Skill Issues
Skill issue, a term coined by Gen Alpha/Gen Z, describes when someone fails at something simply because they are bad at it.
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The bus I am in smells like poop. My face feels like the greasy remains of a french fry bag and my stomach is protruding past its normal reach. We have been on this bus for almost five hours. I am starting to understand why certain countries legalized elective euthanasia.
Today my partner and I stopped in San Miguel de Allende on our way back to Mexico City after a magical trip to Guanajuato. We both packed our belongings in backpacks in order to allow for easy mobility throughout the day, considering we had no place to store our luggage. I imagined that we’d walk around the city center like fairies, perusing the shops and stopping at a cute place for lunch. Instead, we trudged around a hot expanse of colorful houses like overworked, underpaid, mildly abused donkeys. After walking for fifteen minutes, I wanted to die. I suggested that we spend the rest of our time at a bar, so that’s what we did.
We ordered beers and snacks and talked about the things couples talk about (nothing, something) until the demon entered my body at its usual hour, its timing unpredictable yet its environment formulaic, usually accompanied by boredom, hot weather, or a lack of self-reflection. The waitress cleared our dishes and asked him if we wanted anything else. He asked me if we wanted the check—yes or no?—and stared at me for an answer. The waitress then stared at me too, all of which amounted to a level of pressure that felt offensive and triggering, reminding me of the days that my second grade teacher called on me in class when I wasn’t paying attention.
Do we want more beers? Do we want the check? What will we do if we get the check, since our bus doesn’t come for another hour and a half? What will we do if we get more beers, considering an hour and a half is enough to drink a few more — and as hot, young queers we are both inclined to do exactly that — yet being drunk on a bus sounds the opposite of ideal? All of these questions could not be answered in the millisecond I had to respond, so instead I said: I don’t know. He asked for the check, which made me angry, because what if we did want more beers?
So for the following ten minutes I played the part of the annoyed demon baby, avoiding my partner’s eye contact and transmitting passive aggression until I realized that I was actually not annoyed, nor was I a demon baby: I am an emotionally intelligent adult, so I reverted back into the loving partner that I strive to be and hatched a plan for a leisurely donkey trot back to the station.
I wonder if I will become a better person when I am older, or if my partner is forever sentenced to enduring the little demon inside of me. On the walk back to the bus station, though, he also transformed into a demon baby, albeit for a few seconds. I wanted us to reapply sunscreen, which he did not want to do, expressing his discontent in a series of grunts and protests. I made us stop anyways to reapply (because not doing so would be the defamation of Asian American mothers everywhere), and after doing so, he thanked me. He apologized, saying that he was being grumpy when I was just trying to take care of us. I told him it was okay. Sometimes, he can be a demon baby too. Also, I liked the fact that I was not the baby this time. I hugged him and kissed him and we continued on our way.
I think this is an important part of a relationship, an element of unconditional love: giving each other the space to be babies, holding each other when the demons enter our souls.
We are still two hours from Mexico City. I am bored of reading and bored of writing and bored of listening to music, so I’ve just been staring out the window, thinking about other demons. I have so much to be grateful for, but that doesn’t mean that sometimes the BDD (body-dysmorphia-demon) consumes my mind and the fear that I am getting fat overtakes my ability to rationalize thought. If I were to think rationally all the time, I would consider the fear of the climate crisis over the fear of getting fat.
But at the same time, it’s like: Okay, I know that the air I breathe on a daily basis is polluted with a trail mix of particles and natural disasters may wipe us out at any point, but can I at least look hot when it happens? I sometimes imagine that if a tsunami were to drown me or a fire were to consume me, I might still be thinking: Ugh, I’m bloated.
Sometimes I want to be that person who grows their food and eats non-GMO and partakes in the high of a love surge instead of a blunt or a bottle of wine, but I don’t know how to get there. Also, I don’t really want to get there—a part of that personality scares me. I think it takes a certain level of privilege or a certain type of person to do all of that, to grow your own food and reject 90% of the things sold in grocery stores. How is a normal person supposed to remember to drink three liters of water a day and water their vegetables on different days? Ridiculous.
I told my friend the other day that I suspect my brain is underdeveloped in some areas and overdeveloped in others. Like, why can I imagine twenty different scenarios of a random guy I flirted with over a year ago suddenly coming back into my life and gawking at how amazing I am, yet it took me twenty seven years to realize that houseplants need to be watered on a regular basis, more often than trees in the soil, because their roots aren’t connected to the earth? The other day my friend from Nebraska was visiting and he told me about what life in Nebraska is like, except he never mentioned the name of the city he lived in, so he kept using the terms “Nebraska” and “the city” interchangeably. At that point, I started to wonder if Nebraska was a city and not a state. I cheated my way through geography in the ninth grade, so I am never surprised when I stand corrected. Eventually I asked him which city he lived in, and he said Omaha, which was both reassuring, since I knew Nebraska was a state, as well as cause for further worry, considering I thought Omaha was a place in Idaho. And yet, I graduated college with a 3.94 GPA.
Gen Alpha and kids on the late spectrum of Gen Z coined a new term, “skill issue,” which is used to frame a moment in which someone fails at something simply because they are bad at it. I think we all have different skill issues, and mine pop up across different areas of my life, most often to my amusement. Maybe I have skill issues when it comes to the moderation of minor annoyances in a relationship, or the geography of the United States, or the biology of plants and animals. Or maybe I have been performing “skilled” this entire time, when, in reality, my brain is plump with unskilled cysts. Attempting to measure intelligence seems futile, though, considering some of the smartest people are the most socially and spiritually inept: i.e. every billionaire that arose from tech.
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Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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