I was 10 years old when I approached my mother with the question, “Mom, can I start shaving my legs?” I have a very vivid memory of going to school that year, only in fourth grade, and sitting on the carpet with my hairy legs folded criss-cross. I looked around me, and as far as I could tell, every other girl in the room either didn’t have leg hair, or it was so light that it wasn’t noticeable. 

I, on the other hand, had such dark, thick, coarse hair that my legs resembled that of a high school boy gone through puberty. I went home that day and popped the question. 

My mom made a feeble effort to tell me I didn’t need to start shaving, but quickly gave in. She knew the shame I was feeling; her arms were covered in the same thick, dark coat that mine were, and she had been using Nair on her legs and face for as long as I could remember. 

She took me up to the bathroom and showed me how to use shaving cream, to shave in one direction, to moisturize my skin afterwards. I cut myself more than a few times as I learned— my legs were covered in dried blood spots for weeks on end. Eventually, I started to hate the hair on my body in other places, too— my arms, my happy trail on my stomach, my back, everywhere. 

One day in the summer when I was 12 years old, I shaved off all my stomach hair because I was going to a pool party. I wanted to have the smooth, clean, perfect body of all the white girls who would be there. Still, despite my best efforts, I had noticeably more hair than every other girl in attendance. 

It took me 9 years after I started shaving for me to stop hating my body hair. I let my happy trail grow back in, I left my legs unshaven for weeks and months on end, I stopped hyper fixating on whether or not to wax my arms. 

Body hair is stigmatized for women to such an insane degree, and every woman knows the shame of being told by her friends or family that she needs to shave. But I found it to be an especially unbearable stigma because of my coloring. I would complain to my light-skinned friends about how I couldn’t even afford to go one day without shaving, because my hair grew so dark, thick, and fast. They would give me one of two responses, both of which stung. 

The first response was, “Oh, me too! I have soooo much hair. I mean, look at my legs, isn’t this ridiculous? So embarrassing.” I would look at their legs and see the tiniest wisp of blonde hair that you needed a microscope to properly see. I hated that they were trying to identify with me when they could have gone their whole lives without shaving, and no one would know. It also terrified me, knowing that if they thought their bleach-blonde barely-there hair was that bad, what must they be thinking of me? I felt like an animal standing next to an angel. 

The other response, which almost hurt more, would be, “Oh, I don’t shave. I don’t really have to.” It made me insanely jealous, knowing that just because of the way someone’s appearance was from birth, they could go their whole life not having to deal with the pain and shame that comes with body hair removal for dark-haired girls. 

The advent of the cultural shift in body hair stigma both pleased and upset me. I came to a liberal college in the city and met girls who told me they had never shaved, that they were fighting the patriarchy, that of course they wouldn’t remove their hair, and part of me found it very inspiring and empowering. But all that time that I had been ripping out my follicles, I wasn’t thinking of appeasing a man. I just wanted to be normal. 

I was fighting an internal battle with myself. A battle brought on, of course, by a male dominated world that demanded women be hairless and perfect. But my thinking had never been about being sexy or appealing— it had always been that I just wanted to be like everyone else. And by everyone else, I meant every light-skinned and light-haired girl. 

I don’t mean to claim that light-haired women and girls aren’t shamed for their body hair. The entire culture of forcing women to remove hair that grows naturally is an abhorrence in itself. I just wish I could go back to myself at ten years old, staring longingly at the bare legs of my classmates, and tell myself, “You are beautiful. No amount of shaving or waxing or chemicals is ever worth it. You are enough.” 

Trying to describe tactile sensitivities to someone who has never experienced it is insanely difficult. Similar to the well-known quote, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” trying to explain why I can’t wear jeans or touch velvet is something that I just can’t explain sometimes. 

I’ve tried writing about it in every way possible. I’ve tried writing poems, stories, physically trying to make people feel what I feel when my hands are too dry and I touch a rough fabric, why I absolutely need to moisturize my hands after I shower, why I wear gloves to do the dishes, why I do, in fact, need to cut the tags off of my clothing. 

Even as I type this, the feeling of my computer surface against my hands is making me clench my teeth and bite my lip. 

I am constantly looking for smooth metal or plastic surfaces to place my hands on or wrap my fingers around to dissipate the feeling of dry, uncomfortable sensation that comes from any number of sources. I could go on and on about the number of things that cause me physical discomfort to touch: fabric bus seats, construction paper, velvet, wool, corduroy, dry hands, nail files. Just typing them out and thinking about it makes me nauseous. 

There’s no rhyme or reason to why these specific materials cause me so much discomfort; they just do, and it’s always been that way. I’ve tried googling it and found online forums of people also looking for help, for something to explain why this material or that one makes their teeth hurt and stomach churn. I think all of us just want to know why we are the way we are. 

I’ve seen it called tactile sensitivity, tactile defensiveness, and sensory defensiveness. Regardless of the name you give it, it affects everyone differently and is impossible to explain to those who haven’t experienced it. 

When I tell people I don’t wear jeans, they often think it’s weird but don’t question it. What I don’t explain is that if I do wear jeans, any movement I make all day long will have me biting the inside of my cheek and pressing my lips together. When I was younger, my mom used to think I was just being difficult when I wanted the tags cut off my clothes. But when she would leave the tags on, I couldn’t focus on anything all day because I was constantly tugging at the back of my shirt. I once ripped holes in three different shirts in the course of a week from pulling out the tags. 

Hypersensitivity to materials often comes with other neurological disorders or symptoms; for me, I tend to hyperfocus on activities and interactions, fixating on small details and analyzing conversations over and over. When I’m assigned an activity or project, I can’t rest until it’s done. Sometimes this fixation on completeness is helpful, like in school when I need to get something done quickly. Sometimes it’s frustrating, though, when I ask someone to do a favor or project and they put it off; I know that procrastination is only human nature, but my brain has trouble processing why someone would deliberately avoid doing something they know they need to do. It’s in times like those when I have to remind myself that my brain does not function the same way, and I can’t blame people for taking their time/putting things off. 

Neurodivergence is a difficult subject to write about, but I think I’ve taken a fairly good stab at it here. What are your thoughts? Can you relate to issues of hypersensitivity or fixation? How do you deal with this in everyday life?

Being third generation is a strange place to be. I look identical to my Grandma, who is 100% Lebanese, even though I’m only a quarter. I’m the only one in my family who has these olive skinned looks. I have one sister and six other cousins, and of the eight of us on this side of the family, not one of them inherited the Lebanese looks except for me. Why me? Did I lose the genetic lottery? I wonder about this a lot. 

I also wonder about how much being the only Lebanese-looking cousin, but essentially being raised white, influenced who I am— not just as a person, but in my mindset, my sexuality, my gender, everything. I feel that I am living in a constant in-between state in everything I do. 

I am not Arab enough for the Arab students at school, but around my white friends I constantly feel the divide between us. But if I were to ever attempt to befriend the Arab students at my college, I would be immediately identified as an outsider. I come from a white area, with a white name, raised in a white culture, in a Catholic family. I am not Muslim, I don’t speak Arabic. I don’t have all the hallmarks of what it means to be an Arab, so it doesn’t matter that I’m Lebanese— I will never be Arab enough. 

But my white friends don’t understand or believe me when I tell them that I get pulled for random security checks at airports all too frequently. They tell me they envy my olive skin and the fact that I don’t burn, even though as a child I was teased for being yellow skinned, with thick dark arm hair. I introduce my friends to Lebanese food and they’re blown away, finding it just so interesting, and how had they never tried this before? My family’s culture is entirely foreign to them— but I’m still not Arab enough. 

In my family, everyone wants to pretend that my Mommom isn’t who she is. The few times I can get her to talk about her heritage, I learn things I never knew— that she spoke Aramaic growing up, that she used to only eat home cooked Lebanese food, that she had relatives in a strong Lebanese community in Rhode Island. I pull these tidbits from her slowly and carefully, learning in flashes about her childhood. But at the same time, she rails against immigrants and refugees, saying that they’re all ruining our country. I wonder how she forgets so easily who she is.

I constantly find myself comparing myself to my other mixed friends, wondering when I’m going to be immediately recognizably Arab. No one has ever guessed it right on their first try.

I wonder if I so desperately threw myself into the queer community because it was the first community where I was finally enough of something to feel like I could belong. I wasn’t this half something, half another, imposter in every way possible. I was queer, fully and completely, bisexual and genderfluid. I knew I had a place in this community. 

And yet I still find ways to doubt myself. I dress too feminine, I’m too cisgender-passing. I don’t wear my chest binder enough to call myself nonbinary. I’ve been in relationships with girls and guys, but when I say I’m with a man, I feel like people think I’m not truly bisexual. When I started dating my current boyfriend, my old roommate would make comments about how “straight” our relationship is— even though we’re both queer. 

I don’t know where this constant feeling of imposter syndrome comes from. I don’t know if it stems from this need to be a part of something that drives all human experience, or whether it has something to do with my ethnicity, but it frustrates me to no end— and I can’t seem to find a way to just be happy with living in the middle in this society that so frequently assigns us categories to self-identify down to the tiniest detail. 

Discourse surrounding the Asian continent and the use of the word “Asian” as a racial identifier has become more inclusive over the last decade or so. Typically, when people say someone is/looks Asian, what they mean is that they look East Asian— Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, etc. And most non-Asians use this general descriptor because they don’t bother to differentiate between the different nationalities and ethnicities that make up the Asian continent. 

In recent years, however, this has started to expand into reminding people that Asia is not just China and Japan, but includes southern Asian countries as well, such as India, Thailand, Burma, etc. However, among this discourse reminding people that Southeast Asians are also part of Asia, southwest Asians are left behind— not just in this discourse, but in others as well.

In the United States, anyone who can be categorized as MENA (Middle East and North Africa) does not have the option to choose this on the national census, college applications, or job applications. The United States categorized Middle Eastern and North African people, such as Syrians, Egyptians, etc, as white. The category on the census or, for example, the common application for colleges, lists the option as “White/Caucasian (including Middle Eastern origin)”. So in the U.S., even though MENA people are the target of hate crimes, whose representatives are accused of being terrorists, they are counted as white in the census. 

This in-between state develops for Arab peoples; we aren’t considered Asian because we aren’t East Asian, we aren’t considered white by people who want us to leave the U.S., but we have to call ourselves white because the U.S. census deems it so. 

It might seem silly to be upset over something like this, the fact that Arab people don’t have a neat box to fit themselves into when it comes to racial and ethnic categories. But the issue is not over wanting a label and not having one; it’s over being actively disqualified from a category because you aren’t enough of something. Geographically, the Middle East occupies space in the same way that it does in popular discourse on Asian diasporas and studies; it is in limbo, in between continents, on the edge of one thing and almost another. 

This displacement, combined with the effects of imperialization and colonization still scarring these countries, forms an effect of being placed in a category all its own with established connotations about what it means to be Arab but not Asian. 

Stereotypes come to mind when you hear both of those words; Asian calls to mind the typical assumptions about high intelligence, a specific demographic (Chinese/Japanse), parental discipline, tourists, etc. Arab calls to mind the Islamic religion, terrorism, refugees, etc. You can see the marked difference between calling someone Asian and calling them Arab or Middle Eastern— even though Arabs are Asian. For both of these categories, the stereotypes are wildly offensive and untrue; not every Arab is Muslim, but the world perceives it to be that way. 

Readers of my blog will know that I place great emphasis on linguistic patterns and how our language shapes our world. While this may seem like an insignificant signifier, whether or not we categorize Arabs as Asian, I feel that it does matter greatly that in the U.S., we are denying this group of people their identity while excluding them from another.