For my entire life I have participated in catholic faith. As a child I was brought to church every Sunday. I was forced to go to Sunday school, attended a Christian middle school and attended a catholic high school. Religion has been forced down my throat as long as I can remember. I became very bored and uninterested with it very early on. Yes, I was learning, but that didn’t mean I firmly believed in what I was learning. I know all these Bible stories and different lessons, but I don’t really care about them. I remember going to church and not being able to fall asleep in those tough wooden benches. The sermons I had sometimes resonated but that was a long time down the line. It took me around the time I was ten to understand, but I remember going to church with my sisters when around four or five years old just walking back and forth across the bench waiting for us to leave. I started going less and less and made my return a few years later and started Sunday school. I remember when I went through the most important time in a Catholic’s religious journey, Confirmation. I was finally confirmed in the church. I remember when my Sunday school teacher told me at 13, “Now that that you’re confirmed you can decide when you want to come to church”. I haven’t been to that church since. It started off as a break from getting ready every Sunday to do I even believe in anything they are saying? Catholicism is completely faith based. Believing in Jesus is like having a blindfold on and doing a trust fall with someone who walked away and believing they’ll come back to catch you. I remember learning a few of the technicalities of Catholicism and it is not for the weak. To believe in something with barely any concrete evidence is difficult. Many historians believe Jesus was a man recognized for miracles, but he was probably doing modern science, or he had really good luck when in front of the right people. It is confirmed that Jesus was a man that walked on this Earth thousands of years ago but hasn’t been acknowledged for anything else the Bible has said about him. In high school I had religion class my freshman and I realized that I’m not really sure about religion. Lately I haven’t been believing in anything. My sisters still go to church while I spend my Sunday like any other day. Sunday is the second day of the weekend or the first day of the week.

I vividly remember the age of nine. Not because I got a new doll, not because I was about to graduate elementary. It was the age I first discovered I was fat. I didn’t know it at first. I saw myself as the rest of my peers. But then that word entered my life like a blow to the chest. “You’re so fat”. “You’re too big to be liked”. “Fatass”. And suddenly, I noticed everything I had been blind to before. It was like a sheet being lifted from my eyes. The rolls on my stomach suddenly protruded from my pants. My arms began to look enormous to me. My thighs burned against my skin every time I walked. And everything I heard growing up started to make sense. “Don’t drink juice, drink water”. “Eating too many sweets is not going to make you pretty”. “People like smaller girls”. “Eat like a lady”. My world turned upside down with every single word, and from that point on my whole perspective changed. I started to cut down on sweets and greasy foods, and my mind only started to allow me to see “healthy” and “unhealthy” when it came to food. Nobody noticed. And no one seemed to care.

At age 12, at the local doctors office, I was told I had gained more than 20 pounds since my last visit. With a defeated look, I went home, tears falling on my pillow as I flopped onto my bed. Why was I like this? Why couldn’t I just be skinny like other people? A burning, painful feeling filled my chest. Rage. I was so angry that I hated myself and the way I looked, that I made a fateful decision that rainy afternoon. I went on Google and searched “how to loose weight fast”. There was a school trip to a waterpark that summer and I wanted to be able to wear a swimsuit without feeling so big. Track calories. Calories? What are they? They’re in my food? I have to eat less than x amount to loose weight fast enough? It was like this foreign world to me, of numbers, of BMI’s, of using self-hatred as motivation to get thinner. But I continued, spending hours and hours that same night, looking for a way to change. To be accepted. To finally be able to love myself. The next day, I made sure to tell my mom to not serve me rice. Instead, I eagerly asked to be served lettuce with some chicken. That was the first of many days, which turned into weeks, and then months of restricting my food intake. I shrunk more and more, my rolls disappearing and being replaced with hollowness and a protruding ribcage. It was only then, that my Mom decided to take me to the doctors. It didn’t take long for them to diagnose me with “Anorexia Nervosa”. I had never heard of it, and when I did search it up, I decided I could never fit the criteria. Images of skeleton-like women reflected back into my eyes from the screen. I wasn’t like them, so why did I need to gain the weight back? Why did I need to be healthy, if I looked so big? My reflection deceived me, everyday a bit more. The person I saw in the mirror looked so much bigger with every meal I was forced to eat, that I couldn’t anymore. I would try my hardest to make up any excuse to not eat, and when that didn’t work, I resorted to screaming matches with my parents. And it always ended with my mom wiping away tears as she scraped the food off my plate and into the garbage can. Time seemed to slow down so much, that I lost track of how much time passed. But soon enough, my next doctor visit came. I stepped on the scale, anxious to see how much weight I lost and if it met my weekly goal. 100 pounds. I had done it? I stood there in shock, thoughts racing through my head as I struggled to process that I had finally achieved my goal. But as I looked around, no one seemed to share this happiness with me. My Mom let out a sob, as she was comforted by my Dads arm around her. The doctor hadn’t come into the room yet, so it seemed like an eternity of silence that filled the air. When she did come, I hugged my knees, and stayed as quiet as possible. I hated her. She didn’t want me to be skinny. She was my enemy. “Julissa. You have lost too much weight and at seeing that you haven’t made any progress with eating and are still wrapped up in the mindset you have now, I’m afraid your only option is to go to the hospital for inpatient treatment”. Panic. That was what I felt first, along with numbness. And then came anger. I don’t even remember what I said, I just remember screaming and crying, before leaving the building and hiding in the parking lot. I wasn’t going to the hospital. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to get better. Everything that happened in the next few hours was a blur. The smell of ammonia burned my lungs with every squeak of my sneakers against the white marble floors of the hospital room. This was my new home for the next few days.

It wasn’t long until they discharged me, after I had managed to gain a few pounds back. I remember seeing how much I had gained and feeling a weight being put on my chest.

In the seventeen years of my supposedly masculine life, I never wanted anything to do with the kitchen. I had never wanted to cook a meal for myself. I never wanted to handle a knife, I never wanted the scorching heat of the stove to scorch my face, but boy was I starving. 

After a tiresome yet fun session of basketball at the YMCA, hunger took over me as it would an empty-handed hunter. I felt the nutrients excreting from my body through my sweat, if that’s how science works, and I desperately needed to get those nutrients back in my body. On the train ride back home from the YMCA, my mind began filtering through the different dishes I wanted to eat. I could not choose a dish a wanted, from the modest number of dishes which were circulating through my brain—it was either rotini pasta or chicken legs with rice or garlic naan with kabob or lamb stew with naan or cheese bread or biryani or chicken sliders or cheese sticks or Turkish bread or chicken tenders. I really had a limited choice. The decision was tough, but I had quite some time to think about it, after all, it was going to take me 1 hour to get home on the train. Stop by stop, I filtered through the dishes in my brain, and I finally settled on the prize winner– lamb stew with naan. Though the walk home from the train station was like a path through hell, I had finally made it home. I didn’t even care to take a shower or change my clothes once I got home. It was like every time I got hungry and wanted to eat, my muscle memory simply led me straight to my sisters. Being the only and youngest brother of seven sisters, it was taboo for me to step foot into the kitchen. I was always the one being served. I went to of my sisters and asked her to make me food, though I really wanted to TELL her. She said no, explaining how she got a lot of homework from her German chemistry professor. She was continuously yapping about that same chemistry professor for about 5 minutes straight, which I really didn’t care about because I wasn’t in college at the time. But now that I am in college, and have an old Iranian chemistry professor with a heavy  

un-understandable accent, I cant totally sympathize with her. However, in that moment I didn’t really give a shit. I just wanted to eat. After her I went to my other sister, and she apparently was working on an art project for an art competition she was participating in. She also didn’t have any time to make her little baby brother any food. I thought to myself, why do they think that what they have to do is more important than my growling stomach. At this point I wouldn’t be wrong to say that I was starving. By the time I made it to my last sister, I looked like a beggar, going down a street from person to person asking for some change. However, instead of asking for some change, I was kind of asking for a 5-star buffet meal. After getting that final refusal I just lost it. Not even one of my sisters could find time in their schedules to cook for me. Their refusal filled me with anger. I thought to myself, how could my sisters be so busy in their own lives, neglecting their supposed responsibility of cooking for me? I always had this belief that my sisters were mandated by some divine revelation to cook for me. I always believed that cooking was a woman’s job and that a man should keep away from the kitchen. However, I soon came to realize that I didn’t willingly adopt this belief. The belief that my sisters were obligated to make food for me and take care of me was unwillingly instilled into my brain, and at the time, I didn’t realize that I was feeding into cultural misogynistic stereotypes 

I was at odds with myself and my beliefs. My brain was clouded with so many thoughts which were chaining me, not allowing me to step forth into the kitchen. I didn’t believe that it was my job, a man’s job to go into the kitchen and make food. I remember my father always saying to me, “Raja, don’t you shame me by taking on a woman’s responsibility. You are here to be the man of the house, provide and protect the family, not to meddle with the kitchen.” I acted upon these beliefs like a puppet, with the strings being controlled by my father. However, something didn’t feel right. I began to wonder if these beliefs were my very own or if I was just an embodiment of my father’s beliefs. In that little fleeting moment, my true conscience showed itself, and I desperately clung to it. 

I decided for the first time to experience life the way I wanted to, through my very own eyes. I finally manned up, picked up my sister’s crusty old cookbook which had the secret formulas for all of my favorite recipes and decided to make the food myself. I came face to face with many challenges throughout this expedition of mine. I had trouble with the simplest of things, like even finding the different ingredients necessary to make my lamb stew and naan. There were so many different cabinets and drawers in the kitchen, and I had no clue where my sisters kept each of the ingredients. I almost felt like a tourist in a foreign land. After finally finding all the ingredients, I finally began mixing and pouring and measuring and whisking. I followed the recipe step by step and soon enough, I had the stew cooking on the stove and I had the dough for the naan ready. I must point out that the heat from the stew on the stove was difficult to bare. It felt like my skin was peeling off, however, I sort of liked that feeling. I felt like I was on the way to accomplish something great and therefore, I didn’t let any pain stop me. After about 3 hours, I had finally finished cooking my food. Surprisingly, I didn’t really feel hungry anymore. My hunger was quenched by my new experience of cooking, though I definitely needed to drink a cup of water. I won’t go into much detail about how the food tasted because it would be embarrassing, but I will say that it wasn’t as bad as tuna fish.  

Now that I look back, I had no unique beliefs representing my individual experiences or perspectives. The bitter truth is that I was a vessel for my familial, societal, and cultural beliefs- and so was my father and his father and his father before him. So, I do not blame my father for screwing me over, in fact, he was screwed over himself. Living by stereotypes and limiting people’s experiences solely because of gender was the lifestyle passed on to him by the generations before him. Fortunately, I was courageous enough to shape my own destiny. I was able to break free from these cages for myself and my future generations so we can all fly high without boundaries. Its crazy how one can feel this boundless just by now being able to cook, but for me, the simple task of cooking a meal was a life changer.  

I was never a huge fan of reading books until I stumbled across mangas, webtoons and webtoon novels. If you didn’t know, mangas are basically Japanese comic books and webtoons are Korean comic books. I was introduced to these types of books from close friends back in high school and still to this point, I enjoy reading mangas and webtoons. With the arrival of the pandemic and the quarantine, I started to frequently read these books almost every day. Besides reading manga, webtoons and webtoon novels, I kind of enjoyed reading comic books because I can see pictures of what’s currently happening throughout the story. What I dislike reading would be history related books. I feel like reading books about the past makes me unmotivated to read these types of books because I am not really interested in the past. There weren’t that many good memories when reading books but a bad one was when I had to read out to the entire class in third grade. During that time, I had social anxiety so when I had to read out loud to thirty other students in the class, I just froze. As of now, my anxiety isn’t as bad, but I’m still trying to overcome this anxiety.

Compared to reading, writing wasn’t really as fun. At a very young age when I first started to learn how to write and then eventually write essays, I never enjoyed writing. When I would have to write essays for my school, my mind would always wander somewhere else. However, recently I started to write a daily journal of what happens throughout the day. Sometimes after writing these daily journals, I would like to reminisce on days where I had fun so I would go to that specific day in my journal. Back in high school, I would always have to write no matter what I was doing. Everytime I finished a chapter of a book, I would have to write a summary of the main points and what happened in that chapter. As I kept repeating this process for every chapter and every book, I started to heavily dislike writing. 

I haven’t frequently researched for information, but the last time I did do a research, it was about how covid impact the working field. I had to write a paper about how this pandemic impacted how and where people with office jobs would have to work. When I first started researching, I thought the main problem would be finding information that is trustworthy but the actual problem with researching this was that I didn’t really know that many places to obtain information regarding my topic. However after a bit of struggling, I was able to find multiple sources for my paper.

Starting this class, I feel sorta prepared as to passing this class because I really don’t want to repeat this course. From this class, I am hoping to improve in my writings because I’ve always considered myself to be lacking when it comes to this.