On Not Believing in the Unseen

On Not Believing In the Unseen

Since I was seven, I have been skeptical about believing in the unseen. It was warm May afternoon when the loose tooth in my mouth finally wiggled its way out and changed my life forever. It was an ordinary tooth, marble white and covered in a thin film of blood. Once I had overcome my disgust for the tooth, I took it in hand to show my mother my prize.

My mother responded to my accomplishment with a mild interest. She told me in a tepid tone to put the ivory tooth under my pillow, so that in the morning it would be replaced by a shiny quarter. The tooth was taken by a small woman called Tooth Fairy, who in return granted me the quarter. Later that day, as I lay waiting for night to fall, my mind attempted to grasp what tiny pixie looked like. I imagined a frail woman floating on paper thin wings, holding a quarter larger than her head. She would be the one who would make me twenty five cents the richer the next morning.

Unfortunately when I awoke, I found something else waiting under my pillow; it was a sad, hackneyed dollar bill.

The face of George Washington smiled up at me as I returned his grin with a grimace. Where’s the glossy, metallic quarter? Did the tooth fairy make a mistake? Well, perhaps the dollar was not an error on the fairy’s part… maybe she thought I deserved more than just a mere twenty five cents.

I leapt out of bed and carelessly descended the stairs to find my mother cooking in the kitchen. She was humming an unrecognizable tune, brewing eggs and cooking tea. I warily approached my mother, for I was crestfallen about telling her of tooth fairy’s possible mistake.

I’m not sure what I expected her to say, but her response was both unwarranted and unsettling.

“Oh, your brother put that under your pillow before you went to sleep. You’ve never believed in the tooth fairy anyway.”

I stood there in shock, looking at my feet, mulling over the two sentences she had just dropped on me. My mother had lied to me. She had told me of a mythical midget lady who comes out during the dead of night to take teeth and leave money. And worse, my brother was partially responsible for this lie. I thought he knew better than to trick my gullible young mind. I attempted to mask my rage with apathy and distract my young mind with cartoons instead.

So what is the importance of this silly childhood story? Well, it is more than just a mere story or a distance recollection. It is the root to a tree of skepticism that has been growing inside me ever since. It has survived the seasons, adapted to its environment, and blossomed into something more.

Once the petals had taken shape, I was painfully aware than ever of my skeptic mindset; I stick out like a sore thumb in my deeply religious family. My family practices Sikhism, a religion in which followers adhere to the beliefs of ten gurus enlightened by the “light of god”. This light is called “ick jot”, meaning “one light”, because it represents god’s power. However, I can not see or feel this light, because my vision is clouded with cynical darkness. I am not a Sikh: I am an atheist.

The word “atheist” comes from the Greek word atheos, which is the absence of believing in the reality of gods. Ironically, a person can be religious and an atheist, provided that the religion they believe in does not have any deities (such as some sects of Buddhism). The idea of atheism first appeared in the sixteenth century, gaining support during the Renaissance and the Reformation periods. During the French revolution, it was used as a means to free France of religion. However, atheism got most of its

(negative) attention from Karl Marx, when his communist regime advocated for statewide atheism across the globe.

As an atheist and a Latin student, I adhere to the principle, “Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur", which translates to “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”. This idea is the basis for the philosophical principle called “Hitchens’s razor”, which states that if a debater can not back up their argument with factual evidence, then their opponent has no need to even attempt to contest their believes. I believe this idea is a logically sound principle. As a result, it is the counterargument I use when a religious person tries to convince me that god exists.

Unfortunately, this principle hasn’t yet helped me convince my parents into getting me another cat.

Regardless, atheism has been around for awhile, yet it harbors an infamous image. America is a predominantly Protestant country, and disbelievers are looked upon with a cool resentment. Of course, that does mean that all religious people treat atheist with a cold shoulder. I do not believe that religion is bad, only the practice of fundamentalism is.

I am obsessed with studying the sciences, especially the fields of chemistry and biology. However, I am also obsessed with creation stories and mythology. Although these topics juxtapose each other, I have found that for me, they feed off one another. For example, I agree with evolutionary biology because of its logic, but also because it helps exaggerate the fallacies in creation myths. They fit together like a puzzle.

It has been nine years since my skepticism first took root in my mind, and thus far it has matured into something more than not believing in the tooth fairy. I am an atheist because I can not bring myself to believe that there is a deity controlling my life. Some say that everything happens for a reason or that it was part of god’s plan. On the contrary, I believe things just happen, a randomly as gas molecules colliding in a container or lightning striking a person. It is also random that I am an atheist. I could have been born into a deeply religious community, with no means of learning about its opposing ideology.

Recently, I have come to accept myself for who I am and what I do and don’t believe in. I am proud of being atheist, but I am even more proud of being able to still be friends with people who are not. It should be a person’s right to choose whether or not they believe. No one should have a way of thinking forced upon them. People must choose for themselves.

And that’s exactly what I did.

On Being a Daughter

The relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter is not often depicted as a good one. The daughter is usually bratty and spoiled, and always in a fight with her mother, who won’t let her go to a concert, sleep over at a friend’s house, or borrow the car. While there certainly are mothers and daughters who act like this, I’d like to think that most daughters have a better relationship with their moms. I certainly do.

When I was younger, my mom, her friend Donna, and I used to ride horses together almost every day. My mom and I would meet Donna at the barn every day after school, and go riding on the trails around Radnor Hunt. When I was nine, we were riding on a bitterly cold day in January. Some of the trails were icy, so we thought it would be safer to stay in the yard in front of the barn. As we were riding back towards the barn, someone a few properties away fired a gun. It spooked the horses, and they started galloping up the driveway. Donna and I were ahead of my mom, and couldn’t see her. When we got our horses under control, we turned around to go back to the barn. When we turned around, we saw my mom wobbling to her feet, the front of her jacket stained with blood. My mom had fallen off and crashed head first into the fence. Her face was bloody and unrecognizable. Her lower lip hung limply, revealing bloody, crooked teeth. Bloody, crooked teeth in a jaw that stuck out at a sharp angle. She could stand and mumble some words, but she didn’t know what day it was, where she was, or what had happened. I started crying in disbelief, and Donna called an ambulance. When the ambulance got there, the EMTs

decided it would be better to take her to the hospital in a helicopter. I watched her get taken away, not knowing what would happen to her. Donna and I put the horses away, and someone else who was at the barn drove me home. Donna called my dad, who was away on a business trip, and he came home to stay with my mom in the hospital.

While my mom was in the hospital, my brother, John, and I were taken care of by whatever friend or relative could take some time off from work. John and I didn’t have much to say to each other. We didn’t argue, but we didn’t laugh or play either. We didn’t want to talk about our mom, yet that was the only thing on our minds. My dad decided it wouldn’t be good for us to visit my mom until she looked a little better, and he didn’t tell us much about how she was doing. About once a week, John and I recorded messages for our mom with a tape recorder. We made a lot of cards, but we didn’t know that she couldn’t see them because her eyes were swollen shut. In March, my dad finally decided we should visit her. We drove into Philadelphia, and my dad warned us about what she looked like. I had been there when she was hurt, so I sort of knew what to expect, but my dad especially wanted to prepare John, who hadn’t seen her since before her accident.

“John,” he said. “I want you to know that she might not look the same as you remember her.”

“I know, Dad. I can handle it,” my brother replied.

“Alright, but if you want to leave, just let me know.”

With that said, we went up to her room. My mom looked worse than she did right after she was hurt. Although her face wasn’t bloody, it was now swollen and disfigured. She had a tracheostomy in her throat to breathe, and a feeding tube in her stomach to eat. We stood in silence, not knowing what to say to our physically injured, but mentally aware mom. I sat down

on the edge of her bed and started to talk to her. She couldn’t talk back, so she blindly scribbled her responses on a yellow legal pad. Every time she wanted to write something, one of us had to move her hand to the right spot so she didn’t write over something she had already written. Although I had never seen my mom look worse, I felt a huge sense of relief talking to her. The three months I’d spent at home wondering if I would ever be able to have a conversation with my mom again seemed distant. I felt a pressure in my chest release, a pressure I hadn’t even known had been there. I felt like I had my mom back.

By some miracle, my mom can eat, speak, and do everything normally today. She didn’t have any lasting brain damage. Since she came home from the hospital, I’ve only gained more respect for my mom. Her accident has made me appreciate her strength, sense of humor, generosity, and love for my brother and I. Last summer, she developed a lump on her face. When she finally got an appointment with the doctor who had done most of her surgeries when she was in the hospital, he told her that the bones in her face had healed. In doing so, they pushed one of the screws out that had been holding them together. When my mom told me what happened, she said “I always knew I has a screw loose.” She never lost her sense of humor in situations like this one, or when she had to explain to old acquaintances she’d run in to that, no, her face didn’t look like that because she’d had a face lift.

Although I wish my mom didn’t have to go through what she did, her accident has changed us both for the better. Not only are we not an embodiment of the bratty teenage girl/uncompromising mother stereotype, but I appreciate my mom more than I would have been able to had she not had the accident. I don’t take for granted anything she does for me, or at least I try not to. Losing my mom for three months has made our relationship stronger and more genuine than it ever could have been otherwise.

On Being Short

“You need to sleep more.”

“Drink more milk.”

“Do you jump rope on a daily basis?”

These are just a few examples of the plethora of no-fail tricks I’ve received from helpful people on getting taller. Well dang, if only I had slept 10 hours every day instead of a meager 8. Why didn’t I drink milk for lunch and dinner too instead of only breakfast? And I should have kept up with that 1000 jumps-a-day thing for more than just the entire summer of 6th grade. Contrary to belief however, magic doesn’t work.

I’ve tried pills. I’ve been treated by both Western and Eastern doctors. Western medicine resulted in negative side effects and consisted of injecting hormones, or so my mom said, but Chinese medicine was supposedly just as effective and all natural. I was dragged from doctor to doctor, each assuring me that if I just followed his procedure and took his medicine, I would grow. Magic would happen. I even met a famous Buddhist monk who doubled as a Chinese doctor; she sold me bottles of pills at a couple hundred bucks each. In the beginning, I believed their claims. But with each failed treatment, I woke up a little more from my dream.

To date, I am 59 inches tall, 4 foot 11 inches, 150 cm. This puts me in the 5th percentile for the heights of 16-year-old girls in America. I have not grown for the last two years, and I probably won’t in the years to come. In other words, I’m short.

But why should that matter? The Merriam Webster Dictionary says that height is “a measurement of how tall a person or thing is.” So why did I go through so many different treatments and tricks in hopes to increase the measurement of my body? Children are taught not to judge a book by its cover, that physical appearance doesn’t matter. And in a perfect world, it doesn’t. But I am not perfect and neither is the world I live in, so naturally it matters.

In a culture where tallness is glorified (hello stilettos and models with spidery long legs!), being just under 5 feet tall is a slap in the ego. Not only is it embarrassing when I can’t ride certain roller coasters because I’m not quite tall enough for their standards, but life is more difficult in general. I cannot reach the smock hanger in the art room where I have class, not even by jumping. My classmates get to watch the spectacle of a little girl hopping up and down trying to hang her smock up. My jeans are always too long, so I get the option of walking around looking like a girl playing dress-up with her mom’s closet or going through the tedious efforts of tailoring my clothing. And this might sound crazy, but people actually walk into me because I’m under their vision line.

In school there was always that occasional jerk who would make fun of me. In elementary school it was an older boy named Andrew who referred to me as “Midget.” In middle school another boy liked to call me “Shrimp”. Even in high school, someone told me I should be “embarrassed of my height.” When I wasn’t being bullied by these boys, I put the pressure on myself. Around my classmates I sometimes felt conscious of my height, or the lack thereof, and I imagined that others were silently making judgments about me. It was okay though, because I knew that someday I would hit that growth spurt or those magic pills would come into effect and I would be just as tall as everyone else. For a while I was in denial of my fate of eternal shortness. I calculated the number of inches I had to grow a year to attain an average height by high school, when most girls stop growing. Each year that number kept increasing and becoming more ridiculous. I finally came to terms with myself in the 8th grade and admitted that I would have to accept my height for what it was, forever.

Being short isn’t always bad. At piano recitals people think I’m some sort of child prodigy playing difficult pieces by Chopin and Debussy when really I’m just an adequately able high school pianist. I can go trick-or-treating for many years to come, although I’ll probably tire of it before my neighbors tire of me. I always won hide-and-seek too, back when I played it with my friends. It was a thrill to sit comfortably in the kitchen drawers listening to the complaints of the larger kids who could only hide behind doors.

Sometimes I even gain a financial edge from my shortness. One weekend last year, my family and I went to an expensive Japanese restaurant named Minado for lunch. I enjoyed delicious sushi, miso soup, and green tea ice cream. When the waiter brought the bill however, my father wasn’t too happy. Each person cost 30 dollars, and this was only a lunch, not a dinner. But then he realized that one person was only charged 15 dollars. Turns out the waiter assumed that I was a child even though I clearly surpassed the height requirements, but never mind that. That day I was proud of my height.