Where I'm From

Okay, I guess we're doing this. Hi, my name is Beth Goat. Welcome to the first session of my podcast. It's going to be probably a whole series about my life experiences. I come into America from Kathmandu, Nepal, and finally moving up to a Pittsburgh PA. After living in Michigan for its time in Omaha, Nebraska, and going through Ohio and ending up in Jersey City, in Jersey, one of the most diverse places in the United States. I actually had like a lot of people come up to me at the bars or at bookshops to coffee shops, even at work saying that you know you should definitely start like a podcast or something where you talk about your life experiences because at 21 you have a lot to unravel. And I guess I kind of agreed because I do think that you know there are some life experiences of mine that I have to share. And especially as an immigrant to these United States and hostilities that exist. Towards immigrants here, I don't want to be like the standard bearer of all immigrants of course, but you know you can only speak from your own experiences. And I do believe that my experience does matter. And so, even though that is a selfish reason in and of itself, I would also think that the other selfish reason why I should do this podcast, these sessions, is because I do believe this is self-therapy. And I do believe that in these stories, I hope whoever is listening, if there is anybody listening, I hope that you find something that you're going to relate to. You might be from United States, might be from Australia, might be from Europe, might be from anywhere, but I just want to say things that are relatable to you too. And if not, I just want to reach out and tell you my story and see where it goes from there. Now, yeah, I mean there are a lot of things I could start from. And I am very unclear as of now where I should really start from. So the get-go would probably always be your childhood, early life, whatever. And that's probably where I'm going to start. And I'll have to talk about my family and about Nepal and what it was like growing up in Nepal and Kathmandu through the Malveston Sergencies and the earthquake and the lasting impacts that I had even to this day that are traumatic, but they're also funny and a bit inspiring, I guess. So I would love to share these stories with you. Though this is like the first session, now only stick to my childhood and my early life, so we don't go all over the place right here while I'm doing this. It's going to be probably a whole series about my life experiences coming to America from Kathmandu to Nepal and finally moving up to Pittsburgh, PA. After living in Michigan for a time in Omaha, Nebraska, and going through Ohio and ending up in Jersey City, in Jersey, one of the most diverse places. In the United States, I actually had like a lot of people come up to me at the bars or at bookshops to coffee shops, even at work saying that you know you should definitely start like a podcast or something where you talk. A lot of people are like, "I'm going to go to a cafe or a restaurant or a restaurant or a restaurant or a restaurant." I guess I kind of agreed because I do think that there are some life experiences of mine that I have to share. Especially as an immigrant to these United States and hostilities that exist. Towards immigrants here, I don't want to be like the standard bearer of all immigrants of course, but you know, you can only speak from your own experiences and I do believe that my experience does matter. Even though that is a selfish reason in and of itself, I would also think that the other selfish reason why I should do this podcast, these sessions is because I do believe this is self therapy. I do believe that in these stories, I hope whoever is listening, if there is anybody listening, I hope that you find something that you're going to relate to. You might be from United States, you might be from Australia, you might be from Europe, you might be from anywhere, but I just want to say things that are relatable to you too. If not, I just want to reach out and tell you my story and see where it goes from there. Now, yeah, I mean there are a lot of things I could start from and I am very unclear as of now where I should really start from. The get-go would probably always be your childhood, early life, whatever. And I'll have to talk about my family and about Nepal and what it was like growing up in Nepal and Kathmandu through the Malvest Insurgency and the earthquake and the lasting impacts that I had, even to this day, that are traumatic, but they're also funny and a bit inspiring, I guess. So, I would love to share these stories with you. Though this is like the first session, I only stick to my childhood and my early life, so we don't go all over the place right here while I'm doing this. So, that's for the first info to this. I already told you that I'm from Nepal, from Kathmandu. Life was different back then, it went slow. Nepal is one of those places where you can take your time doing things. We always have our tea breaks in the evening. That's something that we borrowed from our colonial neighbors while they were sitting in India. So, 2 p.m.s were always that time where you sat down at a watering hole. Just some place that you felt comfortable in. And you sat there and you smoked cigarettes with your friends, drank some tea, and you talked about basically nothing. That probably characterizes my teenage years, but we're talking about childhood, and I guess it is more important. I mean, I would not characterize my childhood as entirely happy. There are some traumatic points of my childhood that probably is not safe. You say, "Up here in a podcast, we'll come on later," and I could tell you about it at length. There are things about my childhood that not even my mother got us. But you got to trust me on this. I'll talk about it some other time. So, I didn't grow up exactly in a happy family. My mom and my dad separated when I was 6 years old. My first memory of that little scuffleful, I mean, it turned out to be my way more lately. My mom left the house and she lived with her parents. I was still with my dad. My dad had a permanent job as a government official somewhere in the Ministry of Finance in Nepal. But it was not like a top-dog job. He was up there, but he was not on top. He didn't sat in the back room dealings of whatever was going on in the country at that time. It made a rational sense for me to live with my dad for that temporary while of 6-8 or 9. My first memory of this separation was when I was in the second grade, we had our final exams. And I remember sitting down in the classroom. I think it was a math exam. And I remember I saw my mother outside the classroom and I just dropped the test and everything in my pen. I just ran out because I hadn't seen my mom in like months. So I hold her close and I hug her so tight. I can still feel that feeling when you hold someone so dear to you that you don't want to let go. You wish your flesh just melted onto them. There was nothing in the world that could separate you from them. And that's how I felt about hugging my mother that day and I cried. And she cried. And that was the first time I ever saw my mother cry. And that's going to be. That's probably the first time, you know, long time that I'll ever see her cry because she let loose that time. But my mother was always one of those women that were very composure. They took their composure, they took their etiquette very seriously. Which ultimately translated into me being this very disciplined teenager later on as I lived with her after I was 10. She got a job and everything. And we moved into the same house where I used to live with my dad because my dad bought another house where he moved into with his family, his grandparents, his mother and his father. And my elder brother at the time lived with my dad. So it was basically just me and my mom. And she practically raised me all by herself. And this particular fact about my childhood kind of characterizes how I looked at family in general was just the fact that I always believed that the mother of the family was to me is the essential part of any like heterosexual marriage. And I was like, "I'm the third world." So I give me a break on that. But this is how marriages are. And the third world where the mother is not supposed to be the breadwinner so on was very 1950s America. But just in the third world, my mom did start working. She was like, "Colton, call the career of one man." It was always like stuff that you would hear growing up about how she let her sons go because she can't even take care of her sons because she had to go to work, pay the bills and so on. And I guess that did impact a certain frame of mind that I started to dump up early on which was you could only do so much for yourself. And yeah, like you can only do so much for yourself, man. Because growing up, my mom had a lot of debts. Like it was just crazy how in debt we were. I mean, she's still in debt. So you have the people that she owed money to show up at the house to screen at her and she would give me a month, give me a few weeks, give me a few days. So growing up in that environment where anybody could show up and ask her money from my mom, it kind of hurts a kid. I don't know. I won't call it self-esteem, but I guess you know, self-respect. It's just a battering experience to sit there, especially if you've been raised around what it actually means to be a man. That kind of masculinity is very agitated and you grow up aggressive. You grow up wanting to kill him with a fucker. Excuse my French, but yeah, there is a lot of aggression that is innate in situations like that. Or you innately develop those kinds of feelings towards any kinds of confrontation. So I guess for the longest period in my life, the reason why I've always avoided confrontations with people was always because I always used to envisage a confrontation and being a conversation about allwing money to somebody. Or you know, it was very characterized by images of my mom being shouted at, being called names. Names that I couldn't probably say it out loud because they are very hard to get off my chest. And yeah, so this was a scenario where I used to go up. So I was like, that was in a house where I didn't feel safe for majority of my life. And then at one point you just got used to it and then you were always trying to look for refuge with something else, some distractions. So most distractions for me became my grandad from my mom's side, my mom's dad, Bula, who I deeply respect and admire. He passed away a few years ago and that too was a traumatic event for me. And Bula had this influence on me, especially in my politics and how I look at the world and socioeconomics in general. I'm not a Trotskyite, he was. But yeah, he kind of shaped how I thought about the world. He would recite William Wordsworth to me and he was a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe. He used to read Joseph Conrad out loud sometimes. And he actually had a lot of wise things to say growing up that probably has influenced me in my major cross, like trying to weigh through that. And that transition from childhood to early adults that are teenage years, which I believe isn't stressed as enough as being important. Like we all talk about teenagers and like your early 20s and like so on, but nobody actually talks about that time from like 10 to 13, which I believe is like a very important age in anybody's life. And this was a time where like Bula was around for me. It was a time where I did like grow up into like a lot of responsibilities that you will not see in like this part of the world. Like I got my first job when I was like 14. It was just writing for a paper. It was like an English paper. I got like 50 repeats for it, which is basically just like a quarter in American money. But it meant a lot. I made like 200 or 300 later on like repeats. So it was like you know 30 bucks and 40 bucks and it was a lot of money for like 14 years. So with it comes spices, you know, with it comes like smoking and drinking. And it's not drugs. But just like yeah, like the little vices that you know, you kind of adopt. And I adopted it very early. I adopted it at like 13, 14. Like I started to be like a very heavy drinker and a heavy smoker by the time I was 14, which gave me this voice. And as I think that phase two characterized this voice, people always tell me that my voice is very like somber. And you know, like when I make a joke, people are probably like are you making a joke or you know, are you serious? My sarcasm has always been very sharp. And yeah, so that phase two is like probably the time where I realized that I was more depressed than most of my friends. Like don't get me wrong. You go up in the third world. There was like a lot of like untalked issues that are just not talked about and your emotions and feelings. And your mental health of course were like part of it. But it was not it was not like I was like, I knew I had depression so I was like there was no place I could go that could actually give me that. Give me that diagnosis. But my granddad, but he always he always saw it. He always saw it that you know, he always said that you were that I was smarter than my big brother. And like I understood a lot of things that I don't age that you know, he will probably take like 10 to 20 years to realize. And then he's like without play, it was probably like start like talking about justice and so on. That was that was Boa. Like that is the man that had the biggest impression of me and like he did he did help you through like even that phase of like being you know where I was about to self-destruct like you take me and start talking about. If you want to drink you drink with me, if you want to smoke you smoke outside but with me watching like you if you want to do tobacco will do tobacco together will sit down and do it together. Because I know you respect me not to do it in front of me. You know because like that's the thing like you don't smoke or drink in front of our elders in Nepal. It's considered very disrespectful. And yeah it is considered very disrespectful and that was his point. That's how he used to make points to me. If you think that's so disrespectful to me why don't you respect yourself enough not to do it to yourself. And I guess that actually fulfilled this void of self respect that I had gone through with all these people that come in to berate my mom that that battering humiliation was also dealt with this kind of like self respect that my my granddad taught me to have. Of course there was a lot of like a lot of things that he used to say that he used to go through my head but you know as I started reading about stuff and as I started talking. Wondering about stuff and I did I did understand him eventually but he was an intellectual very misunderstood man too with that. And that actually was probably most of my growing up psychologically. And I guess this is like a good session for the background that you know I could give about my childhood. This took a lot longer than I expected it to be. On the next session I probably would talk about how I dealt with malice threats and how like people were joining up to malice insurgency. If you're still listening I hope you're there for that too.