The 'Compounded Effect'??!

Today, I want to yap about how the existence of many struggles in your life leads to a significantly detrimental impact on you, an impact that is larger than the combined sum of the effects these struggles would give you in isolation. 

For example, let’s say someone was bald and had acne too, both of which are, by social conventions, relatively ‘unattractive’ characteristics (I don’t believe that these are unattractive characteristics, but much of society sadly does). Then, how society would treat this person would be much worse than if you were to combine the negative experiences one would be subjected to if they had acne or were bald in isolation. 

This is not an original thought of mine. In fact, I saw a TikTok video that introduced me to the concept of ‘intersectionality’ yesterday, which refers to how different aspects of an individual’s social identity may overlap and potentially subject the individual to extreme oppression. The video talked about how the oppression levels black women are subject to are more than the combined oppression levels experienced by black men and white women in isolation. I’m kind of trying to talk about a very similar idea, where instead of strictly talking about oppression, I’m going to give you all of my thoughts about this idea of how; the coexistence of certain things together can lead to a significantly large impact on a person, which I’m going to now coin as the ‘Compounded Effect’. 

Growing up, I had a countless number of socially conventional features and characteristics that were relatively more ‘unattractive’. I was extremely overweight, had blasting cystic acne all across my face, i was extremely loud and didn’t know when to stop talking (i would later come to find that i have ADHD), and i was also not exactly the most academically gifted. Due to the ‘compounding effect’ of all of these characteristics coexisting together, this would lead to me being treated horribly by my peers, and it would also deeply slash my self-confidence.  

Further, i was an Asian woman, and the intersectionality of that consequently led to a lot of frustrating experiences. Growing up as a female in Asian culture is flabbergastingly confusing. Asian culture tends to care a lot more about a woman’s appearance than western culture. As i was a relatively chunky-sized kid, this would pose a lot of issues for me. To be honest, i still haven’t fully processed how much growing up as a bigger kid impacted me, but i can name a few experiences pressed into my memory. As a kid, i had a habit of binge-eating (which now, i realize was due to my ADHD and my need to be stimulated by the dopamine hits food gave me). One time, i ate a whole family-sized bag of chips the day before i was supposed to head off on a family trip to Sydney. My mum, after finding out, was left in a state of frustration and anger. She then gave me an ultimatum; run around my local secondary school 100 times, or be banned from my family trip to Sydney (where i would be left home alone as a 10-year-old). Looking back, this is not a viable ultimatum, as my mum would probably face a lot of legal issues if she had left her 10-year-old at home for a week. But, i didn’t know any better at the time, so I took the option of running 100 laps around our local secondary school, where i ran mindlessly for a few hours. I don’t really remember much of my other thoughts in that moment, i lowkey think i blocked it out. Aside from that whole experience, there were also other issues. As i was both a woman and a bit clutzy, and not the most academically gifted, i perfectly fit into the stereotypical trope of a ‘dumb woman’ that ‘doesn’t have a single thought in their brain’. This drew more attention and exacerbated these ‘negative’ characteristics of mine in my relatives' eyes. With my relatives constantly saying every possible mean thing to my face, my self-esteem was hit quite a bit. Also, being an Asian and trying to fit in at school is also an odd experience in itself. When the majority of white kids would look at me, i just knew that they would automatically classify me as ‘weird’, and to some extent ‘gross’. Let me just be clear; i understand that not all white people are like this, but i’m talking about 6-10 year old kids here, kids who may not have the full capacity to understand the full extent of racism and their actions. Anyways, this made it a bit difficult to not only make friends, but to climb up the social ladder within my school (which sounds stupid now, but as a kid, everyone prioritized this), especially considering that a lot of kids, me included, would determine some of their self-worth based on how they ranked in this social ladder. It gets kind of confusing because as a kid, you don’t fully understand that these other kids don’t like you because of your race. Rather, you may blame different aspects of your personality, further contributing to a decline in self-confidence. 

Now, all of these different struggles again, had a ‘compounding effect’, making life seem incredibly fricken confusing. Do you know what else made things more confusing? The fact that I barely thought about my struggles as a kid, and the significant impacts of this ‘compounding effect’ just stuck with me as i got older (again, because i never actually recognised or discussed these struggles). Despite never even accepting these as struggles to myself, i could feel them, in the form of intense physical tension and stress in my brain. It’s wild how mental health issues can translate into different physical sensations like that (this is a whole-nother topic that i will hopefully discuss in another post). Now, this pent-up stress would sporadically, and very literally contribute to my brain ‘shutting down’ in social and academic settings (for example, it would sometimes contribute to me blanking out during an important exam). 

To make this extra confusing, as I got older, i could tell that something was obviously going on with me, but because i never even thought about or identified my struggles as a kid, i just thought i was being dramatic in ‘giving myself stress in random situations for basically no reason’. So, i would just get really mad at myself for being an absolute ‘drama queen’ or ‘dramatic freak’. In attempts to reduce my stress levels, i genuinely believed that telling myself i was a ‘drama queen’ for anything that was bothering me, would work wonders. Obviously, if you do this, you just end up bottling your own feelings, and then you just kind of explode at random times; which is why during my ‘Year 12’ years, i would randomly cry (and very unexpectedly too) in the most random settings (on the train home from school, twice in my English classroom, at my local bus stop whilst waiting for my bus to come). In these random outbursts, i never had any individual event bothering me, i would very literally just randomly, but explosively cry. 

Anyway, my point is that this original ‘compounded’ effect can lead to the most random and confusing events and situations in your life. For me, thinking about this ‘compounded effect’ and how it’s significantly impacted my life has really helped me to learn a lot of key things about myself, things that i honestly would never have thought about. I think my brain has a habit of not wanting to think about past struggles, or even validating them as struggles. But, i’ve really come to realize how important it is to validate your own struggles and to validate your own emotions, in order to avoid random crying outbursts in public #lol. That’s actually another reason why i started this blog; to give me an outlet in just plastering my feelings about everything ever. 

But, i would love to hear your thoughts about this ‘Compounded Effect'! Anyway, this is it from me. 

Seeya next time

The Anonymous Blogger