There's always this vague sense of uneasiness when exposing a vulnerable part to the world and finding love, laughter, healing, and joy, that the Adult in the room is eventually going to take us aside and scold us in a concerned, serious voice. We will be informed that we've been Inappropriate in some way.
Despite trying best that you can to learn the Rules, it seems that the Rules prohibit joy, and that these things are Not For You in some crucial way that you have overlooked. You just accept it. You're mature enough to do that, aren't you? You want to be a Good Girl, don't you?
You think that maybe if you're strong in your sadness and disappointment that eventually someone will notice and award you some joy anyways, but they never do. To be restrained and silent is the bare minimum expected of you. It seems each time the infraction was so severe as to have to warrant the pulling-aside to begin with, your unworthiness should've been self-evident.
Eventually with repeated incidences of this and being denied opportunities for joy that seem to come so easily to other people, one's heart shrinks and hardens into a small, bitter little lump, a shadow of what it once was. And with the hardening of one's heart comes the distillation of a different kind of resolve. Perhaps if the Rules constantly prohibit your joy while permitting it in others, then the Rules aren't as virtuous as the Adults in the room want you to believe. Eventually you begin to see how the Rules exist primarily to keep you under control, to forbid you from the fruits that others claim as their birthright while you sit on the sidelines and hope someone will eventually notice what a Good Girl you are. You begin to see how following the Rules is really just a form of learned helplessness, that nobody is about to give you permission to pursue the things in life that you really want out of it, and are just as likely to see you as a threat for wanting them, to formulate a plan to crush you.
So you experiment with all those things that Good Girls aren't supposed to touch, like sex and drugs and the occult. These things are enjoyable sometimes, and scary and troubling others, but you already accepted what came along with eschewing the Good Girl life. You are mature enough to accept the consequences of your actions, and nobody would give a shit anyways if you weren't, so you may as well suck it up. Nobody wants to listen to your whining about how hard you have it, anyways, you spoiled little brat. You’re white, after all, aren’t you? Even if your last name is Chinese. Nevermind that. You’re white until proven otherwise. You’re so white an online IRC group of Reddit atheist cultists you hung out with for nearly 8 years (give or take) will stalk and hound you when you start displaying an interest in witchcraft. The bullying will get so bad you have to scrub your socials and change what names you go by online. Because you’re white, and white girls aren’t allowed to practice witchcraft. It takes years for the ideas of reference to fade and the nightmares to stop but they get to go on believing they did their virtuous civic duty in punishing and terrorizing an entitled white girl.
Sometimes you think about how you should go back and try to carefully hide some of these aspects of yourself, parceling them away. Those things were never anybody's business to begin with anyways! But you find yourself terrorized by other people's opinions, regardless of how discrete you think you're being. It seems some things about you remain as plain as day. It seems the most terrible people are always the ones most upset they can't penetrate you with their opinions, as their opinions are the only thing they have to affirm their genders. You begin to learn you were smart enough all along to see that those Rules were only meant to keep you under the control of people who are only clever enough to try to prohibit your self-discovery and growth, that the Rules were something people were making up as they went all along to contain you as a threat rather than to help you actualize yourself.
The only path you can think to try to walk is your own. You talk to Lilith, the First Woman, sometimes. Three decades into your life, you learn you were Native all along. You looked at the world through a Native woman's eyes and met the world with a Native woman's face but you just didn't know it, and when you learn the truth, you can't help but cry and cry and cry. You cry because the truth was always staring at you through your father’s angry red-toned face, so wretched you could barely stand to look at it. You cry for days and weeks because you've learned a little secret about what a witch and an outcast from the garden and an autistic girl all have in common, staring at the world through the eyes of the Outsider, watching the narratives play out through blood memory, like a strange surreal dream you don't know how to interpret and feel powerless to change. You can't help but wonder how much of a part this played in how often the world said "No" to your joy, your healing, your freedom, your story. And maybe they didn't intend it but you know very well that what they say they intend doesn't matter, that their primary exports are lies. They lie to themselves and they lie to each other, so they’re not exactly reliable narrators. Your laughter was supposed to be silenced and your story was supposed to have come to an end over a hundred years ago. The fact you keep dragging it out makes everything all the more awkward for everyone. They must invent some Rule which you have broken in order to explain away their discomfort. To relegate you back to your role as a vessel for their sins and lies. To be dirty and shameful and infantilized and degraded so they can be pure and free and superior and stainless.
This cycle repeats itself one too many times. You get therapy. You try not to be too racist. You buy yourself a matcha latte and sit drinking it in the sunshine. You start working on a relationship with your estranged half-sister, who's almost exactly a decade older than you; her experiences and thoughts are eerily similar to yours, despite your families being forcibly separated by your white mom upon your birth. Your half-sister is a Pisces sun and rising with a Cancer moon, with tan skin and black hair in tight ringlets to your Snow White hazel-eyed complexion, and she's beautiful inside and out, a curious angled mirror to your own strength and an expansive inner resilience that you are beginning to notice. She finds the records of your great great grandmother who attended residential school in Quebec, and as you squint at the faded cursive ink on the scanned sheet of two-hundred-year-old paper, the million little heartbreaks arrange themselves in neat little black and white columns for you to see for the first time, plain as day. The learned helplessness as a survival strategy for all the weeks and months and years and decades when the best you could hope for was not to have your own joy and culture, but to be as small and unnoticeable as possible in order not to die. You think about what generations of women before you have had to endure in order not to die. You write notes of gratitude, to yourself and to Creator. You begin to feel better, little by little. You can't control how anybody else treats you but at least you're starting to feel a little more comfortable now inhabiting a Native woman's body. You're beginning to see how maybe the greatest gift you have to give to the world isn't to change who you are. It's to get back to who you were.