spacetime.”

Now my friend was grieving an ex. I sighed.

“Well,” I said to her tenderly. “He probably needs time to think about what he wants, probably for the first time in his life—instead of forcing others to constantly take the reins.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m him,” I mumbled.

“Really?” she asked, suddenly alight with interest. “You don’t know what you want?”

“I’ve never been allowed to think about it before,” I said, curious about it myself.

I could remember trudging home from work one dreary evening. My adoptive dad had passed away very suddenly. I felt hollowed out. What’s it all for, I was asking myself. Over time I’d relinquished everything for my parents, and now my adoptive dad was, poof, gone. In that moment I understood I’d made a mistake by living for others; I just had absolutely no idea how to move beyond that realization.

“How long had you cared for him?” she asked.

It hadn’t been a continuous swath of caregiving, but it had fractured my attention when I was presumably supposed to be focused on my own independence. I tapped my face thoughtfully. “Well, he was diagnosed when I was in college,” I said. “And I think I was… 28? 29? when he died, because it was about a year before my adoptive mom died.” She’d always expected me to be their caregiver, I explained, in exchange for my being adopted. I was one of her investment properties.

Her death was when I should’ve passionately and furiously sprinted, liberated and resourced, into my own future. Instead, I was a career carer suddenly bereft of a charge. I barely knew what I wanted—“just companionship,” I muttered—but I’d also wanted to be left alone. I used to always call this dream “alone together,” although I’ve never actually found it⁵. I probably haven’t been explaining it right.

“Do you want to be… a famous writer?” my friend teased me now, an actual glint in her eye.

Well, that sounded awful. I fell silent. I wracked my brain. “Maybe,” I finally said, shaking my head. “I genuinely cannot remember.”