housing unstable, formerly homeless, chronically s--cidal, & incredibly Insane, severely Sick, + Disabled by violence.🌷 this is my only consistent income. 💙please support me!💙
"your last letter hit me in a way i didn’t think was possible.
everything you write is like a thousand bells ringing into my soul."
— slg, 2011
"from time i've known you, i remember how much honesty & intention you bring to calling out bullshit & bringing about positive change." — tc, 2021
"like you tell me i'm wise, but i don't have the wisdom that would keep me alive after near-constant s--cidal ideation & attempts for over a decade." — yp, 2021
"you're a frankly brilliant socio-political analyst & writer, whose ability to apply radical frameworks of analysis in granular ways to your immediate conditions should honestly terrify liberal pretenders, & inspire radical newbies. you inspire me, & i strive to get on your level." — jh, 2022
"i hope to channel even a fraction of the righteous anger & drive for justice that you model." — m, 2022
"i bet even if people read your mind, they wouldn't be able to understand the complexity & nuance that you bring to conversations & thinking in general... your compassion & kindness isn't something people can read & emulate, unless they actually believe in that form of radical love" — s, 2023
"too intense", "sociopath", "too depressing", "too happy", "too depressed", "exhausting", "overwhelming", "weird", "ugly", "annoying", "cringe"
— people with more money / capital / systemic power / better childhoods than me
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i'm a housing unstable, formerly homeless, chronically s--cidal, super traumatized, poor/impoverished, & severely Insane, Sick, & Disabled human being, & i am a survivor of extreme daily mental+physical violence by multiple abusers for several decades, several decades of unsafe housing/housing instability/homelessness, police brutality, many instances of white strangers calling the cops on me for existing in public & not harming anybody, multiple s--cide attempts, many psych incarcerations, & this fucked up world, in general. 🦋🌸
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you & i both deserve love, joy, support, food, housing, & all of our emotional & physical needs met! — regardless of your or my ability to labour!
i am still impoverished & housing unstable, because i am too Disabled to conform to capitalism's ableist demands.
i currently cannot pay my rent regularly, & i am many months behind on my utilities bills. i am on food stamps. i am presently trying to heal from decades of daily violence, poverty, & housing instability / homelessness. i have very little social support or support with financial resources.
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you & i both deserve a loved, joyful, supported, housed, fed life, regardless of your or my abilities/output of labour! due to my fluctuating sicknesses, i do not promise you consistent work, if any work at all. i have spent many years at a time unexpectedly unable / too disabled to function much, let alone write or create.
i'm not perfect, & i'm not here to be "right". i won't word things "perfectly", i will *never* have "perfect" actions, politics, or analysis, & i will never know everything. we are all always learning & growing. perfectionism is white supremacist settler-colonizer ableist capitalist culture. "perfection" means no possible change or growth, so it is impossible to attain, & i do not strive for it. let us unlearn, & learn, together.
my content notes are for fellow survivors of abuse. more privileged people are always actively encouraged to challenge themselves to face reality.
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😭 fuck inst*gr*m— @ ANTIHEROINE.co, on ig! / @ my art! on FUCK_SHUIXIAN / @ suicidism = saneism = ableism is eugenics Naziism fascism.
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note — i do not consent to any of my work or image being used for AI, or any other exploitative or bad faith purposes. \ i acknowledge that i write from a usameriKKKa-centred perspective. i do this bc i presently live in usameriKKKa, & i don't think that i can claim that i presently understand any other society well enough to comment on it. \ disclaimer — my work is not therapy. i am not a medical professional. i am not liable/responsible for anybody's choices. \ english is my 3rd language, & people forced me to learn it through physical violence. \ i do not endorse any of the actions or beliefs, etc., of anybody i quote. life doesn't work like that. \ i do not claim to "represent" any community. i am just one single human being. i can only ever speak for myself. \ i know that some other mentally ill people may not like how i talk about mental illness. that's fine, it's not illegal to disagree. it's not illegal to write about suicide, either, btw.
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UNEDITED / CONTENT: SUICIDE, SUICIDISM, SANEISM, ABLEISM, COPS, ETC...
over one year ago, i started writing more honestly about my experiences feeling/thinking/being constantly suicidal, and of previously being homeless. many things brought me to this. one was the change of usa's "national suicide prevention lifeline"'s phone number to a faster national phone shortcode: 988. now more than ever, it's faster to, when you're crying and opening up about your deepest darkest thoughts and feelings and traumas, get the cops to come to your home against your will and become incarcerated (i.e. involuntarily "hospitalized") and treated demeaningly like a prisoner, especially if you don't "behave".
the day 988 rolled out — july 15th, 2022 — i panicked. i knew i had to do something. i worried about my last ex, who was chronically suicidal, who stabbed me in the back shortly after i broke up with them even though i still supported them immensely, an event that caused the worst suicidality (i'm starting to hate that word) of probably my *entire* life, that has still yet to dissipate, over 2 whole years later. i've lost my desire to eat ever since, which you *know* means things aren't good. even when i prayed to God to kill me years ago, even when i literally was attempting to kill myself, i would cave because i got hungry. i am a person of color, after all (lol). i couldn't even starve myself properly when i had an eating disorder, because i didn't like being hungry.
i blocked out everything before 2016. but honestly, i first blocked out everything before 2004, and then everything before 2008, and then everything before 2012. mango, something about leap years, eh? but i also blocked out everything before 2015... and everything before 2023... and... and you get the picture.
i used to want to live, even while severely depressed and suicidal, more than i do now.
and there is no amount of people telling me they love me that will prevent my desires for, and impulses towards, killing myself. i realized something recently — and i'm not going to speak for anybody but myself — that perhaps, being suicidal is a disconnection from reality.
the reality, is...
it *might* get better.
but. it's *not* for certain, that it *will*.
especially if you're poor or homeless, and disabled.
but as i write that, i realize that on the other side, being suicidal is the deepest connection *to* reality.
staying alive in this world, as a suicidal human being, is impossible for *so* many suicidal human beings, in this world that hates suicidal human beings.
and life is hard if you're a poor human being in this world. and even billionaires are mortal, no matter how much in denial of that they are, no matter how much they try to contradict and contract against that certainty.
it's even impossible for some suicidal rich people to stay alive.
i've done a lot of great things in my life that i forgot. i've written beautiful writing while sleeping on couches and being in utter denial about my own situation. i've received love letters from people way older than me who love my writing, telling me i saved their lives with my writing, when i was secretly suicidal and 21. other people of color thanked me for teaching them a lot about racism, when i was secretly homeless and constantly imagining myself shooting myself and 25.
i didn't care about my own life when i planned to shoot myself in 2016. i really didn't. and i don't really care about my own life now, either. i know my work is important. i don't *feel* that way, at *all*, but i logically can imagine that it's true. that's the result of years of daily gaslighting, in the accurate sense of the term. being lied to and insulted every day until you're not really sure of your own narrative, even though you quite truly still know the objective facts about what happened.
so, usa's national suicide prevention lifeline changed to 988, on july 15th, 2022. and i made a quick post about it, because i was panicking. i was panicking for all the suicidal people who might die because of the change. not necessarily because they’d kill themself. but because maybe a cop would kill them first.
i was worried about my last ex. not because i wanted, or want, them in my life. but because yes, i *do* care, just on principle. i care about *all* suicidal people. i don't want people to suffer. and, constantly suicidal people? they're *my* people.
i wanted to not write so stream-of-consciousness. but once again. i've done a lot of great things in my life that i forgot. i think i've somehow been in even more pain in the last year, when not much happened, than i ever *have* been.
i guess all i know is that i need to write.
and that most people don't really care about you. not in this world, anyway. most people only really care about themselves. and i didn't. until recently. i can kinda see why y'all like it so much. at least i make an active effort to try not to be cruel. i *don't* think that's true for most people.
i'm not perfect, either. the messiness of human life scares me.
tonight, a stranger asked me, "so, you said you're constantly suicidal.
can i ask you a question?
what keeps you hanging on?"
i said: "i don't want to hurt myself. i don't want to hurt my body. and i honestly don't want to die. it's *other* people who suck, and i don't want to live in a world with them.
i'm actually very scared of dying."
but wishing for non-existence doesn't actually care about that, at least for me. andrea gibson wrote —
"your sister thought the hearse was a limousine
'til she asked where it was going
and then she knew for sure
that's what a word like heaven will do
but heaven wasn’t what you were aiming for
you didn’t think the other side would be better
you thought the other side would be nothing at all
imagine choosing nothing at all
imagine something
hurting that bad"
{ — the day you died because you wanted to, by andrea gibson }
i didn't know i was in pain. i am not the only one whom therapy doesn't fix (because human beings aren't things to be fixed). i am not the only one who hates the usameriKKKan psychiatric-medical-industrial complex. or 988. or the incarceration they call "care".
i don't know how i feel. i've actually never had anybody close to me kill themself. i think i imagined it, because *i* so desperately want to. and i know it seems "crazy" to write basically public suicide notes to people who are giving me money to support me. i didn't really give you informed consent, but this is an emergency, did you know? we are all shut up in our little individualist capitalist bubbles. it takes heartbreak to care for others, and it's painful. i get it, now.
so people like me, just sink to the bottom.
my parents never loved me, so i just need to think of a select few people, and imagine they love my work. and that will carry me through.
all i know is, the girl i held onto life for when i was 23, the girl i supported when i was 22 through her grief of her friend killing themself, the girl i told myself, i would not kill myself because i did not want to put her through that again.
all i know is, that girl, the week before i was secretly planning on shooting myself on my 26th birthday, she lied to me to try to manipulate me to go into """mental" ""health"""care""" against my will. the funny thing is, if she'd just talked to me like a human being that day, and asked me about it, i would have went in willingly. sitting on the bench outside of the """mental" "health"" urgent "care"", the white woman worker asked me if i wanted to go in. the voice in my head talked to me. i said no.
i didn't want to go in because the girl lied to me.
"i hear a voice in my head," i said, matter-of-factly.
the white woman worker asked me what the voice said.
"it tells me to drink water and take care of myself," i said, because it did.
"that's good," she said, and she let me go.
the girl i once considered one of my best friends then left me at a motel in downtown san francisco with my two suitcases. i didn't even have a cell phone at the time. she did not offer to help me pay for the motel, so i struggled to get cash out at the ATM while literally hearing loud voices in my head, some of which were actually extremely violent and menacing. i was *not* okay. (i say this, because hearing voices doesn't necessarily mean somebody's not okay!) she said she would check up on me later. she didn't. she ignored the calls from the psych prison in seattle on my own birthday, the day i planned to shoot myself. a few weeks before that, she had just interviewed me for her school project on "asian-american mental health". less than a year before that, she had fundraised for "suicide prevention".
i almost died the day after she left me at that motel. i was completely nonfunctional, wandering around san francisco, all the hotels didn't have rooms, or i was confused, i didn't have a phone, all the motels near the airport were closed the front desks were empty the rooms were all full. the voice now screamed in the voice of the white male ""anti-racist" "feminist" "ally"" and paid full-time with benefits ""professional" "activist"" who called the cops on me, 2 months earlier. the voice said that if he bumped into me on a random street corner in san francisco, he'd call the cops on me again. the thing is, he almost definitely *would* have. even though i grew up in northern california, often going to san francisco on the weekends and taking BART as a teenager without my parents, and he was a motherfucking white boy rich tech transplant.
and i knew that calling the cops on a "mentally ill" trans person of color, especially someone who’s homeless, meant possible murder, at the very least police brutality. so i was rightfully scared that white boy was trying to kill me.
anyway. i'm not going to tell you the *whole* story right now. i went off track again.
when i was 23, i didn't kill myself because i wanted to live for my friend, who already had a friend who’d killed themself, and i didn't want to see(?) her go through that pain again. when i was 25, she "fundraised for suicide prevention", interviewed me about "asian-american mental health", and then a few weeks later, lied to me and manipulated me, then dumped me outside a motel in downtown san francisco alone with my two suitcases when i was suicidal and wasn't functioning at all and hearing violent voices in my head and i had no cell phone and barely any money, and then lied about checking up on me again later, and then didn't talk to me for a month. right before i secretly planned to shoot myself.
who *wouldn't* be suicidal, amirite?
for 7 years, i barely wrote anything or existed online because i was scared the white boy would call the cops on me again, or do something to hurt me again, and i didn't have at all the money, social connections, resources, health, abilities, housing stability, financial stability, or social support who would help me if he did that — just like i didn't on the day he called the cops on me. also, a bunch of other whites called the cops on me for merely existing in public for years after that, in many separate instances (including this year, too!).
he knows what he promised me multiple times, and he knows that he broke his promises. nobody asks to be homeless and unwell. he probably made a performative tweet about Jordan Neely (Rest in Peace) a few months ago in may, just like every other fucking fascist saneist did. he probably did that, after calling the cops on a homeless mentally ill person of color asking him for help (that he himself promised to give), and turning all his powerful social connections against them, which led me to come very, very, very close to buying a [redacted] and shooting myself in public in san francisco.
in *public*.
honestly, i was going to do it near the ocean. i didn't think that that beach was going to be crowded, because i don't think it usually is.
i didn't think other people could see me, you see. i didn't know that if i did that, other people would even notice or care. i truly did not realize that until recently, and it *still* hasn't sunk in.
do i still exist? i don't want to.
i used to think i had atypically bad luck. i eventually realized it was ableism is saneism is ableism. oh, and you know. white supremacy, anti-asian racism, misogyny, transmisia, queermisia, Sinomisia, etc. too. a *lot* of *racialized* gender-based violence. and classism. and all of that other shit.
society treats my life like it's worth nothing. even if i had more social capital, my "opinions" and values are so "controversial" that i'm in danger by fascists anyway. i wish i could give up on this (mostly unpaid) job (of writing to try to fight for liberation), honestly. i always do. so maybe it's a *good* thing i took a nonconsensual break of 7ish years...
so, to recap:
i used to not kill myself for this girl, because i didn't want her to be sad again. then she interviewed me about mental health, and a few weeks later lied to me and manipulated me and then left me outside alone and homeless with no phone or money when i was clearly not functioning, the week before i secretly planned to shoot myself, and then ignored my calls for weeks and eventually told me she didn't even know why she tried to "help" me. she now pretends to care about homeless people and disabled trans people and not calling the cops, too.
moral injury.
stabbing me into my heart.
i'm selfish and a liar sometimes just like everyone else is sometimes.
that's unrelated, i'm just thinking about how human and messy and imperfect we all are. cliché, i *know*.
anyway, i still feel love for her. of course i do. i haven't spent christmas with a friend since 2013, i haven't had a halfway decent birthday since 2013.
people don't like "mentally ill" people. not *really*. you with the "mental health advocate" in your social media bio and even dating app profile — you'd donate *thousands* of dollars to a nonprofit-industrial complex entity, a million times over, in a million different lifetimes, before you'd even *consider* listening to the screaming crying homeless human being on the street. don't lie to me. :) [smiling face emoticon]
*note: this is not to say that you necessarily should — not because they're "scary", but because *i'm* afraid *you'll* fuck it up, and hurt them even more — unless you know for sure you know how to make the situation *better*, not *worse*. you don't necessarily need training, but you *do* need a lot of genuine compassion (not pity), anti-saneist values *and actions/behavior*, and knowledge about resources without being paternalistic. lived experience helps a lot, too. but no matter what you do, *do NOT call the cops.*
the way almost *everybody* has treated me, *truly* makes me feel like if i actually killed myself, a lot of these public "mental health advocates" and "leftists" and "activists" and "abolitionists" and "good people" would barely even care.
or, you know. they’d write some bullshit elegy, and *pretend* they cared.
or, maybe, you know, my ghost would haunt them. yeah, i think that's more accurate... hm..... okay y'all, don't worry. just in case i die, my ghost will haunt you! :) [smiling face emoticon]
don't worry. i'm not going to die today. i forgot that i existed. in 2015, in september, i *also* wrote about suicide. i came out about being suicidal publicly for the first time, outside of teenaged online journals in the walled garden of "friends only" posts in the golden age of the internet (the 2000s — i'm half-joking). but i ended it with a lie. i implied i was "over" it. but i really, really, *really* wasn't. a lot of people really liked that post. i don't even know what date i wrote it on. i didn't keep much records, for once, of dates in those years. i do *not* think that that is a good thing (for me and my passion for dates on the solar calendar and timekeeping and keeping factual logs of real *history*, anyway).
maybe everybody's forgotten about me. but i haven't forgotten them. i'm weird like that. maybe it's because i have unfinished business, or something. can't die/live until i take care of that, i guess.
i was happier before 2023. and i was happier before i started going to therapy regularly, in 2016. i was way, way, *way* happier before a middle-aged man labelled me with a "disorder" after talking to me for 5 minutes, a month before that. i was happier when my beliefs, my brain, my mind my heart my bodymindheart, was even more "in the clouds", than it is now. i was happier the year i attempted suicide every day, than i am now. i wonder why that is.
i think that part of me is missing, that's why. i knew i didn't have the money or social connections or clear-headedness to bail me out if something bad went down with cops while i was dissociating/dissociated. so i just tried to stop being myself. i beat myself down and forced myself down with violence and coercion and pain and threats and insults, just like my abusive father did. i did my best, and i think i *did* unfortunately have to do that, simply in an attempt to prevent further violence from others against me, sadly.
so what now?
i should probably try to remember what happened before 2016. i was happier when i wanted to shoot myself than i am now, trying to see "reality" the way most of you in this universe do. the people who read my work in 2010-2015 didn't just disappear. the past, and other people, and the people who hurt me, didn't just stop existing, just because i wanted them to.
sometimes, when i get the most most *mostest* suicidal, i feel like praying is the only thing that might change anything. but i'm too scared to talk to God these days. i'm scared of what answer i might hear back.
i can't deal with change. change is death, and death is change. sometimes, when i feel most hopeless, i think about praying. but i stopped believing in my own powers, my own magic, in 2016. i was punished for my magic, just like any good child character in a feel-good family movie is. my magic is honesty, and me screaming and crying just means i'm more honest than you are.
sometimes, when i feel most suicidal, i think about praying. but i stopped believing in the power of love in 2016. that was the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
i thought about not publishing this tonight. but hey, this might be the only thing that saves my life. being honest about all of this. it took me years, obviously, to start talking about it.
sometimes, when i feel most suicidal, i want to talk to gOD.
oh, i remember now another reason why i quoted andrea gibson earlier.
"that's what a word like heaven will do
but heaven wasn’t what you were aiming for
you didn’t think the other side would be better.
you thought the other side would be nothing at all.
imagine choosing nothing at all.
imagine something
hurting that bad."
i stopped trying to kill myself after i tried to stop believing in God. i stopped trying to kill myself after i realized i could no longer be *certain* that there *was* an "afterlife".
i stopped trying to kill myself after i stopped believing in a guaranteed afterlife.
i was still *suicidal*.
i'm still *suicidal*.
but i stopped *trying* to kill myself.
i don't want to die; i just don't want to live here.
show your solidarity. support me monthly.
/
they told me a story. they said:
《 i asked them not to hurt me.
i told them, "hurting me will harm you." 》
i just had a thought. and it isn't a thought that's meant to elicit *pity*. it's a thought to challenge how you think about people's life situations.
oftentimes, when someone is depressed, the ignorant ~unsolicited-advicer who is less than skilled at choosing to do acts of compassion instead of just saying whatever they think is "helpful"~ might say, "go to therapy! exercise! eat right! sleep more! blah blah blah."
"have you tried exercise?"
yes. and i currently can't do it because i'm afraid that i can't afford the extra food i need to eat, if i want to do it.
(also, exercise *doesn't* reverse or heal severe trauma, or heal chronic illnesses, or make disabilities go away, for *many* people.)
"many" is vague, but i don't know how else to say it. it's impossible to do a study on the entire world's population.
that's all i have to say for today.
happy december
/
if it applies to you —
if you don't have ASPD, your lack of a diagnosis of "clinical sociopath" ("anti-social personality disorder") doesn't make you "a good person", or better than anyone else.
let me repeat that:
if you are not a sociopath, it doesn't make you "a good person".
if you don't have NPD, your lack of a diagnosis of "narcissistic personality disorder" doesn't make you "a good person", or a better person than anyone else (including, of course, being better than people with a diagnosis of ASPD and/or NPD).
if you're not a narcissist, it doesn't make you "a good person".
diagnosed sociopathic narcissistic people can be kind, generous, compassionate people.
people are not the combination of a few words that somebody who was unearnedly lucky enough to get the unearned random dice roll of being temporarily non-disabled enough to go to graduate university or medical university wrote on a sheet of paper, once.
your diagnosis, or lack thereof, of a severely debilitating mental disorder, or anything else, doesn't make you who you are.
your abilities, your level of health, your housing situation, your money, your fame, or lack thereof all of the above — they don't make you who you are.
/
p.s. did you know that diagnosed sociopaths and diagnosed narcissists have relatively high suicide rates? if you don't believe me, look it up yourself! i'm sorry that i don't have a specific study to link right now, but i will update this post once i do.
/
p.s. i do not have either diagnosis (quiz time: did i say i did, in this post? and if you assumed i did after reading this post, ask yourself: why did you assume so? #critical reading skills), although i'd be okay with being labelled with either. i personally don't believe in psychiatric diagnosis anyway. i just have solidarity for ALL marginalized peoples — which includes diagnosed sociopaths and diagnosed narcissists. :) [smiley face emoticon]
/
july
i think the problem was trying to learn to be "ok" with what is not okay.
other people have said this too, but that's a problem with western ["psycho"-]therapy and individualistic approaches to healing { another product of white settler-colonialism }. learn to be "okay" with a not okay life, and a not okay world, and not okay trauma.
i am not okay.
there is nothing to make the not okay "okay".
/
i pressed my forehead into the dirty crooked hardwood floor, & begged God for an explanation. my knees dug into the ancient ground of the 2nd floor. summer 2012.
Listen. Listen. Listen.
lately, i think of my own lines
& one of the ones i think of over & over again is:
sometimes, when i feel most suicidal, i think about praying. but i stopped believing in the power of love in 2016. that was the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
Look.
Listen.
Open your eyes, & talk to me.
Pay attention to me.
Listen. Listen. Listen.
Mask Bloc NYC, an organization i'm a part of, has released a statement on Palestine + Disabled solidarity. we've also published it on ANTIHEROINE.
read here → 🇵🇸 from the river to the sea, palestine will be free!
Mask Bloc NYC condemns the US-funded genocide being carried out in Palestine by the fascist white supremacist Zionist settler-colonial "state" of "israel". We reject the propaganda that insists that this situation is anything other than an indigenous group doing its best to resist and survive a generations-old effort to displace, dispossess, and extinguish them from their own land.
As disabled organizers, we cannot ignore how settler-colonial occupation violently disables people and leaves them to die (see the already impossible orders to evacuate; imagine those with limited mobility, or who’d die if unplugged).
However, we also want to use this moment to call your attention to the USAmerican public's complicity in genocide, in our inextricably linked struggle against extermination.
→ click here to keep reading... 🇵🇸
something i've been thinking about, ever since i read it last month:
"The psychological horror of solitary [confinement] reveals something about isolation as a condition. In our societal fantasy of the most unlivable places, people are forced into an indistinguishable mass, unable to be separate from others, whether in prisons*, detention centers, refugee camps, or shelters for Unhoused people. We imagine collectives and camps as sites of degradation, when the reality of such spaces is often that the worst punishment is removal from the group."
*including psychiatric prisons/"hospitals"
— On Loneliness, by Hannah Baer, white writer and therapist
/
here is the source for the title of this post, although there are other studies on this subject that i can't find right now. for transparency, i have not read this entire thing. more accessibility disclaimers: its length and language make it inaccessible to many — including me, at this time.
— Chronic Loneliness: Neurocognitive Mechanisms and Interventions
/
content — brief f**d mention /
june 27th, 2014 /
i don't know when love started to feel like lying
i only know i wish i knew how to forget
i remember the last human being whose feelings i hurt
i remember everything
/
june 15th, 2014 /
Loss 2.txt
i kept the tea bags
from the first cups of tea we drank
in those cups that i gave you
the last time i saw you.
i kept
the movie ticket
from that movie we
saw while living states apart,
the stickers from
the time we ate
grilled cheese
that day at
the cheese { not
cheesecake } factory.
I stuck
them together,
back-to-back,
the letters
of our names,
together.
They’re lost, now
lost in a box that somehow
found itself misplaced
somewhere in
an apartment building
in colonizer-called "downtown seattle".
I'll never get them back, now.
I want to say I don't care.
I'm not supposed to care.
The books and my guitar and
and
and
and
and it’s all about
letting go
and it’s all about how
material possessions aren't important, anyway
right?
But I wanted to keep those.
Especially.
For one day.
silly little things like dried-up tea
and stickers and movie stubs.
memories proving that i
have even lived a life.
/
november 2017 /
I'm cleaning out a hard drive
that hasn't been opened
or used
since the first quarter
of 2014.
you know what happened.
i was already "mentally ill" back then,
but not even my own therapist could see
just how deep the wounds were.
that was the last time my life felt
anything close to
"put together"—i had
built my own bedframe,
my own nightstand,
my own kitchen table,
i used to have a whole menagerie
of chairs.
i sold my furniture to a friend & his new romantic partner
2 years later, he told me they had broken up
not long after.
i'm cleaning out an old hard drive
it's been almost four years but of course
i remember which photos were mine
and which photos were yours.
like dividing the spoils after
a failed marriage,
but the truth is
i just seem
to have
a better memory
for these kinds of things
than most people.
/
i didn't plan on writing this much, or compiling so many drafts together. i wanted the second to last story to stand alone — me screaming & crying about saneism.
but, you know. shit happens.
including this preamble, it became 2200 words 😭 [sob emoji]
i wrote this all on my phone. my fingers hurt. no, my whole hands hurt. my wrists hurt. my hands have especially hurt since 2014-2015. when i was super homeless (bc it's a spectrum), i would write for 21 hours a day about racism / white supremacy, gender / misogyny / transness & queerness / cisheteropatriarchy, ableism / capitalism, violence / abuse, & etc., on my phone lol and sleep 3 hours, at most. i still write almost everything on my phone, bc i'm scared of bigger computers bc of trauma rn. (yep!)
send me well wishes that i don't have permanent injuries one day
— ahhh, ableism is capitalism, abilities are capital.
answer key: here, the ability is being able to type. if i didn't have that, i wouldn't have access to something that makes me capital, both social and financial (writing).
fun fact: the first time i wrote an essay (for "fun") on my phone, i was 17 years old, typing while walking { i do NOT advise doing that } around my mothercity of 上海 shanghai in 2007. now imagine the phone i had back then. it was just a numerical t9 keypad lol. for you young'ns, that means i was typing entire essays on a pre-"cloud" machine with only 12 keys, each button of which i had to press repeatedly in order to access each letter of the alphabet. lmfao i sound so old now wow lmfao
/
content — you know, my usual
/
written on october 6th, 2023 —
i remember taking a taxi, a real fucking taxi, to jfk, thinking i was dying. jk, it's new york; it was probably a black car. i remember listening to the song paradise by coldplay, on the way there, praying quietly out loud to myself for god not to kill me. i listened to paradise at jfk while going through the flying rigmarole {that is probably an exact-words phrase somebody else has written before}. i remember a part of me knowing i would write about that moment on one day in late september 2014 one day.
" when she was just a girl
she expected the world
but it flew away from her reach
so she ran away in her sleep
and dreamed of para—, para—, paradise...
every time she closed her eyes...
this could be para—, para—, paradise
this could be para—, para—, paradise
/
written on november 3rd, 2015 —
the last time i was in JFK i wanted to kill myself
the last time i was in JFK i wanted to kill myself
i remember praying softly to myself all the way to the airport
my last host in new york last year gave me his card and said he'd hoped to see me getting published by big names one day
i think about how telling people i freelance is just an easier and more capitalism-approved way to say what i "do" for ~money~ { 2023 note — i was doing the same thing i'm doing now, back then. i started a p*treon in october? 2015, and made like $200 a month for the first year. it was the first money i was able to make since march? 2014. i quit being able to post regularly just 2 months later { in december 2015 }, because my "health" got worse again. health in quotes because what does that even mean? did my health get worse, or did my illness? and why do the sentences "my health got worse" and "my illness got worse" mean the exact same thing? 👀 [eyes emoji] }
the "radio" stations on this flight were amusing
a bunch of classical music, then "mixtapes" of every decade since the 60s
then suddenly: UK music, (and then some more northern european countries)
and "NYC rap." that was it.
in UK music i saw a familiar face ( [redacted] ) but i never like any of his radio-playable singles
so i listened to "paradise" by coldplay.
i actually like this song.
i remember listening to it on my birthday last year
as i sat alone in the burger place and failed at eating.
"when she was just a girl
she expected the world"
~~~
i thought i had more to say about this but i didn't. i don't want to die anymore. it's weird. like, super fucking weird. i've never wanted to live this much in my life, and a lot a lot a LOT of shitty shit has happened this year. especially with other people. shit within myself i can deal with. shit with other people continues to sting for years after the fact.
/
back to october 6th, 2023 —
my work is the only thing that truly makes me purely happy { and i've never really gotten directly paid for it, and i'd like to keep it that way. }, for myriad reasons, including the fact that i was valued for nothing but my ability to perform abilities when i was a young child. and thus, alas, ack! — i've been too disabled by abuse and also disabled by ableism, to do what i love as an adult, for almost my entire legally free {adult} life.
i call the "crisis" line at 2am & end up processing enough to end up excitedly talking about my own dreams around suicide "prevention" until i sound cheerier, talking about my work the only thing that makes me cheer up cheers me up, while the other voice on the line — sounds like a cis gay white male, this time, maybe a queer white — hasn't yet said a single helpful word.
i call the non-carceral "peer" support line that promises to not call the cops on me, & start out trying to be honest, crying about how suicidal i am. the voice sounds like a white male's, again. by the end, i feel uncomfortable, as i do in maybe 49~51% of "peer" support line calls, and 99.999% of traditional "crisis" line calls, to know that the other voice has even less insight to how to make me feel better than i do.
"i don't feel as suicidal anymore, because i remember why i'm still alive," i said at the end of the call.
"and why is that?" he asked, genuinely curiously.
to dismantle saneism, i think to myself, although i do not say it out loud, guessing that the other voice doesn't know what the word saneism means.
i talked about how i hated 988 in the beginning, & at the end, the voice says "i know you hate 988, but it's policy that i have to tell you about it." i learn to start my call every next times with the same script, every time: "i'm suicidal, don't worry, i won't do anything right now {and it feels like a lie, bc i'm only saying it for the other voice's & suicidism's & the system's sake, & not [for] my own [honesty{'s sake}]}, i don't have a plan, please don't call the cops on me, this line doesn't call the cops right [i say, even though i know it's policy that they don't], i don't need you to tell me about 988." depending on who answers, i can gauge how much they listen to authority, follow "the rules".
/
written on september 18th, 2023. part 2 of 2 { part 1 is not yet shown here. } —
...
3 hours later, i called again.
"i want to kill myself," i said, as honestly as i could. i've rehearsed what i say a million times, but i'm never honest, because i used to call the hotlines that would call the cops on you, against your consent — which is *most* hotlines. "i'm not going to call 988 because they call the cops on people."
at the end of the call, he said, "i'm sorry, but it's policy that i have to tell you about 988. i know you don't like them."
"don't like" is not the real reason. "yeah."
i cried and talked about how i wanted to kill myself, when i was talking to him. there are too many reasons for me to even list out here right now.
by the end of the call, i begrudgingly remembered the one thing i ever have to live for, the most convincing reason.
it's not because i think life is worth living {for myself, anyway}. it's not because i enjoy living, because i don't. i have been filled with suicidal panic almost every single day for almost 30 years, a panic that makes me unable to do basically *anything* beyond post online occasionally, because it's a space where i don't have to see anybodymind anyone's bodymind *physically*. on the internet, nobody can hurt me — at least, you know. *physically*.
[ unfinished — bc the answer has already been revealed, above — ]
/
back to october 6th, 2023 —
i know i write about suicide a lot, especially these days. and to the shallow ableist judgmental ones, it probably makes it seem like it defines me. but i don't consciously think of it, ever. my conscious self thinks i'm happy, somewhere else, in a world that's better than one where parents can, and often do, abuse smaller in physical size living human beings who deserve just as much power and rights as they do. my suicidal-ness is always just running in the seeming background — not a desire, but an urgent physical need from my body to escape this constant excruciating pain, feeling not any different from the need to urinate, tbh, except honestly it's even more urgent than that. we understand why we should put down non-human animals in pain — why do we insist that humans stay alive, too?
[because] the majority of discourse & advocacy around "suicide "prevention"" in the suicidist saneist ableist white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal capitalist white-majority western country where i live is focused on how the people around the suicidal person feels about their being suicidal, rather than how the actual suicidal person feels. never mind that i have observed, time and time again and not just from my own experiences, that it is the people who know and interact with the suicidal person who are pretty much always the problem / the ones making them suicidal * ,
and "suicide "prevention"" efforts should pivot to focus on educating them to stop being such horrible suicidist/anti-suicidal people, saneist, judgmental, guilt-tripping, selfish, nonconsensual, forceful, coercive, demeaning, disrespectful, disconnected, dismissive, disbelieving, condescending, patronizing, cold, heartless, unsupportive, and/or fearful and abandoning and avoidant pieces of shit, filled to the brim with unsolicited usually bad advice.
* this obviously has certain caveats and exceptions. this does not apply to abusive relationships. i'm trying to say that most people are suicidal because of other people / external factors — abuse, trauma, unsupportive family and/or friends, being abused or fired by a boss, other stressors, etc., and that it is usually suicidist <=> saneist <=> ableist people's reactions to suicidal people talking about their feelings, that often makes things worse.
* including psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, social workers, doctors, and other "'mental '"health"'"care"'" professionals, cops, prison wardens / psychiatric "hospital" staff, etc. —
note — i just thought of this: if somebody is suicidal because of natural grief, i.e. not anybody's direct actions, or treatment of them — if they are suicidal because say, their loved one died or there was a hurricane or their house caught on fire — it is still dependent on the people around the person, if they end up suicidal or not, imo.
whew! that's something i've been wanting to say for a long time that i didn't think i was ready to say yet.
to shitty saneist suicidist people:
stop being such suicidist pieces of shit and maybe fewer of us would kill ourselves, okay!?
/
written on october 4th, 2023 —
it was summertime. i entered the group call low-medium screaming, fully crying. i was crying about how i wanted to live in a world with no saneism. i cried that i wanted to live in a world where nobody would get shot on the street for acting or feeling or thinking differently in a way that doesn't harm anyone. i desperately wanted this world, needed it. but it's too late for me; what was done to me, is done. over 11 years, & in general a lifetime, of genuinely life-threatening suicidist <=> saneist <=> ableist abandonment & abuse, "it is what it is" "what's done is done" — i wanted to make the world where what happened to me, would never happen to anyone else. that's the real suicide prevention.
it was summertime. i entered the group call suddenly, crying & screaming. i cried about how i wanted to live in a world with no saneism. i cried that i wanted to live in a world where people like me — Black, Indigenous, non-Black, and white — people didn't get shot on the street, just for existing.
"i want to live in a world with no saneism," i cried, actually crying.
"i want to live in that world, too," they said softly, with their whole heart. we'd never spoken before, before that week.
/
note: the following conversation was not with a therapist, but with someone who's had similar experiences.
"a bit of escapism isn't bad. if it helps you, it helps you."
"no, but this was my world my entire life. i didn't even know until recently that the world i live in wasn't "real"."
"i'm just curious. would you rather be psychotic, or live in the real world?
— would you rather live there, or here?"
"obviously, there.
in my world, racism, misogyny, saneism, ableism, transmisia, abuse, capitalism, white supremacy, and everything bad, doesn't exist."
"oh, that does sound better."
/
i am not "struggling with [my] mental health".
my bodymindheart is responding appropriately, logically, naturally, & completely healthily to how other human beings interact with me — me who lives in my body, & my brain & my abilities to have human relationships lives in my body, too.
in the end, human beings aren't so evolved or fancy.
we're just animals who want to protect & defend ourselves, & survive no matter what the consequences are.
do you really believe that you're "sane"r than me, feeling so "okay" with all of what's happening around you?
every evening i
massage gold
into the fault-lines of my cells
content — body image, vague mentions of s*x. heavy.
/
"i once touched a tree with charred limbs
the stump was still breathing
but the tops were just ashy remains
i wonder what it's like to come back from that
because sometimes i feel forest fires erupting from my wrists
and the smoke signals sent out are the most beautiful things i've ever seen
love your body the way your mother loved your baby feet
and brother arm wrapping shoulders
and remember
this is important
you are worth more than who you fuck
you are worth more than a waistline
you are worth more than beer bottles displayed like drunken artifacts
you are worth more than any naked body could proclaim in the shadows
more than a man's whim
or your father's mistake
you are no less valuable as a size 16, than a size 4
you are no less valuable as a 32a than a 36c
your beauty* is defined by concentric circles within your wood
it is wisdom
you
are a goddamn tree stump
with leaves sprouting out
— mary lambert, "body love part 2", 2013, excerpt
emphasis / bold / italics, mine.
* this line originally said "sexiness". i'm sorry, mary lambert, i changed it just for this quote.
because: if you don't resonate with the concept of "sexiness", might i suggest replacing it with "beauty", or value, or... whatever you want, tbh?
/
content: a quote about happiness, pain, & bad days. pretty neutral content, possibly inspiring.
“I actually attack the concept of happiness.
The idea that — I don’t mind people being happy — but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in western society, which is fear of sadness.
It's a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying "write down 3 things that made you happy today before you go to sleep", and "cheer up" and "happiness is our birthright" and so on.
We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position — it’s rubbish.
Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are.
Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much.
Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say "Quick! Move on! Cheer up!"
I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word "happiness" and to replace it with the word "wholeness".
Ask yourself: "Is this contributing to my wholeness?"
And if you’re having a bad day, it is."
— Hugh Mackay, white male. i don't know anything else about him, and i do not vouch for any of his other words or work.
this is a free public post. i am a formerly homeless physically & mentally Disabled survivor of extreme violence. please consider supporting me, to help en-able me to continue to fight for justice. it means a lot to me, thank you so much💙 [blue heart]
/
content note — s--cide, ab-se, saneism, bad life shit, the usual
/
almost nobody shows me grace. not even my own (past) friends, thankfully most of those people are now (in my) past (life), not present. no wonder i constantly feel misunderstood => lonely => suicidal.
almost nobody shows me grace.
it's one of the most heartbreaking things about my life, especially my adult life away from my abusive parents. i expected better out of life, i expected better out of the world, i expected better out of other people. from life, from the world, from other people. i can write, & that's about it. & i can only write bc i wrote "obsessively" as a teenager, bc it was the *only* thing i *could* do. i've never taken a writing class by choice, i learned english bc my father abused me out of speaking my first 2 languages & my father abused me into speaking english, & i am physically incapable of reading books. i feel sharp pains in my head when i try to read books, but i can read online articles once in a while, & i've been able to read race & gender discourse posts on capitalist social media platforms written/created by non-academic people during my good years.
in 2014-2015, i attempted suicide a lot, i couldn't eat, i couldn't sleep, i was living with my worst abusers, & then spending most nights in my car, either not sleeping all night, or sleeping in my car for a few hours. but i could write cutting, insightful analyses about race & gender on tw*tt*r every day, at all hours of the day & night, so everybody assumed i was able/d. (just like i can write cutting, insightful analyses about race, gender, & power right now. but i couldn't really, from 2015-2023.) i am not. i am extremely, extremely, extremely mentally disabled. i am in constant severe physical, mental, physical-mental pain that is very hard to talk about, or explain, without others gaslighting me, or ostracizing me, or shunning me, or avoiding me, or even abusing me. without others thinking that i must be "crazy", i must be "making things up".
i have always tried hard to appear good. so that i am more believeable. so i try hard to appear good. to try my best to never be abusive, to never be exploitative, to never pressure anybody to give me the help that i desperately need to survive (especially not after 2015, a year during which i was *very* homeless — since the severity waxes & wanes). to never speak out loud just how much pain i'm in just in case somebody thinks it means i'm manipulating them. because i can't trust that other people know how to take care of themselves, & their own boundaries, & communicate them. i do. i try to own my own responsibility to communicate, but i concede that for me, too, there are circumstances that make it difficult for me as well, usually along the lines of — you guessed it — somebody else having more systemic power than me. the thing is that i rarely hold that systemic power over other people. but most people don't realize that, bc i can write well, bc i am "articulate", bc i have followers on social media again, bc i'm non-Black non-Indigenous light-skinned east asian/chinese, bc i'm not screaming out loud (not that most people would treat me better if i were! that's the thing!). so when they say no to helping me, they don't realize how much pain & misery that puts me in. but *they* get to move on with their lives. they don't need me.
i have always tried hard to appear good. so that i am more believeable. so i try hard to appear good. to try my best to never be abusive, to never be exploitative, to always be fair & just & kind. it doesn't seem to matter. most people want to harm me, anyway. or at the very least, most people *still* dislike me. *especially* if they knew me, (even more) unmasked (in the neuro-atypical sense).
anyway, it's not fair that i have to work so hard to "be good". i don't think all of us insane people should have to work so hard. i don't think insane people should have to work so hard. i don't think that we need to "appear good"/learn how to "appear good" to deserve respect, but i know nobody is going to give it to us if we don't. (and the people who share my intensity of insanity, most of them *can't* try to "appear good". they literally don't have the *ability*.) i know it's not fair that *i* have to work so hard, too. but i *have* to be like this. it's the one blessing i have, i think. a privilege. privilege: something that i did not earn, that i do not deserve any better than anybody else. my privilege is that i can write, & under more ideal circumstances, i can *appear* to be non-insane quite well sometimes.
not from early 2016 to maybe, this year. and i have been the least popular, the least liked, the most isolated, the most friendless & depressed & suicidal, in the last 7 years, than i had ever been in my entire adult life (which started in 2008).
for over 7 years, it's been impossible for me to *act* neuro-normative. which means that i did not have the *ability*. i didn't have it before either, to be clear, but i still acted fairly more "normal", my more psychotic & manic & shut down selves were suppressed for years. wow, i don't know if i've ever articulated that before, & *especially* not in public. i don't even think anybody reading this can even *understand* what that means, if i don't explain it in more detail. & i just can't right now, i'm too tired.
anyway.
for over 7 years, it's been impossible for me to *act* neuro-normative. & i have had the least support & friends & stable housing & resources, in those 7 years. "activists" have treated me like the social plague. "activists" & "good" people have ostracized me.
huh. i wonder why... 🤔 [thinking face emoji]
/
most people make a lot of assumptions.
most people are not grounded in reality, i observe. they only believe in what they *want* to perceive and believe about the world, based on their own biases, emotions, traumas, internalized beliefs, culture, social norms, etc. — and also, based on what they *wish* were true. people believe, perceive, experience the world through the lens of their own dreams. most people just don't know it, & they usually won't admit it to themselves. you, too, like me, are powered by wishful thinking.
most people are not grounded in reality, i observe. they only believe in what they *want* to perceive and believe about the world, & about their life, & about themselves, & about the people around them, & about how the world works — based on their own dreams, desires, wishes, wishful thinking, hopes, hopes & dreams, — biases, emotions, traumas, internalized beliefs, culture, social norms, — *etc.*
it's psychologically protective. (fuck western psychology! *this doesn't mean i'm pro-psychology in any other region! i don't have enough experience of psychology in other regions!*)
i am a very emotional human being, but i still like to try to observe & analyze & understand interpersonal interactions from a perspective i consider to be grounded, grounded in what i consider to be objective reality. of course, others might still feel like it is subjective. it is heavily influenced by my values, but also it is heavily influenced by what i think i observe materially about the world, & the way power dynamics play out. my values are in seeking out & knowing the truth, even if the truth makes me feel bad, sad, bad about myself, sad about myself, or traumatizes me. i think this is why most people avoid reality. the reality of not only other people's actions, but their own. the reality of the impacts of their own actions, & other people's, as well.
the truth might/would make them feel bad, sad, bad about themself, sad about themself, or even traumatize them.
i try to see things from other people's perspectives, even when they harm me. i know that none of them want to afford me the same grace.
maybe, they — the lower-level harmers, anyway, not the outright abusers who i'm sure don't even care (which is bad!) — don't even *know* how (which is bad!). but that's not an excuse i'm making for them. it's just another possible fact of reality that i'm observing.
maybe, they don't even *know* how to give grace to crazy psychotic super-traumatized human beings, like me.
perfectionism is white supremacist culture. perfectionism is policing. i can imagine now an abuser using these sentences to excuse their actions: "see? i'm just not perfect!" i mean low level misunderstandings, & uncomfortable feelings.
i think i've had a very atypical life, & i have a very atypical experience of the world, & how i see the world, maybe.
what's interesting to me is that these days, within certain groups of people who consider themselves to be "activists" or to do "mutual aid", homelessness is now assigned a positive value socially. which is, of course, the very opposite of the perspective of dominant white supremacist capitalist society. "this person is homeless; therefore, we help them." or, "this person is/was incarcerated; this person is impoverished; this person is an abuse survivor. therefore, *they* are the kind of person we help."
yet i have never been so rejected, been so betrayed, as an impoverished, often homeless, housing-unstable insane disabled survivor of gender-based violence, multiple psychiatric incarcerations, & police violence, as i have been rejected & betrayed by so-called "anti-capitalist" "abolitionist" "activists" who preach publicly the loudest about "community care" for homeless people, impoverished people, incarcerated people, survivors of violence.
it's charity work.
a social clique of "activists" is just another nuclear family, & the nuclear family is THE unit of usameriKKKa — it's the unit that upholds & actively continues, actively helps march on, capitalist white supremacist individualist values. that's something that's been in the back of my head for a while that i've been wanting to say, but i've been too scared to say out loud, bc i have a *lot* of self-doubt seeded in me by my abusers & most people i've met & this abusive society in general, honestly that's (that self-doubt is) a big reason why i'm constantly suicidal.
anyway, other suicidal mad disabled autistic neuro-atypical impoverished "disability justice activists", & people in general, who even talk about saneism & ableism, have *also* lashed out at me or gotten upset at me or even punished me (good ol' policing!) for not understanding ableist white [supremacist] / usameriKKKan or "normative" social norms, or how to speak english "properly" or "respectably".
it's hard being disabled, even moreso to be mentally disabled & unable to communicate or function. so, so, so hard. more able/d people take so much for granted. they move through a world that works for them, the more able/d they are. this world is actively hostile towards me, & the ableist [white/ supremacist] usameriKKKan way is just to say, "suck it up & stop complaining. just deal with it." i *am* dealing with it. the only way i can deal with it is if i try to change it. but i'm not going to "suck it up", & i'm not going to "stop complaining".
let me say that again:
this world is actively hostile towards me,
& the usameriKKKan way is just to say,
"suck it up & stop complaining. just deal with it."
i am dealing with it. the only way i can deal with it is if i try to change it.
but i'm not going to fucking suck it up, and i'm definitely not going to stop fucking complaining.
we live in an anti-survivor society, in usameriKKKa. it is a huge problem in the so-called "abolitionist" "transformative justice" "restorative justice" "leftist" "community/ies". it's also a huge problem in every other "community" in usameriKKKa, probably to an even *worse* extent. but i just wanted to name that it's a huge problem in the "community" where everybody loves to believe that they are *especially* morally "good". i am actually not okay with other people (or, you know, myself) killing themselves over preventable pain & trauma.
* but the decision is still only theirs, if they do.
& they shouldn't be blamed for doing it. ever.
this world, this suicidist society, people who hurt them, should all be blamed instead.
/
this is a free public post. i am a formerly homeless physically & mentally Disabled survivor of extreme violence. please consider supporting me, to help en-able me to continue to fight for justice. it means a lot to me, thank you so much💙 [blue heart]
today's Monday Motivation! is...
— Howard Zinn, white male, 1971.
from a series of debates called "The Advocates" — "A series of debates with a moderator facilitating the discussion of national and international issues – using advocates who would introduce witnesses to support their point of view." [ source ]
this debate is on "If You Oppose the War, Should You Answer the Call for Massive Civil Disobedience?" — on the Vietnam War. [ source ]
recorded at "Faneuil Hall" on Land stolen from the Massa-adchu-es-et (Massachusett), Pawtucket, & Naumkeag Peoples (coercively called by colonizers as "Boston, Massachusetts").
so i've never actually read howard zinn's books. & i think it's fucked & unfair that a white male colonizer academic got to write a famous history book called "a people's history of the united states", instead of Indigenous Peoples. *
also, after reading a quote zinn said about socialism, i also conclude that i don't think it appears that his stance was hard enough towards a pro-socialism/pro-communism side. but that's just from one quote.
( * once again, outsiders, including white supremacist anti-Indigenous fake "leftists", may call me a snowflake / karen(???) for saying this. but me naming this doesn't mean i think all of his work is worthless. i haven't read most of it. it doesn't even mean i wouldn't like the book. i am just naming that he is a white male colonizer academic who got (the opportunity, which is not accessible to everybody, especially actual Indigenous people, non-academic people, Unhoused people, presently incarcerated people, impoverished people, people with the intersections of the above experiences, etc.) to write a famous book about the "history" of these stolen Lands. learn to hold multiple truths at once 😊 [smiling face emoji] )
/
Anyway, this quote (on obedience) brings me to something I've been meaning to clarify.
I've previously said that "my ideal revolution is very hard to scale because it requires respecting people's consent and boundaries, and not abusing others", & that I believe "true love can fight capitalism".
I wanted to clarify that, on the topic of non-violence, I was talking about how we treat our comrades, community members, & innocent bystanders / other human beings, not how we treat cops / bosses / our oppressors / the ruling class (who are not human beings... ha ha ha /hj... unless? 👀 [eyes emoji] )
...
[ continued... ]
...but how I think about this is honestly kind of complicated.
But I grew up fighting my abusers every day.
It makes me sad that my implication is that many things don't "scale" well without abusive dynamics. (Which I think is. sadly! true! for our current world?) Which obviously doesn't make it right! I am saying that I am against this: A lot of "leftist" organizations are choosing to actively replicate the exact same violent oppressive structures as the system they're claiming to fight against.
For what it's worth, I do believe that re-education of oppressors — of anybody, honestly — is ideal, instead of... something else.
But is systemized re-education even possible, in our current world, as of this writing? Well, it maybe doesn't exist in the way I imagine it, but maybe attempts at transformative justice & restorative justice might be versions of that.
There's a lot of tension right now I think for usameriKKKan "socialists/communists" who claim that they want abolition of the prison-industrial complex (honestly, I think for many of them, it's because caring about anti-racism is a trend that they're following), yet also simultaneously claim that they want a hierarchical, authoritarian communist organization / party / state to carry out "a revolution".
I also wanted to clarify my stance on revenge here, which I've edited to:
i don't think i'm morally superior to anybody for not seeking revenge. i am supportive of mindful, politically grounded revenge that does not punch down [on those suffering/more marginalized than you].
(it previously said: "i don't think i'm morally superior to anybody for not seeking revenge. i am supportive of revenge.")
but please like, don't take anything i say as gospel. it's all meant to make you think & ask more questions, it's not meant to make you... obey. me, or anybody else.
I think a lot about all of this all of the time, but I don't have any definitive answers, & I'm not the one (nobody is, imho) to decide what "the answers" are, anyway.
And it seems that right now, it's very hard to get all of us to agree with each other.
/
reminder:
the beginning of today's Monday Motivation! #015 was...
— Howard Zinn, white male, 1971.
content — somehow, i managed to mention s--cide in this, as well. /lighthearted {& yes, i make jokes about s--cide. i think i've earned that right after experiencing almost 3 straight decades of daily si.}
/
Dad says: Dearest Child, you should keep wearing a face mask and care about keeping COVID-19 precautions, to protect your safety and others'.
Dad's Child (could be adult age) says: But, Dad! Everybody else is going out unmasked now!
Dad says: If everybody else jumped off a bridge, would you?
/
"If a factory is torn down but the rationality that produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.
If a revolution destroys a government but the patterns of thought that produced the government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves."
— Robert Pirsig, white male, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance *
* i have not read the rest of this book & i do not vouch nor recommend it (this is a neutral statement. i do not recommend books i haven't read.)
content — mentions of s**cidality, very brief mention of ab*se with no details
/
i was sitting in the back of my childhood car. i was sitting on a small hill. but i was alone this time. i erased you.
i was sitting alone in my childhood car, first year of university. i was hopelessly alone, & i didn't know how to talk to anybody back then.
i tried to be a teacher at the age of 18. i needed the money, & i was teaching 17-18-year-olds. the bus stopped running at 10pm, & work ended at 10pm, so i had to just hope a stranger in my training cohort would be willing to drive me the 8 miles home after work, otherwise i'd just be. stuck. there.
i quit that job quickly. i was terrified of other people. i was an awkward 18-year-old teaching scary intimidating 17-18-year-olds whose parents had more money than me. i said me, not mine.
i found a photograph of when he & i used to sit in the grocery store together. i erased all those memories myself from my own mind, even though i was the one who initiated the (heart)break-up. and compared to all the other photographs, that all seemed so filled with love (in a good way), this one was so simple. we used to sit in the grocery store together. it was ordinary (in a good way). i was still in severe pain back then, i was just even less aware of it.
i haven't been happy since. but i'm trying.
i refuse to believe anybody can love me again.
nobody is ever going to love me again.
i am going to die alone. i'm so (not) sure of this (at all).
(i know i won't die alone. i knew that already.)
or, at least, a part of me does.
the part that lives in the future. the part that tells me not to kill myself. 5 years old, 95 years old.
but my life hasn't felt happy or magical since i was 21. when i was 22, my brain started breaking so much that i couldn't even enjoy looking at the ocean or watching a sunset anymore. that was 11 years ago.
very few people can relate to this experience. i've never met anybody else who can. & i say that seriously. i don't know anybody else who lives/lived in a different reality like i did for this long. there are other people who are chronically suicidal every day, believe it or not. i didn't know that until the past year, but now i do. but fewer people are as severely dissociated & severely psychotic as me every day yet still go outside sometimes, do the public-facing work i do, publish my own writing, move around the world, talk to new people constantly, try to escape psych prison, & are able to pretend to be as sane in front of other people as i can.
i haven't been happy since i was 21, & even back then i was sad. i was happy bc i was loved. i was happy bc i trusted somebody. i was happy bc i had family. i was happy bc somebody loved me.
yet it didn't work out. & that still breaks my heart.
i will never get those moments again. & i want them back. i want them so bad. biggest mistake of my life that i beat myself up for for over eleven fucking years. but was it a mistake? was it *my* mistake?
everything bad that happened since then was caused by: lack of supportive family <=> lack of supportive friends <=> lack of supportive community <=> lack of social support <=> lack of support system <=> lack of systemic privileges <=> lack of resources, past trauma, vicious suicidism <=> saneism <=> ableism from my own friends, many people's unfortunate choices to hurt me & sometimes on purpose, new trauma, suicidism <=> saneism <=> ableism <=> capitalism <=> racism <=> misogyny => poverty & homelessness, & so our dehumanizing, cruel system / "'mental '"health"'"care"'"/psychiatric-industrial complex & medical-industrial complex...
so. many. things. that i couldn't control.
i will never get those moments back. & i haven't felt like that with anybody else, since. & i couldn't understand why. i just wanted to find that magic again.
i thought of that word today, & i wanted to write about that today, actually. i wanted to write about magic.
but please don't put me on a pedestal. i'm just an ordinary, boring human being in real life, who makes a lot of mistakes, & hurts other people's feelings (usually, but not always!, accidentally) sometimes, just like everybody else. for the vast majority of my adult life, i've spent the hours of my life laying in bed, unable to move, wanting to die.
i wanted to write about magic.
/
the fairies are talking to me.
on new year's eve 2015, i slept through midnight of the passing of the sun-years for maybe the first time in my life. i accidentally spilled blue ink on my host's bed earlier, & i left her euros for it. (i also accidentally spilled blue hair dye on the carpet of my other host's room during christmas, & i had to pay her pounds for it. i took a train to the coast by myself on december 24th, but i was so crippled by trauma that i could barely move. so i didn't even go (to visit *mum*, the ocean).)
on new year's eve 2015, i fell asleep.
i woke up in the middle of the night, & a voice i used to call God told me that all my worries about love? everything would work out eventually.
"don't worry, everything will work out eventually."
i would find love eventually.
((a part of )me started planning to shoot myself, a few months later.)
but it's amazing how long my life has stretched, & so many of my moments were defined by how much i love him. the way i drove to the ocean alone on november 11th, 2013, & then 2016, 2017. i was looking for something.
i was looking for something i had lost, & couldn't find again.
in 2018, i slept through 11/11 & woke up in the evening, i was *so* depressed. in 2018, i slept through 11/11. i was *so* depressed.
but it's amazing how long my life has stretched, & so many of my moments since were defined — *unconsciously* — by how much i love him — while he forgot about me, he forgot me, the way everybody else does.
people (including other disabled people) always forget about disabled people, forget us. we aren't interesting or exciting or sexy enough, anyway.
but i see life more clearly now than i did when i was 18, 19, 20, 21.
it is grotesque & even worse than i could *ever* imagine.
so that's why i worry. will i ever be able to forget my trauma, or at least suppress it for 2 & ½ years, & love somebody else ever again?
i re-read, 2 summers ago, something i wrote about summer 10 years ago from that summer. he & i used to sit in the car after we already parked, & just talk while staring at the dumpsters. the literal dumpsters.
i haven't had any magical moments like that since i decided not to kill myself on my 26th birthday. it's almost cruelly ironic. no, it's not "almost". it *is*.
who can blame me for wanting to trade a life of being homeless & crippled & poor & abused by abusive men & abandoned by everybody i know, to sit in a car with somebody who loves me again?
i used to steal figs from the bulk bins at w* f*. only two or three at a time. that's literally before a* even bought them out. i had never eaten figs before. they were dried. they were exotic(*a loaded word in other contexts, use with caution) to me.
i haven't been in love since i was 21. i haven't had anybody i love & trust that deeply since i was 21. i haven't had anybody i love & trust that deep as family since i was 21 — & especially not anybody who didn't eventually hurt => traumatize me, anyway. it's a horrifying existence.
i wrote about a day when we went to the water, not the beach, in my suicide note when i was 24. i forgot about those moments. i forgot i wrote that in(to) one of my suicide notes. god, there were only 3 years in-between 21 & 24. & now i'm 33, & there have been over 7 years since i turned 26, & i feel fucking miserable. i have been nothing but miserable since.
i had a dream about you. it was more a nightmare. in the nightmare, you were trying to save me from my father.
you had concocted an elaborate & loving plan. i dreamt that when i laid in bed depressed & unable to move in college, that i dissociated & whispered to you in my sleep what happened, & that's when you started planning your plan to save me. but instead, in real life, i dissociated & whispered to you in a different way, & after i sent that text, i started crying uncontrollably while laying in foetal position with a blanket on the black asphalt in the street outside somebody's house in the eveningtime.
i flew to the east coast a couple weeks after that day back then (2019), & i stayed with friends of a friend of a friend, friends i'd never met before. they were young & so in love in their breaking down elderly(old) apartment with no (working?) heater in the northeasterly winter cold. i told them how seeing them so in love reminded me of "me & my ex". i mentioned you & i felt like millions of tiny needles were stabbing my arms, & i had to take off my jacket even though it was freezing. i think they've broken up since then. sad.
last summer, i drove with somebody new to a park new (to me) in the san gabriel valley. another park on top of a tall hill, where you can see all the lights from the houses in the distance. one i used to drive to alone, & feel lonely & broken down terrified frozen pain & confused. & i bought chinese groceries with that somebody new. they forgot me eventually, too. and/but that's (not) okay. aren't you proud of me?
content warning: everything
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* i try not to say "trigger warning" anymore bc i read something about how the word "trigger" can trigger people who have trauma around guns, which is how i finally understood why many people made the shift from using the words "trigger warning" to "content warning", and then, "content notes". /i am being completely serious. see [asterisks 5*****] below.
there is no "perfect" wording in the world. period.
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it's hard when you start questioning your reason for existing when you're 3 years old. when you're thinking about military men raping & murdering women who look like you, war crimes, & the massacres of your people while everybody else is experiencing crushes & birthday parties in 9th grade. when involuntary desires to drown yourself or jump off a bridge stab your brain like sharp hailstones involuntarily when you're silently sitting in meetings as an adult.
"it was the only woman you ever loved
that got burnt by the sun too often when she was young
and the cancer spread
and it ran into her body and her blood
and there's nothing you can do about it now"
— Blood, The Middle East ** , 2009
"cos hollywood might be the death of me
so i'll carry my mind to yosemite
lay it all down in the summer breeze
and i'll pick up my guitar and play The Middle East
cos i don't want fans, i want family
i don't wanna stack bands, i just wanna find peace
in a world that's drained all my energy"
— Yosemite, Vancouver Sleep Clinic, 2019
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— i just found out that one of my favourite quotes, which i considered as a title for this poem, & i considered getting a tattoo of one day, has a heavily misogynistic origin from the male writer. nice /sarcasm.
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** i wanted to point out that the context of the history & power dynamics of white supremacy, white domination, white imperialism, & white settler-colonialism affects the choices of bands of all/mostly whites that choose band names like this. see also: Beirut, etc. i have been thinking about this for years.
*** this doesn't mean that i'm trying to "cancel" anyone. i still enjoy those songs. i'm just pointing something out. *sighs*
***** people are going to take [asterisks 2**] & call me a snowflake *sigh*,
or, these days, a karen. i've noticed that the meaning of the slang term "karen"(god, even the way i'm writing about it rn is too technical/boring-sounding, lol) has become distorted in the weirdest way, so that it is now completely divorced from its original intention, & practically means the opposite thing culturally/societally at this point.
2021 july 5
a lonely dream
searching for an evergreen tree i planted in a forests 10 years ago
after we ended
i wrote thousands of poems & books
about weird fishes & how i needed
somebody to read with
my emptiness craving your fingers
in an endless hailstorm of misery
that summer of arpeggi poems
i screamed to myself out loud while eating thawed frozen mango in a plastic bag from the grocery store with my bare fingers while driving as sharp chunks of hail pelted my childhood car
on a tiny road to sacramento from the redwoods
where a bear had fallen off a cliff & died
that i would never trust a man again
/
2012 july 6
Can't
Two summers ago
I sat at that same chair,
at that same hour,
listening to the same songs.
It was another night that I wanted to watch
Clementine and Joel break each other's hearts.
It was another night that I wanted to watch
Mary Svevo and her helpless, hopeless
look when she realized that
Hearts Don't Lie. I don't think I've ever truly
fallen in "l---." It sounds like just another
dirty four-letter word to me. Doesn't it to you?
The way it curves around your cheekbones and
pierces your overpopulated cityscape teeth.
When I was 13 I was afraid that I would
never learn to love anyone. So I tried. I tried
again and again and in the end, I don't think I really can
or know how. I don't think it's possible. I don't think I really
have a heart. They opened me up once, you know: sliced me
shut when they realized that there was nothing. They saw nothing.
It was empty, all, all empty. I never met eyes that turned me or someone
I'd be crazy not to follow. Sorry, Radiohead. But I have yet to catch a weird fish.
So this is what I learned from Eloisa to Abelard: Hearts Don't Lie.
If you can say you are truly In Love
with someone,
then you never really stop.
I always stop.
That is how I know I am incapable of love.
every time we're generous or kind, especially when we usually wouldn't be, or when capitalism/our internalized capitalist indoctrination wouldn't expect us to be — it's a risk, maybe.
maybe that's why so many of us don't do it, especially under capitalism. it *does* put us in a vulnerable position, maybe?
risks aren't inherently a bad thing. we need to risk something to make the world better. 💙 [blue heart emoji]
change requires pain usually, unfortunately. {*always*?}
change often requires sacrifice.
moving more towards love requires sacrifice.
making the world a better place requires sacrifice.
i believe in you. 💙 [blue heart emoji]
content — heavy, suicide, &c.
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2023 june 9th
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trust is more important than love.
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i pressed my own hand into my own forehead, & my other own hand into the back of my own neck, with my own consent.
i started crying, against my own will.
"i don't want to die," i started crying.
"i want to kill myself," i cried, in a different world.
"i don't want to die," i repeated, crying.
/
"i want to kill myself," i cry, 5 years old.
"i don't want to die," i cry, 5 years old, in the exact same millisecond.
/
"i just want somebody to wave a magic wand & fix everything for me."
"but you know that that's not possible." the 2nd queer asian woman therapist i talked to in 2020 said to me.
i felt angry when she said that.
no, i didn't.
no, i don't.
i truly did not believe that that wasn't possible.
i truly believed in the existence of that magic wand, bc i needed one.
she broke the promise she made me when we started, just a few months later.
/
"yeah, somebody raped me and told me he would kill me," i told her nonchalantly.
"that's fucked up," she replied.
is it? i thought, very sincerely.
/
i was sitting in the driver's seat of a rental car while parked in the parking lot of a park at the top of a hill in the first week of january 2022. i fell asleep in the driver's seat briefly as the sun was setting. i felt so lonely & frozen & broken, i didn't even leave the car until after sunset.
"you seem to know a lot about therapy," the queer asian woman therapist i was doing a phone intake with, one of maybe literally 20 mostly queer mostly women asian therapists i interviewed that month, said, as i sat in the driver's seat.
"yeah. i do." i responded.
i never spoke to her again.
/
when i turned 26 years old in a psych prison in 2016 after deciding/trying not to shoot myself, a man who had tried to kill himself by drinking a gallon of bleach told me that i'm beautiful.
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in 2023, my elderly chinese neighbour smiles at me every morning.
"you're beautiful!" she says every time.
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mi vecina mayor xicana hispanohablante always has conversations with me en español. she doesn't even care if i can understand it or not or if i respond or not & it always makes me laugh.
/
in the first week of september 2023, i got my bivalent BA.x SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 booster vaccine.
i took 2 buses for 2 hours afterwards {while wearing an elastomeric respirator, for SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 safety}, bc that was when i started waking up every morning feeling like euthanizing myself.
so i decided to visit mum. the ocean.
in the dark, i ate a burger sitting outside alone at a picnic table near the sand.
a young Black woman laughed at me as she walked by with her friends.
i turned around, sad.
"oh, i'm sorry. you look beautiful, eating. i love seeing [girls*] eat," she said, laughing.
"thank you," i responded.
* i'm not a girl, woman, or femme.
/
much like the rest of white supremacist capitalist usameriKKKa, therapists / "mental "health""care"" professionals harm the most impoverished human beings the most.
some therapists don't harm others as much. they are usually paid better, they usually have wealthier clients. & by wealthy, i mean, people who can pay for out-of-pocket therapy, that is not covered by insurance.
therapy / psychiatry as a system in usameriKKKa harms so many human beings, bc they work with some of the most vulnerable human beings alive, when those human beings are asking for help.
the entire medical-industrial complex harms other human beings, anyway.
/
i've been reading a lot about parenting lately. & if we want to parent in a way without abuse & violence & punishment, we allow natural consequences to play out by themselves. if you don't wear a jacket, you’ll get cold. you don't need to repeat this fact to a child who's not listening; they will learn on their own, when they refuse to wear the jacket.
if you hurt somebody, they never have to talk to you again.
if you're an adult, i believe that most of the time, mental, etc. disabilities notwithstanding, you have a choice in how you treat the people you say you love.
even when you don't believe that you have that choice.
and you can always choose better.
otherwise, there would be no point.
content — a lovely story,
& then an old chinese folk story,
with ageist ableist classist lookist violence {sigh}
in real life, i walked in circles around big houses.
i walked in circles around the neighborhood, trying to find my soulmate, who was supposed to be sitting on a sidewalk waiting for me. i walked in circles for hours, trying to find the right sidewalk, so i could sit next to them. but i couldn't find you. instead, hidden within the shadows of a big tree, tied on a branch slightly taller than me, i found a red ribbon. i lifted myself slightly onto the front souls of my feet so i could reach it, untied the red ribbon, & i took it with me.
in the chinese folk stories of 姻緣紅線 yīn yuán hóng xiàn, the red thread of fate that connects you to your true love, 月下老人 yuè xià lǎo rén, the old man under the moon, the god of love & marriage, tells human beings who is their soulmate.
in the legend, an ambitious young man asks 月老 the old man under the moon, who is his destined true love.
in many similar versions of the story...
月老 shows the young man that his soulmate is a young girl in the village who is poor & devoid of beauty, walking with her mother/caretaker, an old blind woman. 月老 shows him the magical red thread that ties them together: the young man is tied to the young girl by an invisible red string, tied around his pinky finger, stretching to hers.
in every version of the story, the young man is always very unhappy about this. he tells his servant to stab the young girl & the old blind woman to death, because he does not want to marry a poor, ugly girl who is the daughter of an old blind woman, & he wants to prove the prophecy of the 月下老人 the old man under the moon, the god of love & marriage, wrong.
14 years later, the ambitious young man, now a successful government official, is engaged to be married to a beautiful young woman, the daughter of a wealthy governor. he cannot understand why she could not find a suitor before.
on the night of their wedding, he notices that his wife is crippled{reclaimed} & walks with a limp, & that she covers her forehead with a mysterious silk scarf. in some versions of the story, she has a scar on her back.
when he asks her why she wears the silk scarf, she starts crying & tells him that she is actually the niece of the family leaders, not their daughter. when she was a young child, a stranger stabbed her blind mother to death, & then stabbed her, leaving her disabled & barely able to walk. she takes off her silk scarf, revealing an uglybeautiful scar.
her husband realizes that 月老 was right, & he starts crying. weeping, he confesses that he ordered his servant to kill them both, & he tearfully begs his wife for forgiveness.
& she forgives him.
in every version of the story, the young boy foolishly hurts the young girl in his youth, leaving her with an uglybeautiful scar.
& she forgives him.
"the two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers, regardless of place, time, or circumstances. this magical cord may stretch or tangle, but never break." {quoted}
* other than the last quote, i worded this version of the story myself, an amalgam of several versions i read.
before anybody comes at me, i KNOW that this isn't the story of 七夕 {the title of the post}, nor is today the real 七夕, omg. for those unaware, 七夕 is a holiday about a different chinese folk story.
i also intentionally use the word "ugly" to mean: beautiful & flawed/imperfect, because *nothing* in this world can ever be "perfect".
if you ever feel like a failure, please realize that it's actually just capitalism that's the big ol' failure, and it's victim-blaming you.
i walked in circles around big houses. i found a tree that looked lovely to climb, but i was too scared to climb it. i walked closer to the tree... or was it another tree? i think it may have been another tree. i looked up into the tree. there was a slightly translucent red ribbon tied to a branch taller than me, hidden within the tree. i lifted my body slightly onto the front souls of my feet, untied the red ribbon, & took it with me.
i walked in circles around big houses, & in the knots of another tree's roots, i found a tiny table. it looked like children — or fairies — had created it by melting plastic & glitter together. it was a triangle of slightly translucent white plastic, with purple sparkles & tiny legs. i lifted the top piece, & there were tiny chairs underneath.
this entire day, i believed that i was in a different world — my world, not the ugly "real" world. i realized, days later, that when i found that red ribbon, & the fairy furniture, both in different trees, that they were real.
i want you to know how magical it was. it didn't feel real, so the most magical part was real-izing that it was real.
gOD talked to me again, asked me why i love the ugliest parts of the world they created, why i love their ugliest parts, as i touched the ugliest parts of the bark of a tree. they sounded sad. i asked gOd desperately, why they kept running away from me & reincarnating as somebody else. i cried. i told them that i love the last form i met them in. i told them that they're beautiful. i told you that you're beautiful.
in my dreams, i told god that they're beautiful.
this is a free public post. i am a formerly homeless physically & mentally Disabled survivor of extreme violence. please consider supporting me, to help en-able me to continue to fight for justice. it means a lot to me, thank you so much💙 [blue heart]
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CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING
2023 june 27
i have several drafts of the following post dated 2023 february 9, plus a new not-completely-related-except-for-one-phrase-but-you-know-they-are-all-connected-right draft i wrote while dissociated at the end of may 2023, bc i certainly don't remember writing it, much like i don't remember writing most things i write...
yesterday, i told them the truth, & they happened to be around to hear it. a dear friend of mine, i haven't felt safe to call anybody "a dear friend" in years. they happened to be around.
"hey i'm slipping
i just am at my limit
like i just want to pick a day & end things
but i know i probably would back out at the very end
& not actually go through with it
it feels like everybody turns on me in a second
& nobody is predictable"
"Makes sense that we're always afraid at the end"
Life is just made up of little moments. Little memories. I don't forget things. Everything burns into my brain as a scar. Things that happened 20 years ago still hurt, stuffed sadness into a tiny little pinhole in my heart, spilling out in also-suppressed desires for violence, a violence that i do not act upon against other people, but i am happy to choose to sacrifice myself in the process.
These days, I have an unpredictably predictable spiral at least once per day. Our lives affect one another, we forget this. As a child, because I didn't really have parents, I took very seriously all of the sentimental Hollywood movies about chance & fate & serendipity & how a small gust of wind can cause a hurricane somewhere else. I would like to think of that as my choice, but as I write this, I realize why. lately i have been trying to understand the confusing choice i made as a small young child to *not* be like my parents or my family, a child's most significant influences, or the racist white kids & the racist white teachers at school, who all were the only human beings i ever came into contact with, anyway.
but as i write this, i see why. i hear it in a tiny voice in myself, finally: why i chose to follow the path of Sailor Moon instead of the daily violence i suffered every day from almost everybody i ever came in contact with.
i wanted to love horrible people into changing. i wanted to learn how to love, & not repeat the same violence that was done to me. i didn't even know what cycles were back then, i didn't know the word "trauma" as a english-is-my-3rd-language-violently-abused-into-me-while-my-first-2-native-chinese-languages-were-abused-out-by-my-own-chinese-father 7-year-old in 1997.
i just know now that i felt stronger as a 3, 4, 5-year-old than i do now.
so that's it. i wanted to change them, but i couldn't. i still want to change human beings who harm others. i change myself every day, to the point where it is exhausting. they said to me yesterday "I was about to say maybe you can obsess over fighting unfairness or something" but i had already pre-empted them by saying that i already do. "i already fight for justice for other people who aren't kind to me at all bc i tell them not to support sexual harassers", i said right beforehand. afterwards i said that after i started attempting suicide, and THEN an "anti-racist abolitionist" man/father of 2 young kids raped me when i was homeless, nonverbal, suicidal & told me he would murder me & refused to take me to the hospital when i told him that i thought i was dying & also told me that he would help me kill myself, & i attempted suicide many times more oftentimes once a day for a little less than a year, i went from for months praying 21 hours a day to turn back time bc i thought i must have fucked up bad somewhere in my life to feel this bad, to learning more & pummelling my brain with thoughts about feminism & capitalism & communism & racism & anti-Blackness & anti-Indigenousness & anti-Asian racism & gender & trans love / rage / justice & queer love / rage / justice & anti-queerness & anti-transness & violence & intersectional critical socio-political analysis on twitter for 21 hours a day, every day. for months.
/
i have been sitting on the following draft for months. in the end, it actually feels kinda anti-climactic to finally publish it.
START WRITING: FEBRUARY 9th, 2023 @ 7:35pm
"i should have seen the signs."
sometimes, i read youtube comments. it's a questionable pass-time, i know, but i secretly watch {what i would like to think as} wholesome enough yew chew burrs that their comments sections are pretty tame, funny/clever, sometimes even hopeful and encouraging.
for some reason, i sometimes find/read ones written by someone whose friend killed themself. "i always thought they were just a really good friend, always reaching out. i didn't realize that they just needed somebody to talk to. i should have seen the signs."
"I SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE SIGNS."
I CARRY MY SIGN WITH ME. IT DOESN'T MAKE ANYBODY ANY KINDER TOWARDS ME.
— "WE SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE SIGNS." I CARRY MY SIGN WITH ME EVERYWHERE. IT DOESN'T MAKE ANYBODY TREAT ME ANY BETTER. ,
2023 february 14
i carry my sign with me. it doesn't make almost anybody act any kinder towards me. in my head, i was so naïve, so innocent, so trusting. i naïvely believed that showing people my sign would mean that they would know how to act more caring towards me. if somebody else tells me that they're suicidal, i usually know what they need {OTHER than just, you know, the complete & utter destruction of capitalism} —
they usually just need:
a real friend.
somebody to talk to, who is safe, loving, kind, supportive, validating, nonjudgmental, & generous.
{more money, more food, & safe(r) housing, if they're poor.}
Our capitalist system, AND our capitalist interpersonal social culture, rewards individualism in hefty doses.
Capitalism deeply rewards the disposal of the human beings whom people with more systemic power find "inconvenient".
Nobody asked anybody to be a martyr.
I'd hope that most people just hope that people show any bit of care.
"we are relational creatures.
our lives & deaths impact one another."
her words keep ringing in my ears, ever since i read them at the end of july 2022.
do they?
does mine?
Does mine impact yours?
i would love a screaming stranger in a psych prison, because i choose to love. i choose to have that love.
i choose to love.
i choose to love.
plus, i don't even really have any "best friends" anymore, anyway.
but you wouldn't love somebody like that. especially, a stranger? of course not.
i know you wouldn't.
The kinds of people whom their "friends & family", if they ever had any to begin with, give up on, as a "lost cause", & shunt away into hiding, into psych prison?
Do you believe that they do?
Because I do.
Because my entire experience of my entire life is closer to that, than most of you out here, on the outside.
nobody tells me "don't kill yourself, you are so loved".
because they know i was not loved.
& in this society, we believe that we deserve what we have. even so-called "anti-capitalists" — well, the neoliberal usameriKKKan fake ones, anyway — are under this spell, even though if that were truly true, we would all equally have food & shelter & healthcare already. but we do not.
& in this society, people {are led to} believe that other people have what they deserve. so if nobody loves you, there must be something wrong with you, right?
who loves the screaming human being in psych prison? the mentally Disabled human beings whom their "families" have given up on, & whom they throw into an institution to forget about, a shameful whisper nobody ever likes to bring up at holidays' dinnertime?"
— " Untitled.txt ", 2023 march 26
"i didn't know.
i should have seen the signs."
I carry my sign with me.
It makes people run away.
Sometimes, I feel like I'm alive only as a favour to everybody who’s abandoned me.
So they won't feel guilty.
Just kidding. Apparently people excuse themselves with a hefty dose of cognitive dissonance, anyway.
As I move through so-called "healing" towards seeing the world from a supposedly more "normal", "neuro-typical", "indoctrinated reality" {*my coining} perspective, I am starting to understand why.
Cognitive dissonance has a hefty psychological benefit.
You'd probably go insane knowing how much you, as an average human being, harm other human beings, just by living under white supremacist capitalism.
You'd be just as insane as me, if you really stopped to think about it.
"Our lives & deaths impact one another."
Do they?
It doesn't seem like mine sure matters very much to most people.
I have to deliberately stop myself from constantly checking in on other human beings I know who are suicidal, when I myself feel so awful, but I only ever choose to stop after I know for certain that they have other people to talk to — usually, people I've introduced them to.
"we are relational creatures.
our lives & deaths impact one another."
DO THEY?
i never "ghost" human beings whom i'm close to, or who are in need, or whom i've promised to help.
Other people "ghost" me.
And then they always try to come running back to me & apologize, years later.
As if they didn't make a deliberate choice not to save my life in the moment.
Or, you know.
At least, the choice to be a halfway-decent human being, & at least communicate something, instead of just ignoring me.
am i so selfish to want my life to be saved?
why do these housed "homelessness activists" acknowledge the pain of somebody else, but not mine?
i can't survive without support, either.
none of us can survive without support from others.
i can't survive without support from strangers, either.
i LOVE { tone: sarcasm } seeing the same people who abandoned,
or WOULD abandon, ME
for becoming/being Disabled,
fundraise & donate & "do mutual aid" for
OTHER Disabled poor people
because it gives them a nice feeling that
they did something CHARITABLE that day,
for the MORE PALATABLE "victim" of
white supremacist capitalism that they can imagine,
not making THE SIMPLE FUCKING CONNECTION that THE VERY SAME
saneism <=> ableism <=> abandonment
that THEY put ME through
is ALSO what forces the people
whom they're doing CHARITY work for
TO BECOME DISABLED & HOMELESS & POOR.
because i literally became MORE
Disabled & homeless & poor
BECAUSE OF THE EXACT SAME {KINDS OF} PEOPLE WHO ABANDONED ME
who are "donating" & "fundraising"
& "doing mutual aid" today.
you only care once it makes
YOU
LOOK.
GOOD.
it's SOCIALLY VALIDATING
to think of yourself
as "one of the good [housed? privileged? comfortable?] ones"
just like whites do, with regards to racism.
i've mutually supported a lot of fellow suicidal human beings. & in my observations — & i think about pain, & who suffers the brunt of systemic oppression the most, a LOT — it seems that chronically suicidal survivors of prolonged child sexual abuse { especially racialized survivors, especially trans / queer / marginalized gender survivors } are probably some of the people in the most utter bodymindheart pain & hopelessness that is possible for human beings to experience.
not only are we in pain, but everybody is scared of us, & nobody wants to help us, or even talk to us.
You get pushed out for speaking up.
"Popular" people maintain their power for a reason.
the people with the least power
hurt other people the least
because they have the least power to.
Nobody cares if anybody hurts you, if nobody cares about you.
I thought "homelessness activists" would know this more than anybody?
Nah. I guess you don't really know it until you live it.
Nobody cares if the state hurts you, if every "ordinary citizen" around you already abandoned you for being poor & homeless & crazy & disabled & neuro-different. Undesireable.
Until a random charity worker stranger {aka "grassroots mutual aid volunteer"} cares, anyway.
Unless you don't look like their ideal imagination of a victim of white supremacy & capitalism.
Nobody cares if anybody hurts you, if nobody cares about you.
"it's the truth. nobody cares if anybody hurts you, if nobody cares about you." i said to somebody recently.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE SANEISM EXISTS.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE PEOPLE KNOWINGLY ABANDON SUICIDAL HUMAN BEINGS, & THEN CONVENIENTLY TELL THEMSELVES THAT THEY DIDN'T CONTRIBUTE TO THE SUICIDAL HUMAN BEING'S DEATH.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE RAPISTS EXIST.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE SANEISM & RAPISTS EXIST.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE SANEISM & RAPISTS EXIST.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE SANEISM & RAPISTS EXIST.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE SANEISM & RAPISTS EXIST.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE SANEISTS & RAPISTS EXIST.
The systemic oppression of Suicidal People goes like this:
The systemic response to Suicidal People is basically usually involuntary "treatment" — forced drugging & incarceration.
Since most Suicidal people are already aware of these consequences, silently threatened their entire lives by an anti-Suicidal-people society, aware of the fact that the non-Suicidal/anti-Suicidal individuals that they tell will probably force them into violently abusive treatment that they don't want, they never tell anybody.
Since most Suicidal people are aware that most non-Suicidal people have bad responses to somebody saying that they're Suicidal, that non-Suicidal people will try to call 911 on them, involuntarily commit them — they never tell anybody.
because you knew.
yet this is how you treated me anyway.
& once again.
this applies to many, many, many people in my {past} life.
unfortunately.
i want you to look me in the eyes & tell me that you really thought that this world would be better off without me in it.
because you knew, yet you didn't do anything.
because you know, yet you don't do anything.
Lately we talk about how fake "leftists" 's betrayal hurts more than betrayal from somebody who doesn't call themself a "leftist". People who are open about their lack of genuine solidarity, you just don't expect much out of, to begin with.
i think the 2014 man who raped me (who, ironically, was also an "anti-racist abolitionist") telling me that he wanted to help me kill myself, is easier for me to accept than the actions of some of my "friends" who used to worship me until i got just a little bit "too" anxious for them.
Blame me for believing that "mutual" "aid" "activists" would care about other human beings without other human beings having to tell you their entire trauma history first.
Blame me for knowing that they wouldn't have treated me this way if I looked & acted differently (fucking classist, ableist, racist, anti-Asian racist [+ model minority myth, which pits Asian people against Black people anyway], & pointless, but okay).
Blame me for expecting "anti-capitalist abolitionists" to care about a Mad & Disabled human being, when most people who have gone through the trauma of poverty & incarceration end up Mad & Disabled.
I don't feel like I'm allowed to be myself in this world. I wanted to live in a world where people actively question their friends, when somebody tells them that their friends harmed them. I wanted to live in a world where the people who claim to care about certain issues, cared about the people who are affected and traumatized the most by those issues.
I don't feel like I'm allowed to be myself in this world. I want to live in a world where people actively question their friends, when somebody tells them that their friends harmed them. I want to live in a world where the people who claim to care about certain issues, care about the people who are affected and traumatized the most by those issues.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE SANEISM EXISTS.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE PEOPLE KNOWINGLY ABANDON SUICIDAL HUMAN BEINGS, & THEN CONVENIENTLY TELL THEMSELVES THAT THEY DIDN'T CONTRIBUTE TO THE SUICIDAL HUMAN BEING'S DEATH.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE RAPISTS EXIST.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD
[unfinished]
/
2023 june 27
mercy. my staying alive is mercy to everybody who has ever hurt me. i am saving you from the crushing shame & guilt that would destroy you, if you had to look in the mirror.
mercy, mercy, mercy.
one day, you will have to look into the mirror of your moral wounding of me.
when you hurt others, you are hurting yourself. i know this, which is why i try my best not to hurt others in the first place.
i am saving you from the crushing shame & guilt that would very likely destroy you. i don't trust that you are as strong as me. i'm worried about you, i am worried for you. i kinda don't think you could survive that pain, the way i've been forced to survive my pain, alone, by myself, every single day of my life.
/
2023 may 24
for a long time, i told myself the only reason to live was really to help others. dismantle ableism-white supremacy-cisheteropatriarchy-capitalism. it seems like a good reason, right?
it seems kind of unbelieveable, even to me, to be trapped in an endless constant severe pain for your entire life. a pain that nobody else even understands. a pain that you can't talk about, even to other people who think that they're going through the same thing. a pain that scares people so much that they will leave you outside on the side of the road & then ignore you for the rest of your life.
no matter how many people i help, it can never change the past.
i'm fine with being almost murdered as an adult. that wasn't actually that bad. okay, it was bad. but in the grand scheme of things, it really isn't the worst thing that's happened to me.
my childhood, stolen from me. a lack of socialization & any positive interactions for years is what made me hate white supremacy & capitalism & cisheteropatriarchy & all the interlocked systems of oppression so easily, from such a young age.
in january 2016, i screamed & cried in the basement flat in the middle of the night, in an obscure town in deutschland. then i went walking, took off my shirt, into an unknown grassy field alone, in the middle of the dark night.
i used to do that kind of dangerous shit, bc i didn't really understand life to be real or whatever it's seen as by most people.
in january 2016, i wrote a poem:
i can't find the poem right now.
but i was talking about generational trauma.
since 2015, a lot of people have watched from afar me suffer over the years. mainly, people who once called themselves my friends distanced themselves more & more from me. some of them, i didn't even talk to, before they either exiled me, or simply "gave up" on me. cruel. it's funny, because really, all i wanted was a friend. or, communication instead of a suddenly disappear.
i genuinely believe that every one of you has blood on your hands.
and i want you to live with the guilt forever.
but you won't. you'll reassure yourself that you're "a good person", because you're more invested in the same abuse culture that runs this entire society that none of you want to admit that you live in. the cognitive dissonance is so that you don't have to think one single thought about it at all.
after all, the capitalist workflow must go on after your optional one day off for "grieving" something.
{ and you could relate this to covid-19, as well. but i'm not going to, right now. because i already do so much for covid-19 is not over! activism. }
i grew up in deep isolation. i don't understand the world like you do. i don't see myself as different or "crazy" at all. everything that makes my bodymindheartsoulspiritself different, everything that saneist hegemonic society tells me i am supposed to hate & supposed to want to change & supposed to change about myself, is exactly what makes me me. it's what makes me such a fierce lover, a fierce fighter, a fierce existence. a fierce heart on fire. it's also what has kept me alive until now.
yet saneism, carceral compulsory neuro-conformity* tells me that what keeps me alive & makes me me, is everything that i should hate, everything that i should hate about myself, everything that i should go visit doctors & privileged non-insane non-disabled people who spent a lot of time & money at violently ableist institutionalized schools, to twist my mind back & forth & take pills & find ways to "get rid of" it.
* carceral compulsory neuro-conformity => also a phrase i coined
lately, i see the beauty in giving space for different experiences of the world. i don't presently have the energy
[unfinished]
/
i know that in this world, people don't fight for people like me. they think that if people like me kill themselves, that it was inevitable, we were sick, insane, inherently diseased. it's a way to deflect from how much responsibility they really had. i don't mean to guilt survivors of a loved one's suicide where the loved one didn't actually tell anybody or ask for help. i'm talking about me. you knew, yet you didn't do anything.
you know, yet you don't do anything.
/
because you knew, yet you didn't do anything.
because you know, yet you don't do anything.
cognitive dissonance has a hefty psychological benefit.
you'd probably go insane knowing how much you, as an average human being, harm other human beings, just by living under white supremacist capitalism.
you'd be just as insane as me, if you really stopped to think about it.
you'll reassure yourself that you're "a good person", because you're more invested in the same abuse culture that runs this entire society that none of you want to admit that you live in. the cognitive dissonance is so that you don't have to think one single thought about it at all.
nobody cares if anybody hurts you, if nobody cares about you.
i don't want to live in a world where saneism & rape exists
/
this is a free public post. i am a formerly homeless physically & mentally Disabled survivor of extreme violence. please consider supporting me, to help en-able me to continue to fight for justice. it means a lot to me, thank you so much💙 [blue heart]
* bro, relax. i'm publishing this bc i'm trying NOT to kill myself. stop reporting me on social media** , it is literally making it worse & is a smaller version of calling the cops (especially since Big Social Media Platforms** [not this site, though] will call the cops on people). i (& others i know) know WAY more about preventing suicide than those articles & "'mental "health"'"care"" professionals do, anyway.
** Comradery won't report me or do anything, i literally co-own it 😍 [heart eyes face emoji]
content warning — mentions of s*xual v**lence
/
i had a dream about you last week. in the dream, you were one of the main ring-leaders of a huge sex trafficking ring in the music industry. i think it was maybe a mixture of the knowledge of the fact that one of my favourite k-pop stars from when i was 17 years old in autumn 2007, somebody even younger than me at the time — 16 years old — was outed in 2019 as being involved in a huge "sex crimes scandal" (strange phrase, to me. rape is violence, not sex, & i'm definitely not the only one who says this) in south korea. & of the fact that i recently found out that one of my favourite singers is quite clearly [with years of evidence] sexually & emotionally manipulative & abusive towards his fans who are girls & women, especially his younger fans. in my dream, i also dreamt that i spoke to him directly in my head, & convinced him to stop abusing women. i dreamed that i was psychically saving korean girls in 서울 from being raped by pop stars, by speaking my shitty korean to make them laugh, & playing the rapists' own pop music to distract the rapists.
in my dream, i spoke to you in my head about your biggest fear. i asked you if your childhood dream was to become a rich sex trafficker. i dreamed that you developed a heart disease after the last time i texted you. because *i* did. i developed a heart condition after you said what you said back then, a single whole chinese zodiac cycle ago.
no, i am not over you. & i feel a lot of shame about still being in love with somebody i haven't talked to in years. so much shame that it makes me want to kill myself.
it occurs to me that despite all i can do to try to fight my internalized capitalism, i still feel like a failure & worth less than other people, because i spent over a decade housing-unstable / homeless, not doing much but feeling frozen & unable to get out of love. lol that was a brain typo
& unable to get out of bed.
{ and it wasn't "just mental". at *all*. }
i feel worth{ }less than other people, because i've been too disabled to work for a long time.
the beautiful{/sarcasm} thing is that other people also treat me like i am worth{ }less, because/when i'm too disabled to work.
i've been crying to strangers lately, & it occurs to me that i need to write about everything that happened up until now, otherwise it will always be trapped in my heart. otherwise, i will still want to die.
the years of my life fold onto themselves — i don't remember much.
i don't want to be here.
when i started learning more about rape culture when i was 21, it saved my life. it also made me even more deeply depressed for 12 years. learning about rape culture did not stop men from raping & assaulting & abusing & harassing me, because other people choosing to harm me is not my fault.
what i eventually learned about ableism {is} capitalism over the years, from connecting my own horrific experiences of disability & a violently ableist society which completely included the people i loved and trusted most in my life, with what i was constantly teaching myself about social-political-cultural injustices, saved my life. the way i've viewed myself has changed over the years. i have always struggled with feeling like a failure, especially a failure of "an asian", especially a failure of "an asian immigrant", especially a failure of "a good chinese immigrant". because no matter how determined i was, no matter how much i knew i *could* be good at what i was trying to do, i just couldn't do it because my brain + body wouldn't work properly, no matter how hard i tried.
so i don't go outside. & i don't talk to anybody in person, because i don't know how to "act normal".
i write on the internet, & people think i'm cooler than they would if they first met me in person.
i had a dream about you. in the dream, you were corrupted by money, but you still loved me.
2023 june 21st, excerpt from a yet-to-be-published draft —
i am looking for a way out of my constant pain & panic. the world breaks my heart every day. it grates at my skin. violence.
one of my favourite songs last year was performed by an anti-autistic activist [don't take this out of context. i didn't say the song was anti-autistic, did i?]. (but most people don't even care about that, when they consume his media. which is exactly how he got onto this song that was seemingly not about ableism. the song was about harming others, & being anti-autistic & ableist is harmful.)
one of my favourite songs of all time to listen to to feel sad about sexual abuse trauma, i learned recently that the singer is emotionally abusive towards girls / women / his younger fans.
i stopped listening to a certain artist after a certain year once it came out that he DMed minors.
i need people to care more. so will you?
but i hate this narrative so much, it makes my soul boil: just call the suicide hotline, & a hotline worker you've never talked to before who may or may not actually have any shared/lived experiences of being suicidal and/or trauma and/or "mental illness" in the middle of the night will convince you to live.
"you have so much to live for."
do i?
/
"exit music"
november 23rd, 2009
in a dream some nights ago, she walks towards me slowly. both calm. she takes my hand,
soft skin {on her part}, sinks her canines into my fingers, digs deep, hits tiny vessels.
blood drains from entire corpus. as i die, i wake up into a soi-disant "real world". what's
real?
/
i think i was more honest, years ago. "growing up" is learning how to lie.
we tell ourselves we need to lie in order to survive. & in our right now world, that's the truth.
i think i was more honest, years ago. "growing up" is learning how to lie. to survive.
i think i was more honest, years ago. "growing up" is learning how to lie. we tell ourselves we need to learn how to lie in order to survive, & that's the truth.
i think i was more honest, years ago. growing up is learning how to lie. we tell ourselves we need to lie in order to survive.
i think i was more honest, years ago. "growing up" is learning how to lie.
i think i was more honest years ago. growing up is learning how to lie.
growing up is learning how to lie
growing up is learning how to lie
growing up is learning how to lie
growing up is learning how to lie
growing up is learning how to lie
which is why i never learned how to lie
first of all, read this to learn: what is saneism?
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...
note: saneism doesn't just affect "mentally ill" people. (which is the point of that article!)
saneism not only affects & demonizes neuro-atypical [e.g. autistic + adhd] people as well (newsflash: mentally ill people are a part of the neurodivergent + neurodiversity communities!),
but saneism actually affects / harms everyone / everybodymind, because there is never any such thing as a completely "normal" or "sane" mental state.
...
...
...
now, let's begin!
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...
ask yourself:
how do you personally contribute to a world where we demonize mentally ill people, or at best ignore them when they *seem* like they're not doing well, or when they're asking for help?
do you think of "mentally ill" people as bad? scary? inherently violent or abusive?
do you believe this consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously?
( fyi, please admit to yourself that the answer is almost definitely yes.
we are all deeply indoctrinated with saneist ways of thinking & feeling & harming others (as well as white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, + capitalist values, etc.), from basically birth. including me, always! )
do you have conscious, subconscious, or unconscious negative thoughts or feelings, or have you learned stereotypes, about mentally ill people, or people who in general seem to "act differently" from what's considered "normal"?
( is "normal" defined by white supremacy & capitalism? yes, i think so. )
how do you inflict saneist violence onto others, on a day-to-day basis (including with *seemingly* innocent words or actions)? *violence includes seemingly "small" things like verbal or even silent microaggressions, unspoken hostility, & ignoring people in need. violence isn't necessarily physical.
even something like staring at a human being who "seems" to be "acting" mentally or behaviourally "different", can be very hurtful/harmful to that human being.
these questions also apply to neuro-atypical + mentally ill people themselves.
we all have been indoctrinated with saneism & ableism.
also, none of us can actually label somebody else's mental state or diagnose other people with something that they did not directly communicate to us. the people who try to do this are usually the most uneducated about mental disorders, and they are usually the most saneist of all.
the point of saneism is that it actually harms all of us.
one thing that i also wanted to say is that i don't expect anybody to be "perfectly" not-harmful, or not-saneist, especially if you're only just now starting to learn about it. reminder that perfectionism is literally capitalist white supremacy culture.
try your best, but the point is that we have all been deeply indoctrinated into our prevailing culture of constantly harming each other, and we have all been indoctrinated to act in patterns of harm / treat others with a culture of harming those with different experiences from us/those who are more marginalized than us.
unlearning these things take time, & this journey never ends, & this journey will likely involve many mistakes along the way, especially if we're actually trying to change.
apologize & try to take accountability whenever you can, whenever you feel like you've hurt somebody, or whenever they've told you directly that you have (definitely *especially* if they do that, because that can be really difficult & scary to speak up about!).
try your best to be kind to each other. you don't have to over-stretch yourself. just try to learn to be generally kinder to other people, including strangers! — even if you don't, or can't, help or befriend or support everybody.
i know that some of us tend towards a social justice martyr/guilt complex more than others. for those of us who do, let's try to be gentle & kind with yourself!
but also, some of us (and oftentimes, those of us who are more privileged, of course) need to care & act more. & those of us who are like this, are sadly usually more oblivious, & less self-aware about how much we harm others.
i hope life is gentle to you this week! ☀️ [sun emoji]
content — mentions of s**cide
/
when i was 22, my ex hurt me on purpose. when i was 21, too, though. i was deeply angry, & there was a way for me to get revenge that i knew would absolutely crush him. he had already gotten his revenge on me for my traumatized behaviour that i couldn't control {that does not mean that the fact that i hurt him, doesn't matter. but for lower-level hurt, i believe that context & intention *does* matter}, several times by then.
but i chose not to, despite my history of being an extremely impulsive, at-the-time very reactive & not reflective, human being.
bc i knew how much it would hurt him.
it's these choices that may seem insignificant & fleeting to the average capitalist's mind.
{ and when i say capitalists, i mean literally *anybody* who is still loyal to capitalism, divide & conquer, including most members of the working class in usameriKKKa, & including most people in usameriKKKa who believe sincerely that they're "leftist". }
or maybe not, bc maybe most exes would have just taken the chance.
& oh, how i wanted to. i was severely suicidal depressed & constantly panicked, in large part triggered by him, i was too severely depressed constantly panicked & suicidal to work anymore since we broke up so i was impoverished & housing-unstable, i had basically no friends anymore, i had nobody i trusted in the universe anymore {he had been the only one i ever allowed that close to me} — i had all the reason{? did i, though? "objectively"?} to take that chance to hurt him on purpose, like how he hurt *me* on purpose.
reflecting today, well, i still can't let go. {if you're reading this, don't worry. i'm still working on it.}
i still can't let go bc i believe what i said, even though i felt a bit unsure about it after i said it. abuse is never okay {this is not related to my relationship with my ex, it's just a fact that i wanted to state, that is related to the next thought}, but i meant it when i said that love lasts forever.
in the belief that anything that has already happened, cannot be changed. it's history, & i don't mean that in a way where i believe that that means that we should forget about it.
so i was hesitant, asking myself if i really believed what i said
"love never really goes away, once it exists.
for anything, for anyone."
— https://comradery.co/shuixian/posts/650
bc most people who have been kind to me, have also been cruel to me, & caused me an immense amount of pain. i also don't trust the intentions of everybody — especially people who have been abusive to me.
but i thought about how insignificant a memory for you may be. the smallest gesture for you to do that you may forget in the next second, could mean an entire universe to somebody else.
either cruelty, *or* kindness.
{ you get that choice. }
so yes. many people have been cruel to me. many, many, *many* people have caused me unbearable & honestly unsurviveable depths of pain. but i still remember all of the acts of kindness that they gave to me, too, no matter how seemingly small. & even if i can claim to not love them anymore, what i know is that you can't change the past. the previous love / care / kindness held there, even if it was only for a mere millisecond, is now a fact. it is now an immutable fact of history.
it is now a part of the unending history of the universe.
"king saul fell on his sword when it all went wrong
& joseph's brothers sold him down the river for a song
& sonny liston rubbed some tiger balm into his glove
some things you do for money
& some you do for love, love, love
raskolnikov felt sick, but he couldn't say why
when he saw his face reflected in his victim's twinkling eye
some things you'll do for money & some you'll do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna to come back to you one by one
love, love is going to lead you by the hand
into a white and soundless place
now we see things as in a mirror dimly
then we shall see each other face to face
and way out in seattle, young kurt cobain
snuck out to the greenhouse, put a bullet in his brain
snakes in the grass beneath our feet, rain in the clouds above
some moments last forever
but some flare out with love, love, love"
— "love, love, love", by the mountain goats
i don't think i'm morally superior to anybody for not seeking revenge. i am supportive of intentionally thoughtful, politically grounded revenge that does not punch down [on those suffering/more marginalized than you].
for a systemic oppression context, i believe that oppressors need to know how it feels.
but to me, there are many different ways to take revenge.
and there's a difference between pressuring somebody to be accountable to you, & taking revenge on them.
and i like being strategic about what i want from people.
i have acted with deep mercy to a lot of people, especially people who have physically hurt me, even repeatedly. i'm not even sure any of them know or understand just how much grace i've given them.
the dictionary says that the definition of Grace is "Good Will".
my entire life, i have helped other people & directly benefitted other people's lives, while i myself have wanted to die. for just one example, i've helped jumpstart, or at the very least support, the eventually-very-financially-lucrative careers of *several* people while i was housing-unstable / homeless myself, who all then mistreated me to the point where i almost killed myself. it's a strange thing.
my existence is a strange thing.
but would i be less suicidal, if i were more supposedly [capitalistly, individualist-"self-care"-y] "selfish"?
i don't think so.
somebody asked me recently if i really am that good at getting what i want, since i constantly "express being in so much pain around my relationships with other people".
i answered that what i truly want, are things that i truly can't control.
what i truly want, are *truly* all things that i cannot have.
{ btw, fuck the "desire is suffering, & suffering is inevitable" bullshit, tbh }
things that i *need*, not just "want".
i *need* a perfect world where nobody is saneist to me, where *nobody* is racist or oppressive or abusive or capital/profit-driven to anybody else. { — & i already do, a lot, myself, to try to make this thing happen. but i know that the work is not going to be finished in my lifetime. is it too idealistic to say that i believe that there's a possibility that it *can* ever be "finished"? yet, we are always, always *growing*— }
i needed love from people who did not give me love.
{ and that isn't a fault of mine. contemporary narratives tell you that it is — "go to therapy", *fix* something about yourself that makes you want/need love from others...? }
i needed a better childhood that i did not have, & can never have — & so, this ties to my need of "a better world".
you could give me one million dollars tonight, & i'd most likely still want to kill myself. one billion, for sure as well.
sure, it would obviously be great to be able to pay my rent, & help other people as well pay their rent. not trying to flex, but i would definitely give most of that money away.
but it doesn't change a universe where i have disabilities that make society want to kill me. ableist society is trying harder to kill me than my disabilities are. ableist society wants to kill me more than my disabilities do.
it doesn't change a universe where non-Crazy people don't love the outlier experiencers of insanity. { i said experience-Rs, *not* experiencEs. }
& i mean it: *love*.
so i reflected today that the biggest reason i know it wouldn't work out with my ex ever again, is bc he now has exactly what he wanted back then: a lot of money & capitalist success.
i don't want money { but i need it, to pay my rent & help others }. i don't want power { but i need it, to get more human beings to listen to me, so that i can help myself & others }.
i need love.
i *need* love.
you know, sometimes what your enemy sees as your revenge, is actually redemption
yours & theirs, together
sometimes what your enemy sees as revenge is just you standing up for yourself.
sometimes what your enemy sees as revenge is just...
is just
justice
was it worth it?
was it worth it for me that i didn't take revenge on someone, when i could have?
i don't know yet.
was it worth it for me that i didn't hurt someone, when hurting them could have been seen as a form of "standing up for myself"?
i don't know yet.
was it worth it for me that i didn't take revenge on someone, even though i really, really, *really* felt a rage-driven, absolutely demanding urge within myself demanding myself to?
i don't know yet.
it is incredibly difficult, & it takes a lot of *intentional* effort, energy, & *pain* — to treat other human beings as what they truly are: human beings, who are just as real and being and human as you are.
i knew that already.
nobody wants to be nice { which is not *kind* } to a truly severely suicidal-every-second, severely literally-"psychotic", severely "mentally ill", severely disabled, & severely constantly angry against oppression human being, unless they're famous.
i knew that already.
i want you to love me, even when i'm absolutely useless.
to you, *&* everyone else.
i want you to love me when i'm useless to you.
i want you to love me, even when i'm "useless".
i want you to love me, even when i'm useless
i want you to love me even when i'm useless
i want you to love me
even when i'm useless
i want you to love me
GRIEF IS UNENDING.
Just a Joke:
"chronically suicidal influenza" sounds like a virus, lol
always re-inventing itself
"what doesn't kill you, mutates + tries again"
remember to wear a good face mask
i don't want you to get sick 😷💙
[masked face emoji, blue heart emoji]
this is a free public post. i am a formerly homeless physically & mentally Disabled survivor of extreme violence. please consider supporting me, to help en-able me to continue to fight for justice. it means a lot to me, thank you so much! 💙 [blue heart]
/
the title of this post is a joke
part of this post is a vaguepost/critique of real human beings, not sorry
/
CONTENT — thoughts on ADHD, autism, ableism, saneism, Madness / neuro-difference. mentions of trauma (please just get used to it).
*** these are my thoughts & ideas. i might not be "right" about them. i don't even think that being "right" is the point, anyway. ***
edited to add — i forgot to specify this originally, but i both have adhd [ idk, i personally don't use "adhd" as an adjective for myself ] + i'm autistic [ & i'm also clinically insane ]. 🤷♂️ [short-haired human shrugging emoji]
/
CORRECTION on previous posts:
People with ADHD are at high risk for catching & getting complications from COVID-19, but they are not immunocompromised.
@littlepileofteeth , one of my followers on social media, graciously educated me & others about my statement that "people with adhd are immunocompromised". this was based on my misunderstanding of this page, by The usameriKKKan CDC, "People with Certain Medical Conditions | CDC" —
"A person with any of the medical conditions listed below is more likely to get very sick with COVID-19. If you have one of these conditions, talk with your healthcare provider about how best to protect yourself from severe illness from COVID-19."
@littlepileofteeth said:
"I want to say very respectfully that there’s a difference between being immunecompromised and being high-risk for covid-19.
You do wonderful work that I am very much appreciative and as an ADHDer I think this thread is great, but I do feel that this is an important distinction.
Being immune-compromised indicates that you either have a condition or are taking medication that significantly effects your immune system in a manner that weakens your ability to fight infection— the key point here is that the immune system is directly causative.
Studies have shown that there are other health conditions that can increase an individual’s risk when it comes to covid— such as many other medical conditions including various mental health experiences.
The difference is that those conditions do not cause a discernible fluctuation in the immune system in a way that causes immunodeficiency.
Why do I think this is a necessary language distinction?
I think these classifications/conditions exist at a different places on an un-hierarchal axis and it’s just important to acknowledge that.
I think it’s helpful that we have language for this so that we can platform or focus on certain experiences when we want to do so.
I also believe that “speaking from the experience of ____” is a meaningful phrase and we should be as accurate as possible.
Similarly I think it’s good to be as clinically precise as possible just bc being told you’re immunecompromised can be a bit worrying/disorienting for some.
Being immunecompromised also impacts many areas of life beyond covid-risk w/ other viral/infectious/+ avoidance protocols and lived experiences so I think that word is also important for community.
Similar to how my form of immunodeficiency causes me to get reoccurring pneumonia as well as sepsis, but I don’t have risks/experiences of people with other syndromes so I won’t speak on that even though we have many of the same difficulties.
I just wanted to say something as this language specification has come up as feeling important to many folks in my immunodeficiency support groups.
I definitely welcome any other perspectives/thoughts/opinions/knowledge from anyone!
Thank you for reading— I know this is quite long, but I wanted to be precise with my words."
thank you so much for the free education, @littlepileofteeth !!
/
START POST:
i've been holding onto all of these notes/thoughts for a while:
/
2023 april 6
"ADHD is my superpower" ; "autism is my superpower" ; desireability in disorders
— i am not 100% for the social model of disability
would people look kindly upon an openly "suicidal founder", "depressed founder", "anxious founder"?
"narcissistic founder"? "sociopathic founder"? "attention-seeking/histrionic founder"?
no?
why not?
ADHD as marketable → more palatable for capitalism now, co-opted — a "better" worker, where "better" always means "more exploitable"
— this is a white woman, obviously
/
2023 may 17
ADHD is a disability in an ableist capitalist system.
Capitalism, + capitalist companies / corporations have conned you into believing that it's a superpower.
/
2023 april 16, unfinished draft [circling back...]
*note: terms like "histrionic", "narcissist", + "sociopath" are all saneist. i'll explain later, if you don't understand now. what saneists call "narcissistic abuse" is actually just emotional abuse. we don't say "adhd abuse" when somebody with adhd abuses someone, for instance.
i saw this instagram "influencer" the other day, + it made me angry.
my white gen z Mad / Neuro-Atypical / Disabled comrade, "A", is the one who made me realize, months ago when we first met, that ADHD was quickly co-opted by capitalism as a "good" thing. autism, as well.
never mind that it's a disability {they both are!}, + capitalism can't let you realize that it's a disability {where here*, "disability" means not able to function to [ ableist <=> ]capitalistic standards}, bc otherwise, capitalism can't exploit you. otherwise, you would become radicalized/politicized, + fight back against your own oppression.
realizing that you are Disabled can radicalize + politicize you, which can inspire you to fight back against your own oppression. this is why capitalism co-opts disabilities as superpowers, & currently, ADHD is very popular for capitalist co-optation, bc a lot of "smart" & successful people have it / are now diagnosed with it. late-diagnosed autism & lower support needs autism is experiencing similar capitalist co-optation right now.
[ "smart" is in quotes bc "smartness" is measured by white supremacist ableist capitalist standards in usameriKKKa ]
[ both "functioning" & "support needs" labels are controversial within the autistic community, but part of their controversy is usually caused by lower support needs and/or late-diagnosed autistic people, i.e. people with more privilege! ]
*another thing i've wanted to talk about is the social model of disability. i haven't read any papers on it bc i can't read books or longform right now, + i haven't been able to since early 2012.
the social model of disability does apply to a lot of things, but controversial take, it's kind of toxic positivity in disability justice, after a certain point. it doesn't accommodate Madness { i.e. "mental illness" }. [ THIS IS NOT A FULLY FLESHED OUT THOUGHT YET OKAY? don't come for me! (yet, lol) ]
even in a perfectly "accessible" world, i would still be traumatized. i would still be in pain every day, even if i'd *had* the "right" care — even if the "right" care existed [which, in this present world? it just fucking doesn't. not from the government, not from nonprofits, & not even from "grassroots" orgs, or individual caring human beings.]
perhaps we can say that in a "perfect" world, nobody would have abused me in the first place. yes, well. that is the world that i'm trying to build.
but in a "perfect" world, trauma would still exist. death, natural disasters [which would happen even in a world that's not burning bc of capitalism], miscarriages, sickness, heartbreak.
unfinished...
/
2023 may 16, DMs to fellow psycho friends. spitballing. THEY'RE JUST THOUGHTS OK like the entire point is we are all growing & these are ideas & thoughts & opinions that are changing & can always change. !!!
adhd just sounds like it's only seen as a "disorder" under capitalism
it's just... different... variations of humanity...
what is considered "age-appropriate" behaviour?
why is impulsivity not "age-appropriate"?
only bc it makes you a "worse" [& less naturally obedient] worker to a capitalist boss?????
bc i may be insane, but at least i don't abuse anyone?
and here are so-called non-insane people who abuse people so who cares how much money they make or how non-insane they are? lol
they aren't better than me, in ANY way, just bc they're more abled or more non-insane or have more money. (!!!)
/
eternal thought —
a lot of people with adhd, newly diagnosed autistic people, etc. don't want to admit that they're disabled bc of internalized ableism. hence the "it's a superpower" thing.
saying it's a superpower is ableist + capitalist
AND it can make people who have more severe "symptoms" feel bad about themselves.
a lot of people with adhd, autistic people, etc. don't like being told that what is seen as "mental illness" is also part of neurodivergence & neurodiversity
"mental illness" is so stigmatized even though it's clear... adhd, autism affects people MENTALLY
nobody wants to be lumped in with "mentally ill people"
people who are considered diagnosed [so-called] "narcissists" & "sociopaths" are under the neurodivergence + neurodiversity umbrellas bc so-called "personality disorders" => neurologically different brains
btw i'm of the "New" School of Thought that "Cluster B personality disorders" [borderline, narcissistic, anti-social ["sociopathic"], histrionic] are all just complex trauma / childhood trauma. and they are
(DID I SAY IT'S EVER OKAY TO MISTREAT OTHER PEOPLE? no? yes, exactly. sit back down, having intense emotions or being suicidal doesn't make anybody abusive)
[and tbh, ALL "mental diagnoses" / DSM "mental disorders" are just... trauma, imo]
what is considered "properly" socialized? and how is somebody who is neglected, berated, etc. abused every day supposed to learn how to act "pro-socially"?
what is socialization?
what is considered "pro-social" & "anti-social" behaviour, in a cruel society? what is considered "acceptable" & "unacceptable"?
palatable? desireable? undesireable?
what is "normal"?
who gets to decide?
/
this is a free public post. i am a formerly homeless physically & mentally Disabled survivor of extreme violence. please consider supporting me, to help en-able me to continue to fight for justice. it means a lot to me, thank you so much! 💙 [blue heart]
idk, i've been holding onto these draft notes for a while:
- "recovering people-pleaser" to "everybody's toxic + my peace is most important" pipeline, lol
- "recovering people-pleaser" to "boundaries i don't owe anybody anything" pipeline
Those are just some of my thoughts on it. I will expand more later. Take care!
What do you feel <=> think is the psychic damage that *you* suffer when you hurt another human being?
You can only ever completely trust what you yourself experience directly.
Not what other people TELL you to believe.
in the light of love, everything looks more beautiful.
or, maybe it just looks brighter.
clearer.
lighter.
you get to choose what you see.
you get to choose to see things with love.
you get to choose to see things in the light of love.
you get to choose to see things with the light of love.
or not.
you get to choose differently.
/
"THE WORLD IS A DIRTY PLACE
TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES
BEFORE YOU COME IN"
— 2018 february 5th
/
"WHAT IS TO GIVE LIGHT
MUST ENDURE BURNING."
— Viktor Frankl, Jewish-Austrian Holocaust survivor { & ironically, a psychiatrist — & i'm on Team #AbolishPsychiatry. }
i found this quote when i was in late high school, maybe in 2007. i think i've owned at least 2 paper copies of his book "Man's Search for Meaning", at one point. & i still haven't read it. i have 3 separate copies of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, the 2 paper book copies of which i think i got both for free in the past few years. i have not read it. i couldn't get past the 1st few pages. i bought e-books of both The Wretched of the Earth & Black Skin, White Masks, when i was living in england for 2 months at the end of 2015, crying & having flashbacks & panic attacks while sleeping on a different couch or bed almost every night.
i didn't live my life linearly as a "wannabe model minority" asian-usameriKKKan immigrant. & i still don't. i can't. i am not able to.
i lack the ability to function in a capitalist system.
/
i believe that people can be better. it's one of the only reasons i know how to live for. i was punished for not being "better" in a capitalist perfectionist way. so i forged my own fire. i taught myself how to want better from people, but in love, with love, instead.
/
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/
image description for the above image:
screencap of a documentary about an island of stray cats in japan (if i recall correctly). a stray orange tabby cat is sitting, eyes closed, in front of what appears to be a white metal garage door. the left half of their body is in a shadow. the right half of their body is in bright light, which comprises the right two thirds of the screencap.
the subtitle for the screencap says: "Everything is beautiful when you look at it with love."
you tried to burn me alive
but instead
you taught me
how to invent
a new kind of fire
Power
— by Adrienne Rich
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.
What you choose to do & say will always impact other human beings. Your choices even impact human beings you don't know.
It's also your choice what to do with your awareness of this fact.
content — child ab*se, g*nerational tr**ma
/
in early 2016, i suddenly started crying & screaming in the middle of the night in the basement flat of a house in the middle of nowhere, germany, where i lived for a few weeks.
i wrote a poem that i can't find right now.
is the only line i remember right now.
the most kindness i experienced as a child was through a handful of years of the company of my paternal grandmother, with whom i did not even share a single 1 of my 3 spoken languages. that's just one of the many, many, many reasons i talk weird{positive}, & my best friend is somebody who can't speak english { my cat }.
but i always knew that my grandmother, at one point, abused my abusive father herself, too. so that made things a bit complicated.
the 3 humans i spent the most time with as a young child were:
my sexually, physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually abusive father,
my emotionally abusive mother whom my abusive father also abused who then abused me,
& my paternal grandmother, who {at least} once, also abused my abusive father.
life is fucked up that way.
/
/
/
/
/
this wasn't the poem, bc i lost the poem. i hope i find it again one day.
/
generational trauma is a dark thing. & if i can break the cycle with no money & no friends in a fucked up country like this, so can you.
this is a free public post. i am a formerly homeless physically & mentally Disabled survivor of extreme violence. please consider supporting me, to help en-able me to continue to fight for justice. it means a lot to me, thank you so much!
/
content note — it's a heavy one!
/
people talk a lot about "self-love".
"you have to love yourself first, before anybody else can love you."
can a newborn baby love + take care of themself "first"?
should they, before they are "allowed" to receive love?
must they be able to "love themself", before their caretakers "can" love them?
"we are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, + we heal in relationship."
so which one is it?
"re-parent yourself."
how can you re-parent yourself, when you have no models for parenting except for maybe some {usually written by whites} self-help books?
what if you can't read { or hear / listen to / process / pay attention to / stand audio-books }?
not even most actual parents of children today have a model for first-parenting their own children.
"we are wounded in relationship, + we heal in relationship."
what if you can't afford a therapist?
what if all the therapists you find, or the therapists your insurance will cover, would call the cops on you { which can lead to the cops either brutalizing you, murdering you, or psych-incarcerating you at best } ?
what if the vast majority of therapists in usameriKKKa are loyal to white supremacist capitalist neoliberal individualism, just like most everybody else? { hint hint, they are }
what if nobody wants to be "in relationship" with you, because you're disabled + living on the streets?
what if nobody wants to be "in relationship" with you, because you're trans + "mentally ill"?
what if nobody wants to be "in relationship" with you, because you're impoverished by a system you can't control, a system that quite literally does not care if you die?
what if nobody wants to be "in relationship" with you, because you talk to yourself out loud?
what if nobody wants to be "in relationship" with you, because you hear voices in your head, completely outside of your own desire or control or choice?
what if nobody wants to be "in relationship" with you, because nobody ever taught you how to put on make-up?
what if nobody wants to be "in relationship" with you, because you're sleeping in your car?
what if nobody wants to be "in relationship" with you, because you're fat?
what if nobody wants to be "in relationship" with you, because you can't speak english?
* my definition of relationships *always* includes friendship/s, btw.
what about all of you who cannot heal?
what about all of you who cannot heal, through no fault of your own?
what about all of you who cannot heal, because this society is saneist, + both society + individual human beings abandon you?
the way i observe how most human beings treat each other in this world... it seems like it requires a loathsome amount of dehumanization.
i've never abandoned a human being who’s struggling. i've never left a human being who’s struggling, without at least trying to give them resources first.
one focus of my life is to cause as little unnecessary trauma to other human beings as i can. because i hurt other human beings. we all do. and it is actually so, so, so hard not to traumatize other human beings unnecessarily. the way we take shit out on each other. lash out at each other. abandon each other. emotionally unavailable. avoid conflict.
trigger each other with all of our childhood shit.
bubbling up.
i trained myself to stop lashing out at other human beings in 2016, after a number of awful things happened to me, including "good" people i trusted de-humanizing me + seeing my life as so value-less, that they were completely ready + willing to treat me in a way that ended up with me almost losing my life.
i trained myself to stop lashing out at other human beings in 2016. this meant that i mainly just isolated myself + tried not to get close to anybody else for many years. i went to a lot of therapists, half of whom helped, + half of whom didn't. not just because i wanted to stop hurting other human beings. i also wanted to find a way to not want to kill myself anymore. { btw, 7 years later, + i now know it's not about "finding a way to not want to kill myself", it's "it's not my fault i'm suicidal + very truthfully it should NOT be MY responsibility to change the fact that i'm suicidal, but in this present society, i'm forced to fill that role for myself, because nobody else will" }
it was very hard. but i never wanted to traumatize somebody else unnecessarily again, like i did in 2015.
ironically, when i stopped being so messy in relationships, almost everybody i met treated me with more callousness than i'd experienced since i was bullied by other kids i didn't even know for "looking like a lesbian" in middle school. + [treated me with (more)] saneism.
in our society, most human beings see "anxious" as weak. and they see weak as bad.
{ is that not the foundation of ableism? "weak is bad"? but i don't actually want to talk about ableism *in specific* for once — *all* of this is about ableism. }
in our society, most human beings see kind, thoughtful, generous, anxious, depressed as weak. easy to take advantage of. easy targets.
vulnerable means "able to be wounded". i've been thinking about that definition since i was 22 or younger, + i'm over 32 now.
wearing something that also protects you { read: a high-quality face mask } is now a bold, polarizing political statement.
you might even get attacked for it. physically or verbally or even by your own loved ones or whatever.
some human beings try to wound you for caring.
how did we get here?
why are we here?
{ i'm not asking for the obvious answers. i know that you know that most human beings are here because our society is about protecting the money, not protecting the people. }
many human beings are totally okay with wounding the most easy-to-wound { read: vulnerable { this includes children, elderly, impoverished, undocumented... } } human beings.
some human beings want to wound you for caring about easy-to-wound human beings { including yourself }.
it requires a disgusting amount of de-humanization to not care about other human beings.
other human beings became a lot meaner to me after i was no longer semi-successful, well-known, famous { disclaimer: i wasn't "that" famous back then }. they were all "anti-racist" "anti-capitalist" "activists", "abolitionists", "organizers", "communists", "socialists", "leftists". other human beings treated me with much more cruelty, after i became a kinder human being. other human beings treated me with much more contempt, after i came out as trans, + i stopped caring about appearing or acting cis.
you would have to force yourself to ignore reality, to continue to believe that oppression, systemic AND interpersonal, doesn't exist, + that you don't suffer its traumas — either from others oppressing you, or you benefiting from others being oppressed even when you don't do the oppressing others directly yourself { which is, i believe, just a different kind of wound — trauma — }.
most supposedly "neuro-typical" human beings i know are firmly attached to their denial of reality.
but i'm a psycho. or something. hehehe
this is a pretty imperfect piece. i started it out feeling more confident than i feel now. + then it just became a bunch of thoughts. which was already my intention. but now i feel even more insecure.
i really want to dissociate from the reality of the SARS-CoV-2 / covid-19 pandemic. + i do. dissociate, i mean. but i won't endanger others with my dissociation. { read: i would never, + i will never, not-wear a face mask. } the part of reality i want to dissociate from is the pain. the pain of the fact that now, even previously not-disabled human beings { who have now seen others suffer or die from covid, or who now have long covid } get to see just how little most human beings care about each other in usameriKKKa.
+ that that fact is stark + unavoidable, now, at least to me.
what is clear to me, is the truth:
to know the reality:
to be able to see* just how little most human beings care about each other.
{ should i use sight as a metaphor? it's ableist. is it possible for me to ever write "perfectly", ableism-free? should you punish me with a public shaming for not being able to think up a better metaphor? are words more important than actions? i'm never going to perfect in actions, either. but i'll admit, i try really hard to be lol }
{ i think i could have used the word "know". but it wouldn't have landed the same, i know }
/
i'm thinking about two words:
caretaker + caregiver.
they mean the same thing.
english is weird.
care-giver + care-taker.
give + take.
i don't really like the word "take".
but then there's "take care of each other".
+ "take care of each other" means the same thing as "give care to{/wards} each other".
i don't think i'm a good writer.
can you blame yourself for not being able to love yourself?
shouldn't you blame the human beings who didn't know how to love you first?
/
this is a free public post. i am a formerly homeless physically & mentally Disabled survivor of extreme violence. please consider supporting me, to help en-able me to continue to fight for justice. it means a lot to me, thank you so much! 💙 [blue heart]
salutations, comrade! if you're presently subscribed at only a donation tier, think about subscribing at $5+. your support goes directly to sustaining my livelihood, & i'm also on strike from working on more ANTIHEROINE. posts, until i get more paying subscribers in general.
thank you so much 💓 [pink heartbeat]
i will be publishing fewer public posts, & publishing more private posts to $5+ subscribers, in the meantime. 💙 [blue heart]
i know that many of us {but let's be honest: not all of us!} are suffering harshly under white supremacy+capitalism. my intent is not to paywall important work, but to first be able to live a joyful life where i have love*, joy, rest, relaxation, leisure, healthcare, food, & housing. i am a formerly homeless human being experiencing constant severe bodymind pain, & i can't even pay my own rent right now. once i have more resources, i will of course be able to do more.
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* fyi, when i say love / relationships, i ALWAYS mean ALL/ANY "kinds" of love / relationships. including friendships. non-romantic. familial {whatever that means to you}. butterflies. birds. cats. etc.
/
my apologies for not writing a content note for last week's Monday Motivation. i wasn't thinking. i know that body image can be a sensitive subject for many.
today's post is also about body image, & it might feel heavy to engage with. i encourage you to take care of yourself, i encourage you to not read it at all if you don't feel like it, & i encourage you to take breaks if you feel like you need to.
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content —
heavy questioning against body image negativity.
pushing back against fatmisia [anti-fatness / hatred of fat people].
mentions of wh*te s*pr*macy, no details.
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which one do you hate more: your body, or white supremacy?
do you hate fatmisia / anti-fat culture / diet culture?
do you hate it more than you hate your body?
* fatmisia = anti-fatness / hatred of fat people. cf.[compare] fat"phobia".
which one do you hate more: yourself, or anti-fat culture?
which one do you hate more: yourself, or white supremacy?
why?
where does negative body image come from?
bc it's not your fault. and it's not your bodymind's fault.
what are your feelings, thoughts, & beliefs about your body?
where did/do those feelings, thoughts, & beliefs come from?
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remember that you can rest as much as possible after today's post. & take your time. i know it's a hard one.
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have a beautiful week. 💙 [blue heart emoji]
more people are getting diagnosed with adhd these days. this should make you realize that you're disabled under an oppressive fascist-ableist/eugenicist-capitalist system that does not respect/accept/value natural, valid, often helpful differences in how your unique bodymind works,
and this should make you want to betray capitalism,
instead of trying to conform to capitalism in a different way.
[ correction:
this post used to end with, "*p.s. people with adhd are immunocompromised btw". this is not true.
people with adhd are at high risk for COVID-19, but this is not the same thing as being immunocompromised. read more, here.
thank you for the correction, @littlepileofteeth! ]
content — nightmares, "unreality" / "psychosis" / a different reality {a bad one!}, famous g*n*cidal white males
JUNE 2021
in the ER a week ago in a voluntary psychiatric hold for less than 24 hours, i dreamt living nightmares. they folded onto each other, like the layers of an onion. i rewatched shrek yesterday, with [SH]. i hadn't seen it in probably 20 years. not since it came out.
the worst nightmare, even worse than the nightmare where i was completely alone in the universe and had simply created and imagined all my friends and everybody else in the universe. time was frozen, and gOD said, there is no point to life. every night, they will smother you, euthanize you, and you will die. and there is no point to it.
the worst nightmare, even worse than that, was when time started again, and Time told me that i had ruined the world. that i was worse than h*tl*r. that i had destroyed most of the world's population.
i haven't awake-dreamed like that since tr*** was inaugurated, except this was actually way worse. these were the worst nightmares i've ever had.
i fought Time in my head, and they said, you can't stop this power, this power of destroying the world. no matter how hard you fight it, the worse you fight it, the more you will cause destruction.
and i fought it, and i said no. please don't. i don't want to go down in history as worse than h*tl*r.
so i used my power to imagine planting sunflower seeds. to cover the world with sunflower seeds. so that they may bloom one day, and reverse my destruction of the world. and that oppressed peoples worldwide would one day be free, and white supremacy could be abolished.
i wanted to plant sunflowers, so that they may bloom for you.
[PY] said i planted a seed of true love and care in somebody. i'm not so sure about that. the whole point was that nothing i did mattered to them. no matter how kind or loving i was, they still never wanted to change or be better to me.
time froze for me once, in reality. but i was 21. it took me many years of hard work to become a better human being. to learn how to communicate clearly. to learn that i could be better, even to people who didn't deserve a single millimetre of it.
i raised my voice for literally a few seconds yesterday, and it scared me. it scared me that i could lose my patience like that.
i planted those sunflower seeds for you.
i'm not sure if they’ll bloom.
content —
body image
questioning against body image negativity
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which one do you hate more: your body, or capitalism?
which one do you hate more: yourself, or capitalism?
why?
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* there isn't a #004 bc of the chinese avoidance of the number 4. i don't think i would call it a "-phobia" { fuck white western hegemony, forever. sigh }, in the western sense, but here's an imperfectly written, white western gaze article about it on the english-language wikipedia.
content warning — s--cide
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2015 november 19, excerpt
the night i drove back to that house crying and screaming about capitalism what i was actually screaming about was how hard i fucked up and how fucked up this existence is that all we do is hurt each other
so, you know,
capitalism
/
2023 may 12, unfinished
i think we all live our lives trying to avoid pain. i think the way this often manifests is that we end up causing pain to other people.
i've been writing about capitalism since 2015. that's the year i slept in my car & on a lot of random people i met online's couches after attempting suicide a bunch of different methods a bunch of different times.
i never tried hard enough to actually die bc i didn't want to hurt myself.
i never picked a more effective method bc i didn't want to hurt myself.
i didn't want to hurt myself.
i just didn't want to be here anymore.
i don't want to be here anymore bc "here" fucking sucks.
i've spent my entire life trying to escape pain. i won't universalize my experience + say "we" right now.
i have a very low tolerance for pain. you could word something slightly the wrong way, + i'll feel hurt + think that you hate me + want me to die.
i have a very high tolerance for pain. i survived extra-ordinary violence every day for decades.
/
in 2022 april, i said:
being alive is more painful than being dead
— for some people, anyway. i added as a disclaimer.
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* disclaimer that i'm not encouraging suicide. i'm not responsible for anybody's choices.
i wish i didn't have to include this disclaimer.
if you're white or financially comfortable {you can pay your rent without fear of becoming homeless}, stop reading now!
exit out of this email/post!
now!
i'm psychic, & i'll know if you cheat! 👁️ [single eye emoji]
today's Monday Motivation! is for Struggling People of Global Majority {"BIPOC"} only.
"Struggling"? you can define that for yourself.
i tend to think of: Unhoused, Impoverished, "Mentally Ill" / Mad / Disabled / chronically ill, trans, queer...
{ * i think a LOT of neuro-atypical people can be very privileged. "a lot" & "can be" does NOT mean "everybody"! }
If this feels hard for you, that's totally understandable — especially in our oppressive white supremacist capitalist system.
Maybe you can spend this time to contemplate what rest means to you.
— How do you define rest for yourself?
It could be anything!
It can even be something that takes a lot of energy, & exhausts you {for example, moving your body in a way that you enjoy, if you are enabled to}.
It could be laying down & doing nothing.
It could be doing something!
It's all up to you.
I recognize that not everybody has the privilege of having an entire free hour of free time, or even 10 minutes.
Can you take 5 minutes?
60 seconds?
To catch your breath?
Slow down for 10 seconds?
I hope you can take a rest soon.
Take care. ❣️ [red heart exclamation point emoji]
you would like to think you would like me if you knew me, but you would really not like me if you really knew me
you would like to think you would like me if you knew me, but i think you would really not like me if you really knew me
you would like to think you would like me if you knew me, but i know you would really not like me once you really know me
trigger warning — s**cide, m*rder, d*ath
i think this is one of the most important words i've ever written, & the thoughts have been swirling around my head ever since my loved ones started abandoning me for being disabled —
i know that in this world, people don't fight for people like me. they think that if people like me kill themselves, or get killed, or die, that it was inevitable, we were sick, insane, inherently diseased. it's a way to deflect from how much responsibility they really had.
i know that in this world, people don't fight for people like me. they think that if a cop kills us, we must have done something to deserve our murder.
i know that in this world, people don't fight for people like me. they think that if people like me die, that we deserved it. they think that if people like me die, that it doesn't even matter. we are absolutely useless to society, a burden, a disgrace. we were sick in the head, and it was all our fault. ours, alone. alone. alone. alone. alone. nobody else's.
2023 april 15
i know that in this world, people don't fight for people like me. they think that if people like me kill themselves, that it was inevitable, we were sick, insane, inherently diseased. it's a way to deflect from how much responsibility they really had. i don't mean to guilt survivors of a loved one's suicide where the loved one didn't actually tell anybody or ask for help. i'm talking about me. you knew, yet you didn't do anything.
you know, yet you don't do anything.
2021 june 15
— letter to my ex, excerpt
i was so depressed in los angeles & san diego that year. 2018. driving around downtown san diego, my white woman medicaid therapist at the time made an exception for me and gave me a phone session. i asked her, "do you think i'll ever get better?" and she said, "yes. yes. i do believe you'll get better." i had spent most of the days since january 2012 wanting to kill myself. 2018 was especially bad, for reasons i can get into some other time. i woke up every single day with every single moment wanting to kill myself.
2023 april 15
i was in a psych prison that played the news on the tv every day when i found out chester bennington killed himself in 2017. a month later, i laid down on the grass at a park in seattle, feeling numb. i cried listening to Heavy, even though i felt nothing. i tried to feel something, do you understand? i tried to feel something.
— excerpt from bullets + windchimes, 2021 june 11.
is this art?
there are absolutely zero real spaces in this world for our selves to be truly honest with each other. even somebody as honest as me is scared of saying certain things, because i know that nobody else is.
nobody loves me. i know this for a fact; you don't have to lie to me.
i'm scared. i missed my delusions.
who cares if i'm different? apparently, you do.
i don't even think that i'm that insane.
being carved up from the inside every day as a child will do that to you.
IF YOU ARE IN usameriKKKa, ASK YOURSELF: HOW AM I CONTRIBUTING TO THIS GENOCIDE TODAY? BECAUSE SO LONG AS CAPITALISM EXISTS, WE ARE ALL HARMING EACH OTHER IN SOME WAY. SOME OF US, MORE EXPLICITLY AND INTENTIONALLY THAN OTHERS, INCLUDING/ESPECIALLY IN OUR INTERPERSONAL INTERACTIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS, REGARDLESS OF HOW LITTLE OR HOW MUCH SYSTEMIC POWER WE HAVE OVER ANYBODY ELSE, REGARDLESS OF HOW MUCH POWER WE BELIEVE THAT WE DO NOT HAVE.
HOW ARE YOU PERSONALLY CONTRIBUTING TO SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION TODAY? WE ALL DO, ALWAYS ME INCLUDED.
I AM NOT PERFECT, AND I NEVER WILL BE.
PERFECTIONISM IS CRUCIAL TO WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE.
AND IT IS SO HARD FOR ME TO ACCEPT THAT I CANNOT SAVE EVERYBODY WHO IS SUFFERING IN OUR FUCKED UP WORLD, ESPECIALLY WITHOUT HURTING MYSELF DEEPLY / LETTING OTHERS HURT ME DEEPLY, IN THE PROCESS.
2008 / 2013 / 2015 / 2016~2022 / 2023
i'm going to die alone
image description: at the top, light black text says "Rest in Paradise, Jordan Neely." underneath the text is a photograph of a bunch of light blue flowers. the background is a plain pale white wall.
image description: a photograph of a bunch of light blue flowers. the background is a plain pale white wall.
AND THAT'S THE END OF TODAY'S MONDAY MOTIVATION!
* transparency / acknowledgment that today's Monday Motivation is literally the opposite of the purpose of a traditional "hustle culture" "Monday Motivation" post. i.e. today's Monday Motivation is: hustling more won't give you real love.
* eternal disclaimer that wikipedia . org is imperfect.
one of wikipedia . org's hugest flaws is that the type of human who has the time to volunteer to edit wikipedia is usually the type to have the privilege of having free time and energy to do unpaid labour.
having time to volunteer = having the free time and energy to do unpaid labour.
impoverished working-class and/or Disabled people rarely have this luxury, especially if they're multiply marginalized in other ways as well { race, gender, etc. } in western/white-majority countries. especially, oftentimes, women / MaGes {marginalized genders}, especially women/MaGe spouses / parents, have even less free time and energy.
doesn't that make sense?
as a result, the english-language version of wikipedia . org is usually biased towards a western / euro/usameriKKKa-centric / liberal{as a negative thing} / pro-capitalism / cis / het / white AND/OR male worldview, especially a white male worldview, and a white bias in general.
thanks for reading my endless additions and parentheticals, etc. my entire point is that i want to be thorough, and i want to teach people that everything is connected. every system of oppression is connected, and part of each other, and feeds into each other.
Cis-hetero-patriarchy harms cis / hetero / men, as well — especially men of color.
Patriarchy {i define this as an over-arching, intersectional term — "cis-hetero-patriarchy", transmisia {anti-transness}, white settler-colonialism, white supremacy, ableism, imperialism, capitalism, etc. are automatically included} harms men, too.
Patriarchy harms men too.
Cis-gender roles harm men, including cis / straight men, too. Especially men of color.
The ideal feminism benefits men, including cis / straight men, as well.
image description:
image 1:
meme created by 水仙 SHUIXIAN @ableism_is_capitalism, using a photo of a human hand touching a cat's paw as it stands on its hind legs.
the human hand is labeled "me" while the cat, wearing an N95 respirator with a pink heart drawn on it, is labeled "you, my loved one, wearing a mask to protect vulnerable people even if you don't know them".
image 2:
meme created by 水仙 SHUIXIAN @ableism_is_capitalism, using a photo of an orange tabby cat wearing an N95 respirator and holding a wooden spatula, appearing to stir a small black-and-white tabby kitten inside a standalone electric wok.
the orange tabby cooking is labeled "me, cooking covid minimizers & anti-maskers for supper", while the kitten being cooked is labeled "people who refuse to take covid precautions."
image 3:
meme created by 水仙 SHUIXIAN @ableism_is_capitalism, using a comparison meme format of two photos of Smudge the Cat, the meme-famous white cat with black spots on his nose.
the first photo, showing Smudge seated at a dinner table in front of a plate of green vegetables and looking very grumpy, is captioned: "when you continue to eat indoors at restaurants bc you don't care about covid + your cool [non-ableist] friends judge you for it"
the second photo, showing Smudge on top of a bed at home looking happy, is labeled "you at home, hanging out with your coolest friends online", with an added air purifier labeled "purificador de aire". it is captioned: "when everybody loves you bc you decided to stop doing that & decided to use your privilege to help fight eugenics instead, and you are now popular, loved, & cool again"
these memes are CC BY-NC 4.0 / licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
tl;dr: feel free to share, and/or remix. so long as it remains monetarily free, & so long as it remains anti-ableist/anti-fascist/anti-eugenics. also, please credit me 水仙 SHUIXIAN. , with a link to comradery.co/shuixian !
this license allows re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for non-commercial purposes only, so long as attribution is given to the creator.
"protecting your peace"
"set boundaries"
"self-care"
does not mean you get to be cruel to others.
honesty
kindness
compassion
understanding
thoughtfulness
intention.
other people have feelings + boundaries + needs + traumas + fragile human bodies, just like you do
western white settler-colonialism / white supremacist invasionism => individualism has disconnected you from this fact
we don't live in true capitalism anyway. in true capitalism, the government doesn't bail out failing businesses or let businesses lobby them to stay alive.
in true capitalism, the market would just let failing businesses die.
it's pretty bad if the auto-complete for your company name completes as "does turbotax lobby to keep taxes complicated"
& it's even worse if the answer is: yes.
* we = usameriKKKans
random note, but years ago, i used to say "USians", instead of usameriKans / usameriKKKans , i.e. USAmerikans. i pronounced USians "you ess ee ens".
why?
bc if we're going to call these Lands by coercively-called-by-settler-colonizer names anyway, we have to acknowledge that the USA(KKK) is not the only "amerika" there is, or the only country in "the amerikas", or the only country in "north amerika".
i now pronounce usameriKKKans "you ess amerikans". it's less awkward than "USians", also less awkward visually, & it's also easier to understand.
** "true" capitalism => "raw" capitalism, i.e. laissez-faire capitalism, free market capitalism. this is based on my own personal understanding.
*** the title of this post is a list of things that are inevitable 🙃 [upside down smiling face emoji]
I don't want you
or the people you love
to get sick/er, or die.
Why is this so controversial to you?
content — s--cide, ab-se
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i'm faltering over a precipice.
for 10, 12, 14 years, it was difficult for me to write. i dissociated & embarrassedly texted my uni ex whom i'm unfortunately still in-denially in love with {& still denially} on a spring day after i broke up with [redacted] & ended up homeless again. anyway, after that, it started to feel like i could write again.
{neuro-atypical masking} makes me suicidal.
i told somebody recently that every moment that i'm still alive, is a moment in which i am {neuro-atypical masking}. bc i am pretending to be somebody i'm not. somebody who wants to be alive.
it's not {even} that i don't want to be alive. *really*. it's that i do not want to live in this particular world, in my particular violated body, in my particular life. but, *especially*, not *this* particular world.
lately, i have been letting myself be a little fake sometimes. i am learning to be fake sometimes recently, bc i am too tired to constantly feel love for everybody, the way that i used to. so i do things sometimes, when i don't actually feel like i completely mean it. when i don't necessarily *feel* the love or kindness or friendliness that i'm expressing. {i am starting to think that this is how "normal" people live, huh?} & then sometimes, i ask myself. maybe i shouldn't fake it, bc it's kinda goes against my morals. but then i asked myself what the consequences of *not-faking-it* would be.
& the consequences would be me not doing *anything*. not trying to do *anything* good for myself. i would just completely give up on even *trying*.
by still being alive, i am faking it.
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do i love too much? i think i do. i love everybody more than they love me. it's not about a lack of boundaries. i value life, but nobody values mine in the same way. i care about every single death, including the deaths of strangers. i get my feelings hurt by strangers who are stranged{weirded} out by how much their loved ones' deaths affect me, how much a stranger's death means to me. me, the loveless. the unloved.
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there's this artist whom i follow. & they make comics about the people who love them. & i'm envious. envious, not jealous. somebody with a birthday i still remember, somebody i met in high school, once taught me the difference between "jealousy" & "envy". jealousy, he told me, is envy within relationships. of other people's, like, positions in relationships? of the love that somebody else is getting, from somebody that they love? i'm not sure. envy is coveting what somebody else has. i'm not jealous, i'm envious. they make countless comics about their family & friends, about how much their family & friends love them, about how much they love their family & friends. today i recalled that even when *other kids were violent to me*, when i was a child, my own parents would take the other kid's side. they hated me *that* much.
i know just as much as any other homeless human being that people hate & abandon homeless human beings. i know bc of how everybody i loved, treated *me*.
i am now the Weird Person from school {to those who knew me when i was younger — or, at least, i assume so. i speak to none of them, anymore}, who somehow ended up drowning in over a decade of deep tragedy. it's "Because I Am Mentally Ill".
isn't it?
no. it's Not.
it's bc usameriKKKa is disposability culture. & unless people think you're "cool", & unless you're lucky, *nobody* gives a shit about you.
especially if you get sick.
i accidentally wrote, two nights ago: the truth. the world wants me dead. the world wants trans people, queer people, impoverished people, Disabled people, crazy people, abuse victims/survivors, & anti-white-supremacy activists^, especially LOUD ones, *dead*.
^ { i hate that word— "activists" —, but i can't think of a better one right now, that's not *too* incomprehensible. labelling myself with that word lumps me in with a bunch of people i hate, tbh }
& i've been fighting death my *entire* life.
i've been fighting being murdered, my *entire* life.
several months ago, i wrote that i'd rather kill myself than die of covid-19. bc just one reason, out of myriad good reasons i have, i have for being suicidal, is so that i get to be in control of my death. kill myself before an abuser, an ableist, or covid-19 kills me *first*.
i feel heartbroken.
wait. what truth did i write?
oh, yes.
nobody is saving *my* life.
because it isn't me who needs to "keep myself" safe. it's the world. & the world doesn't want to keep me safe. the world never did.
the flip side of that is:
the world wants me dead.
& it *does*.
my non-traditional, anti-carceral supporter believes that i can be happy & without constant pain & panic one day. i would like to believe them, but i also think it's absurd. how can i be happy in a world where, even if *i* am not in excruciating pain, even if *i* am not being abused, i know that somebody else is? i feel like they perhaps do not understand me enough, or my intentions. i am not okay with this *world*.
i think i would have to shut most of my heart off, if i could achieve personal happiness for myself in this world.
i miss *my* world. yes, i am extreme. i never feel like i'm doing enough, & i swear this isn't a trauma response — jk it probably is. but i am not satisfied. i am not satisfied bc this world isn't what i need it to be. more caring. more loving. more supportive. i will never be able to save as many lives as i want to save. & i also know that not everybody will ever agree with what i'm trying to do. or understand it.
nobody tells me "don't kill yourself, you are so loved".
because they know i was not loved.
& in this society, we believe that we deserve what we have. even so-called "anti-capitalists" — well, the neoliberal usameriKKKan fake ones, anyway — are under this spell, even though if that were truly true, we would all equally have food & shelter & healthcare already. but we do not.
& in this society, people {are led to} believe that other people have what they deserve. so if nobody loves you, there must be something wrong with you, right?
who loves the screaming human being in psych prison? the mentally Disabled human beings whom their "families" have given up on, & whom they throw into an institution to forget about, a shameful whisper nobody ever likes to bring up at holidays' dinnertime?
i've been sitting on a draft since february. part of it is about that. nobody cares about the signs i give them. this world is fucked for people like me. & now that i have fought for what i have — a fight that i didn't deserve to have to do, for something i deserved in the first place: somewhat more stable housing — i want to give up. i do.
i am deluding myself because i haven't felt safe or loved in years. i am deluding myself within a single, fleeting moment. yet another wound. take me for granted, i will cut you in half.
what is inherently unloveable about screaming & crying?
absolutely nothing. throw away your baby, while you're at it.
i wrote, a few weeks ago:
if you think that crying is manipulative, it means that your parents didn't love you enough. sorry, i'm not the one who parented you badly lol
— or, you know. you live in a cold society. {both: they create each other.} the word "capitalism" is overused, at this point, as well. i shared covid-19 resources for almost 3 years, but i slapped a "capitalism" into my new username, & then i went small-time viral, for talking about a virus. go figure.
when i wrote about capitalism being disposability culture, i was thinking about on an individual level. fake "anti-capitalists" believe that as individuals, they're free from inflicting systemic violence onto other people as individuals, & that they're also free from benefiting from it. but they're not. when i wrote that, i wasn't even *thinking* about capitalism in terms of, you know, corporations or whatever. *{said, tongue in cheek.}*
but if you forced me to explain it to somebody in a way where it would obscure how much interpersonal capitalist violence they also participate in & benefit from, i would say: capitalism treats human beings as disposable. doesn't it?
the Black/Brown woman/MaGe pop star of the week, until we learn that we're supposed to hate her, for some reason {bc it's usually a Black/Brown woman/MaGe human being whom we're taught to hate}.
the workers, here & abroad.
Disabled human beings.
i fight my death every day. i fight my impending death every day. i don't know why i'm still here. i don't know why life matters anymore. the only times i deeply hurt somebody were bc my brain was basically splitting apart, & i was basically homeless. one of the times was after i hadn't seen anybody in person except for people who had literally severely physically abused me, in an entire year.
maybe my neurotransmitters simply only know how to misfire. yeah, i know they do. probably. i don't know. i don't feel things normally, that's just a reality of my bodymindheartspiritsoul.
but it feels like what i do doesn't matter. it may matter to many people. yeah. but i don't want anything fancy. i realize, & feel, that i am ordinary, more & more, every single day. i am just one human being. the way i think does *not* make me special.
*nothing* makes me special.
i don't know.
like i said.
i don't want anything but love.
& so here i am. exactly where i was when i quit when i was 21. with people who love my work, but not with anybody who loves *me*.
& all i want is to be understood. & loved.
i would give up everything for that.
or, at least. i used to.
but real love shouldn't require totality of sacrifice.
but real love, *does* require sacrifice. i will not erase sacrifice from the definition, or, at least, *my* definition of it.
here i am. exactly where i was when i quit when i was 21. i have no friends, no family, but i help human beings with my work. & yes, my life is & sounds strange & unconventional. i did not choose this. sometimes, i feel like the loneliest human in the world.
even chiron had found family as a child.
but love is complicated. but i refuse to love abusers. i refuse to love people who knowingly hurt other human beings. that minuses most of the human beings in this damn country.
it truly does.
i finally published march 8th, 2020, again, but completely publicly. a few months ago, i wrote:
"i don't even believe in love anymore," you say.
but love doesn't need you to believe in it
in order to be real.
in spring 2021, i wrote —
"i feel like believing in true love is like believing in god. no smart, rational thinker would do it."
^^ "smartness" is an ableist concept. "rationality" is also an ableist, specifically saneist, concept. the concept of perceived lack of "reason" is literally what gives oppressive power validation to imprison human beings under the guise of "they're too neuroatypical / 'mentally ill' for society." i'm struggling to find better words to describe this, but the point of the line is a touch of irony & self-awareness, anyway { *explaining the joke*: i am *not* rational. }. i will update this wording when i can think of better wording. in the meantime, i apologize for being ableist/using ableist concepts.
but anyway. apparently, i don't know if i simply thought up the lines again organically, but i first wrote —
"i used to wonder if i believed in love
romantic love
but romantic love doesn't need you to believe in it to exist."
— nowaday, it's not just romantic.
true love evades. —
anyway. i apparently first wrote those lines, those thoughts, that *idea* — on march 9th, 2020.
so i put off publishing march 8th, 2020.
& i've been putting off publishing march 9th, 2020.
&... now?
what i wrote on march 9th, 2020, was about how easy it is to become homeless, *really* homeless, & how society does not care about human beings like me/us.
i am oracular. i am closer to death, so, i see everybody *else's* futures.
i have always been very sybilline. all i knew back then was that covid-19 lockdown meant it would be impossible for me to get an in-person service job, which is the easiest job for me personally to get. which means i had no idea what i would soon do about rent; i was already comatosely depressed, but i knew i would have to "force" myself to make money, soon enough. the day of march 9th, 2020, i cried about how i ended up homeless, about how easy it is in this country to end up homeless. the night of march 8th, 2020, i cried about the thought of contracting a terminal illness. it's just a common thing i think about. sickness & death, even before i ever learned the sequence of the two words, *disability justice*, in its proper order. i never read any book on disability justice. my comrade would say that claiming that that is superior, is ableist {&, indeed, it is. it *is* ableist to claim that being self-taught is superior. & i'm *not* claiming that it's superior — i'm merely stating a fact.}. but i just say that to express to you that i have never read a single entire book about "social justice" or "feminism" or "leftism" except for a book by [a very famous feminist] when i was 22 that i didn't actually like & was very critical of at the time, before my brain kind of puttered out completely — but everything i learned about *all* of this, i learned from being fucking oppressed every single day of my life on these stolen Lands.
everything i learned, i learned from thinking a lot. everything i learned, i learned from my parents abusing me, random cis men abusing me, my parents / my parents' abuse & the state impoverishing me, the personal experiences & free-form thoughts of & my conversations with other oppressed human beings & not books, & everybody i loved abandoning me, the moment i got just a tiny bit too inconvenient for them to support. it didn't matter that i'd helped them apply for law school, or supported them in a career that now makes them literal millions. i was no longer useful; i ended up abandoned => abused => sleeping in my car, they ended up with six-, *seven*-figure careers that i supported them in starting.
& i also read some articles & zines. back when i still *had* the ability to read. /lh /sincere
usameriKKKa does not care how "smart"^^ i am, if i only use my "smartness" to defy usameriKKKa. capitalism does not care how "hard-working" i am, if i can't obey my oppressor's time schedule. & nobody in this cruel world cares about the contents of my heart & mind & soul, if to them i'm a fucking "nobody".
^^^ once again, "smartness" is an ableist, classist, cisheteropatriarchal, white supremacist, capitalist concept, anyway... — "hard-working", as well.
i am a foundling. a human {child} being deprived of human contact. i only happen to be one who's good with computers, & knows how to write.
i am a feral child. a feral feline. a feral cat.
i am a stray cat.
i am a feral child.
i forget this a lot.
because even i am in denial.
because this isn't the life *i*, *anybody*, wants for themselves.
i am not special. i am just sad. i am unloved. i am audrey hepburn holding an éclair outside of tiffany's. i am a stray with no name. i am not "normal".
/
2023.03.23.23:32{seriously}
usameriKKKan individualism.
all i wanted was for people to be baseline kind. to not lie, & to communicate.
other people haven't felt real to me in years.
all i wanted was for people to be baseline kind. to not lie, & to communicate.
but no. even when i was 21, & people told me my writing saved their lives. & i tried never to tell anybody my age, bc i knew they'd treat me differently. they’d treat my writing differently, if they knew how young i was.
i've been watching this silly internalized-ableist show. & i get so emotional over the characters, even though none of the characters seem to understand consent or boundaries. everybody is cheating on each other. it isn't meant to be a trashy drama. it's a family show.
today, the bitchy white mum character i hate said:
"they say the best care-takers are those who weren't cared for themselves."
& i thought about it. all the saneism. people always thinking i'm too emotional, too impulsive, i seem immature. uncommitted. i know how to save lives. it's bullshit to call me self-destructive. nobody is saving *my* life. nobody can even keep a single promise.
the people who always judged my actions are also the cruellest people i've ever known. the ones who come back, begging for forgiveness, later.
saneists.
but i had to pause the show. bc how could anybody think i'm irresponsible or self-destructive, when i've been able to save money in freakish ways, hallucinate in 5{?} different non-english speaking countries, & still manage to be in one piece?
bc it isn't me who needs to keep myself safe. it's the world. & the world doesn't want to keep me safe. the world never did.
i wish i could make people understand just how hard it has been to survive being me. the ways i've had to survive. the reason i remember dates & times so well, but i can't actually believe that most of my memories are real. but i'm scared. bc it seems like people lash out at me bc they're jealous of me. which is *so* fucking strange. *i* wouldn't be jealous of me.
{neuro-atypical masking} makes me suicidal.
i don't like existing around other people.
i know you don't care about me. it's fine.
months ago, i texted somebody, scared. i text somebody, scared, about this, every day. the somebody i texted that day didn't have a good answer. i asked how i could ever meet anybody as brave as me one day, to fall in love with. i text somebody, scared, about this, every day. all i want is to fall in love. & i know i can do anything. i can keep fighting. i can never-give-up. i can manage to succeed at trying not to kill myself every day. i can try try try & try & try & try again, to make new friends. i can accomplish my work dreams, by myself even; i mean, i've always launched while homeless & with no real social support, bc that's been the *majority* of my life. as the beautiful fog in my brain lifts sometimes, catastrophically, i realize how horrifically powerful it is that i've done all this work while barely surviving. &, most importantly, *without love*.
cops have always tried to get rid of whomever seems different. whomever challenges the social order just a bit {too much}. that is the role of cops. to maintain imperialistic conformity.
anyway. i cry about this, every day. i know i can do anything. i can create, i can make friends, i can continue with my very non-"traditional", non-hierarchical healing work. i can try to accomplish anything i work hard at. but i can't guarantee that you will love me.
i found some poems i wrote before my 2018 very-{mentally-}unconscious-ER visit. one was titled: "Nobody wants to love a schizophrenic"
then:
"Nobody wants to date a sad girl"
the first few lines of the 1st one:
"y’all wanna love the manic pdg when y’all don’t know what manic means
manic means psychosis
manic means wanting to kill yourself"
one of my biggest fears as a child is that i would find myself psychotic, or "mentally ill", one day. one of my biggest fears was that i would find myself "mentally ill" one day. i already was. i hate this world. the beautiful world inside my head is so much better. i want to show it to you. there, i dream of a world without abuse. & all systemic oppression is just systemized abuse.
one misdiagnosis by a middle-aged cishet chinese man who talked to me. while i was quiet & oppressed. for 5 minutes & told me to go back to my parents {chinese mental "health""care" professionals always seem to love telling me this, right after i tell them that my parents are abusive. the cognitive dissonance is astounding, it's like most people don't even know what the word "abuse" *means* [ *whispers: they don't. we're all speaking different languages out here, at this point. weaponizing words we don't understand, against other people, to make other people feel bad. /end whisper* ]} after one white boy broke his promise to me &, not exactly resultantly, called the cops. ruined my life for almost/over 7 years. one misdiagnosis around my birthday.
my 2017-2019 therapist told me she didn't think i was schizophrenic. she told me she didn't even think i had "bipolar "disorder"", which was that chinese man's misdiagnosis of me.
she said she thought i had trauma, that manifested in bipolar-like symptoms. & i agreed, but i didn't actually believe her, even though some selves in me knew she was right. i knew she was right. but it was easier to think of myself as fixable. that way, i could be safe. from random whites calling the cops on me, & my friends always abandoning me like the cowards they are instead of defending me against injustice. it was easier to think of myself as fixable, bc that way, you could stop breaking my heart.
i know you don't care about me.
it's fine.
every day, i feel scared that nobody will ever be able to love somebody like me. bc it's not just the ""neuro""atypicality"" or disabilities or whatever. it's not even just saneism.{.. i think?}
every day, i feel scared that nobody will ever love me.
in the darkness
i will meet
my creators
& they will all agree
i'm a
suffocator
i've cried unplannedly, unexpectedly, & uncontrollably, in the state of texas three times: 2012, 2014, & 2015. i haven't been back since. texas, tattoo, trans. in that order. but i blocked those memories out. & now i'm scared to make new memories, bc i am terrified of how fragile human bodies are.
"ableists (not [necessarily/just] people with capitalism-approved bodyminds) deny reality:
all of our {bodies & minds = bodyminds} are finite & fragile."
i said to somebody today.
get beat up enough as a kid, you’ll never forget that. i never take that for granted, or, at least, i will lie & claim that i do {i do never, i mean}.
usameriKKKan individualism.
all i wanted was for people to be baseline kind. to not lie, & to communicate.
i know you don't care about me.
& that's fine.
/
if you aren't already, subscribe. i know you want to live in a universe where i can pay my rent.
/
/
i just want to get this out before t1kt0k{sic} gets banned forever /half-joking —
march 13th, 2023 — message to my white Mad gen z comrade, "A"
"tiktok kinda scares me bc
all of these social media apps are actually controlled by algorithms & corporations
well, aren't all media -_- [annoyed closed eye face ascii emoticon]
but people think it's organic virality*
when we're all just being fed the same propaganda that we were fed in previous decades, before social media even existed"
*thinking that people deserve their virality, & the number of social media followers they have, is => meritocracy = ableism is capitalism & white supremacy
( think about it )
fuck the Sinomisia {i.e. the non-ableist word for "Sinophobia"}, though. amirite? read this: don't let western media make you Sinomisic
Amazing Justice System You Got There.
Would Be A Shame If Somebody Came And Fucked It Up. 👀 [eyes emoji]
it's a joke!
so if you haven't noticed, lately sometimes i just post shorter posts. so... yeah that's all i wanted to say
content: covid-19 pandemic theirstories — romantic break-up, covid-19 pandemic. pretty mild.
if you saw the email version — this post totally got nerfed by some wonky formatting, even on the web version. my apologies! read the version on ANTIHEROINE. instead. [ link also above ]
///
read the first version of this post, that was published on Comradery, here. — published on march 8th, 2022.
so i've written a lot over the years, that i don't remember.
& the other day, i was looking through my 2017 folder. bc almost everything in that folder, i don't remember writing.
& i found the text of my okc*pid profile from december 4th, 2017 apparently lmao.
& i was like, ha ha ha. this would be funny to publish.
& today, on the way home, i felt like publishing it.
so i just searched my files again, for "okc*pid".
& then i found this lmao.
& i don't remember writing this at all, but now i think i fuzzily remember who this was about.
he was pretty boring.
most more-privileged* people are, to me.
anyway, this poem i wrote in 2016, turned out to be about misogyny & saneism.
on accident. **
content below: misogyny, saneism, p*lice v**lence
hm. tbh, misogyny & saneism are deeply related. & you can experience misogyny, even if you're not a woman!
[ years ago, some trans/queer people pivoted to calling this oppression "femmephobia" [ terms that end with "-phobia" are ableist, btw, but i will explain some other time, sigh — maybe you can think about why it might be, yourself, first? ] — but there are some issues with that. first of all, misogyny & femmephobia basically mean the same thing: hatred of women / the feminine. ]
yeah, i need to write about that. about misogyny & saneism being deeply related.
western psychiatry/psychology is settler-colonial & white supremacist, & a lot of its function is to literally institutionally gaslight people who are oppressed. if you slap a "disorder" label on them, you can do basically anything you want with them: drug them, imprison them, strip away their rights.
and, you know, now you can also justify killing them — especially if you're a cop!
[ now do you see why saneism + western psychiatry / psychology is so harmful? ]
note: "gaslighting" is a term about actual abuse, that has been distorted, memeified, and made into a buzzword by current culture, especially internet/social media culture.
the term is often misused.
gaslighting is an action where somebody who has hurt/harmed you, or somebody with more power than you, attempts to make you question your reality, and thus discredit your narrative and credibility.
the term originates from the 1938 play, "Gas Light", written by a white male, Patrick Hamilton.
so, misogynistic men tend to use saneist tropes & language to put down women.
even if they're in a supposedly consensual, so-called "loving" relationship.
even if they purport to "like" them.
& they also tend to use saneism to gaslight women when women speak up about any mistreatment.
misogynistic men use saneism to gaslight the women they abuse.
& they also use saneism to destroy their victims' credibility, if the women speak up about it — "she's crazy."
the worst part is, being abused does often [usually? always?] make you "mentally ill" / Mad.
it does often [usually? always?] make you toe out of the social order: express more emotions, need more help & support [especially emotional] & love, etc. — which all makes you seen as "crazy", " "mentally ill" / neurodivergent / neuro-different ", etc. —
** okay, did you know that this shit literally just comes out of my brain on the fly? like, i didn't plan this post like this, & it actually makes me nervous bc it makes me worry that i'm leaving any potential angles of this analysis out. but like, hopefully, my work is building upon itself, you know? & then y'all can understand all the thoughts in my mind, about oppression & abuse & stuff.
it's an entire lifetime of me basically observing people oppressing each other.
&, you know, tbh — especially, oppressing me.
it's also stuff i have been wanting to write about for years, bc saneism is killing people.
okay, you know what? i made this post too political lmao.
i think i need to separate the poem into the next post lol
* privilege is becoming a super limited framework, especially as more people try to learn about white supremacy & racism / anti-racism, & a lot of people are now misusing these words, & diluting the meanings.
is it white privilege, or is it anti-Blackness, for instance? it's kind of complicated to unpack, but speaking of unpacking, i still think that White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack is a pretty useful introductory essay to understand how "privilege" works in general.
actually, please don't quote me on that right now, since i haven't read it since 2010. [ i'll update this post after i've re-read it, but that probably won't be that soon. ] but it was pretty helpful for me back then.
content — ab*se dynamics, p*lice v**lence
texts i send right after i wake up —
i think kind of the point of my thesis is that ALL abusive dynamics, no matter how "minor" or "subtle" they SEEM, directly contribute to a system that affirms that it's okay for cops to lie & kill people. {& for interpersonal abusers to abuse, as well.}
this kind of behaviour is the foundation of ALL oppression.
it's not even "just" micro-abusive at this point, it's literally just abusive. harming somebody & then lying about it & using those lies as an excuse to punish people {& especially, punish them for zero reason.}
that's exactly what i was getting at with "Revolutionaries need to be psychotic.", about Christian Hall. punishing a 10-year-old for innocently playing. for breaking a "rule" that nobody even told him.
& the fact that you are also punishing people, especially more marginalized people {PGM, impoverished people, neurodivergent, &/or Disabled people} for not knowing rules that you did not even communicate
{including so-called "social rules" that everybody of a certain SOCIAL CLASS takes for granted, & polices others to follow, even if nobody taught those others what they were. see: immigrant experience, language & cultural knowledge/competency/barriers, etc. all these rules are defined, dictated, & enforced by white supremacy, & its followers — whites, but also including PGM}
i talk about saneism a lot.
saneism is woefully under-theorized, bc the human beings whom saneism oppresses the most are too psycho{reclaimed} & Disabled {this is a factual statement! if you think that this is a negative thing, you're ableist & that's a fact} to go to school, let alone write books. { i've written about this before, & i will write about it again in the future. } i narrowly escaped the system myself, & i'm still struggling to even stay alive.
Nancy is an acadaemic{sic — i spell it that way on purpose, & not bc there is any precedent for it!!!}, & i try not to platform academics, but i really appreciated their personal definition of saneism. *
share this post on Evil social media™ — share this post on inst*gr*m!
that polices all mental, emotional, and spiritual states, so that anybody can claim and abuse power, so long as they are willing to participate in that policing...
* ironically, mariela, who wrote the summary of suicidism, is also an academic. & Alexandre Baril, who originally named (but did not invent! bc how can anybody, as an individual, invent an oppression ?!) suicidism, is also an academic.
see what i mean? the human beings whom saneism oppresses the most are too psycho{reclaimed} & Disabled to go to school, let alone write books.
capitulating to your donors even when it doesn't align with your purported values is exactly what the nonprofit-industrial complex also forces you to do 🤔 [thinking face emoji]
if your "revolutionary" project / org / whatever is starting to resemble the establishment / an industrial complex... fucking *sigh*
the point of being "grassroots" is the fact that you don't have to be beholden to your donors, & you can say no & also negotiate
you know how people say you should judge your date* / loved ones [including friends, etc.] by how well they treat service staff?
i think you should also judge people by how well they treat those whom society deems "mentally ill" or neuro-atypical or Disabled.
especially people such as homeless, unable to speak, or unconscious "mentally ill" / neuro-atypical / Disabled people.
you know, like, the most vulnerable people in the entire world.
i've been all of them [including what would be considered subminimum(in usameriKKKa) wage service staff (in china), lol] & god, some of the most horrifically horrible meanest saneist ableist elitist gatekeeping clout-chasing capitalist social-capitalist cruellest people i've met, call themselves "anti-capitalist abolitionists" lmao
*this word choice is only playing off of the meme.
i actively fight against the normalization of romantic relationships as default / "most important".
for one thing,
it directly serves (& is a cultural value propagated by)
white supremacist capitalism,
to elevate romantic relationships / marriage / nuclear and/or legal family,
over
everything else
/ all other kinds of relationships.
trigger warning: 1 (one) ab*se/CSA mention, no details.
MY AMATEUR UNDERSTANDING & ANALYSIS OF CAPITALISM & ABOLITION & ALL OPPRESSIONS COMES FROM BEING MENTALLY - EMOTIONALLY - PHYSICALLY - ABUSED EVERY DAY AS A KID, & ALSO FOR SEVERAL YEARS AS AN ADULT AS WELL. MY AMATEUR UNDERSTANDING & ANALYSIS OF ABLEISM IS CAPITALISM COMES FROM BEING TOO BEDBOUND / DISABLED BY HEART - SPIRIT - MIND - BODY - SOUL - TRAUMA-SICKNESS TO WORK FOR AN EMPLOYER FOR MOST OF MY ADULT LIFE.
AMATEUR. NOUN. "AN ATHLETE WHO DOES NOT PLAY FOR PAY." "DEVOTEE. ADMIRER."
AMATEUR: FROM FRENCH AMATEUR "ONE WHO LOVES, LOVER" [16TH CENTURY. RESTORED FROM OLD FRENCH AMEOUR.], FROM LATIN AMATOREM [NOMINATIVE AMATOR.] "LOVER, FRIEND", AGENT NOUN FROM AMATUS, PAST PARTICIPLE OF AMARE "TO LOVE".
AMATEUR.
AN UNPAID ONE WHO LOVES.
A DEVOTEE. AN ADMIRER.
ME: A STUDENT.
AMATEUR:
A LOVER & A FRIEND.
note: i am currently theorizing on "Careaboutability", a term/concept i created, & will share more about it eventually. Careaboutability is not the exact same thing as desireability, although there are some connections.
{ i am not an academic. fuck western acadaemia. not only is western acadaemia white supremacist, settler-colonizer, ableist, etc., it's also gatekeepy. because it is all of the above. }
i'm a little annoyed that i'ven't publishing on the day to the day
FEBRUARY 15, 2013
the week was {the last, or second-to-last— } march 2012, the weather was getting warm in new york city. i always walked around the new york public library {the jason schwartzman building, one of the white male roommates called it, but it was actually the schwarzman building} but never stepped inside. bryant park, instead. i would sit outside with my wireless keyboard, & write, & use my fingers to travel & type.
i would go to tea in soho. funny. my two roommates, my favorite ramen place, my favorite tea shop. all from a girl with whom a meek & meagre superficial friendship lasted about a month & a half. she spelled her name with a "y," as if to make herself different. my favorite bookstores, the day i saw one of my favourite authors in person, even my favorite coffeeshop. i still have a piece of her clothes.
-- & i would walk around brooklyn & we walked to the health clinic after getting coffee & bagels & the air was so bitingly cold, so warm on some days, so cold on others. the only times i've been to the doctor's in the past year has been because of my fears about -----. it's not fair, i think. it's not fair. the weight we women— survivors— carry—
devonshire cream only comes from a certain place in england. "i've had devonshire cream," i said with a surprise. it was the first week, months that i was no longer vegan. i allowed myself to have scones. i always drank french super blue lavender tea at that tea shop. i never drank caffeinated. i never drank "real" teas, only tisane. i would sit there & write & pretend i knew what i was doing with my life. february 29th i wrote a post about taking the leap. march 1st i didn't sleep much, i ate a whole bar of chocolate that the colorado white boy whose room i was subletting for march gave me, he worked at that one chocolate store in williamsburg, the name of which i can't remember, & that chocolate kept me up all night, & i wrote 7,000 words on werewolves, and, and— i met - the next day, his white-blonde hair, & we ate subpar all-vegan dim sum, & ------ that last weekend in california, & i was angry, & i missed her before she even left.
periphery, the periphery. peripheral friendships. i forget why i began.
i'm sitting on a draft. i'm sitting on a few drafts, actually. i'm sitting on eleven whole years of unpublished writing, & then years of writing i did publish, & then deleted.
i love odd numbers. but 11 just feels awkward. too skinny. 10 or 12 seems better, i think. 12 is the number of years in one chinese zodiac cycle. 11 feels... wrong.
if you saw my update about how i was going to publish CRYING ABOUT CAPITALISM [-1.0/2.0] on february 11th, 2023, exactly one year after i wrote it...
well, i haven't yet.
bc i don't feel ready.
& that's scary & sad for me to say out loud.
i already feel helpless, so helpless. it is helpless to be a disabled human being with no family or friends. it never occurred to me until recently — since i have been living in a different reality, in a dream of a better world inside my head, since 1993 — that capitalism-enabled people don't realize that poor disabled people are basically floundering by themselves.
i don't have a partner. that's sad. every other disabled human i know has a partner or family. no, that's not all of them.
there is basically nobody in person to help me.
the people in the worst situations are dying on the streets. i am not in the worst situation possible, but that doesn't make me feel better, bc it needn't.
capitalism-enabled "communists" thinking that ableism doesn't matter is them trusting in the very system that they purport to want to abolish. trusting that that system takes care of us disabled people.
it doesn't.
i feel helpless bc i still can't stick to a posting schedule. i'm sad. i feel broken inside. my life has never been stable, & the very people who claim to care about these issues, are mean to me for the results of poverty: me being traumatized.
i'm sitting on a draft. but the line i keep thinking about the most is this:
This isn't a suicide note. Although I deeply wish I could make art about suicide notes, and I probably will one day. I talked to C, who's in law school, about the legality of writing about suicide online. There's nothing illegal about it. I talked to [redacted], who works for a nonprofit, by & for Mad people.
There's nothing illegal about talking about suicide.
*unless you're a psychiatrist, in very specific circumstances
i reposted mariela's article summarizing suicidism on a cursèd social media thing [i.e. website] today. prettier slides.
{ there's also a little extra commentary in the web version, from me }
here's another start of a draft:
i feel like everything i've internalized on what it supposedly means to "heal" is about changing myself towards acting more neuro-normative/neuro-conformist.
forced sanity.
i think it's difficult bc [ unfinished ]
i find it funny when so-called "communists" don't care about somebody who's suffering. i guess that's the core of genuine, all-usameriKKKan white supremacist capitalist individualism, for ya.
the feeling of loss is there.
like something is missing.
something you didn't even miss
or really think about consciously
when you had it.
— 2021 february 9, 1:06am
trigger warning: s**cidality
note — idk about gender anymore
2013 february 6, on stolen Kizh Lands {coercively called by colonizers as "los angeles"}
... wrote about suicide one week ago. Nearly six months ago, someone killed me. My lungs are heavy; the burden of being a woman {because it is a weight I must bear} chokes my torso. I fear many things, and my own death — at my own hands — is one of them.
Once upon a time, I wrote things. I wrote words. I told stories to someone else other than myself and my imaginary friends. Once upon a time, I felt things in my chest, until they all, treasure and everything inside, were shattered one day and I didn't want to live anymore. There are things that are difficult; the things like your brain making you feel like you have given up; the times when you can no longer control what you think or feel or believe, or lack thereof —
Still I believe. Still I sit and stand and sleep, and some days are better than the others. My belly aches. My body is tired, and some days I end up sleeping twelve hours, and waking up still in the dark in this windowless, wall-less wonderland. Hummingbirds sing, into my ear.
I do not know where I am going, but I know that I will leave this place one day, someday soon. It is time for me, now, to be the one to leave, to leave somebody else — because I am not strong enough yet to stand on my own, I cannot be so selfish as to lean against another and crumble somebody else, too. It is hard. It is hard sometimes but I still have yet to feel... so I stay, drowning in my own selfishness.
The stories I have lived up until this point don't make much sense to me. It is truly as if I have died and have not so much been born again but given a big and hearty resetting. My bones, my bones — how I wait for them to settle back into the places where they're meant to sit. Am I meant to settle, anywhere, I wonder? A week and a half ago as I watched a lesser-known independent band open a show for someartist else I had meant to see, they and I talked about my moving. "Maybe you didn't stay long enough," in New York, they meant. Long enough to know if I liked it or not, they meant, but no — I did, I did. I did not like the lack of space, the lack of trees, the lack of clean air, the lack of the ability to see the sky past the manmade cement phalli that populated and polluted and pierced the clouds...
"I think that's true, plus I have wanderlust, but I think because I can decide to live anywhere and I'm not tied down and I don't have a family, I'm just looking for where I want to build my sense of home somewhere, a homebase, a true feeling of home. That's the real reason I want to wander. Not for the sake of traveling, necessarily."
How beautiful, they replied.
this post is a lot about suicide 🤷♂️ [shrugging short-haired person emoji]
"You say that love goes anywhere.
In your darkest time, it's just enough to know it's there.
when you go, i'll let you be
But you're killing everything in me."
— Jimmy Eat World
THE DAY YOU DIED BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO, BY ANDREA GIBSON
...
and love was the only thing assumed
and
and i can crush a can with the heel of my shoe
i can drive by your mother’s house if i want to
but i don't want to
she was there when you bought the ring
she knew how long you’d been saving
me, i didn’t save anything
but you don’t lose a person like a set of keys
'cause you don’t find them again
and you can still get to where you’re going.
...
So what I want most
is to live the rest of my life
desperately wanting to live it
THE PALATABILITY OF REGRET it is so much easier to say "it's okay to make mistakes" until you realize just how much those mistakes cost another human being. except most people, including most "social justice activists", don't actually give a shit about how much they hurt other people, especially other people with less privilege to protect them {sounds familiar, doesn't it?}.
today i communicated a boundary with somebody i barely know & told them they upset me, but i could tell they were sad & they didn't apologize bc they were more attracted to all of the pretty things i can say that validates to them that their negative feelings are valid & that their oppression is real & injust. you all think you love me bc i am good at my job; i am a poet about power, i am a poet filled with power. i know how to say beautiful words, but if you sit next to me in person, my brain will ramble & unravel, & i would probably cry & refuse to receive even a single word that you say.
& you will run away, just like everybody else does, bc Sick people are merely nothing but an annoying inconvenience to you.
THE PALATABILITY OF REGRET the words in that title have been ringing in my years i almost wrote ears for perhaps months now.
let me spell it out for you: Regret is much more palatable than actually making the effort to do the just thing in the first place in a world where injustice has no real negative external or systemic consequences to the harm-doer or their level of power. But we are creating a different, better, world, now, aren't we?
none of you could ever make it better for me so i will just sit alone at home & try to make art out of my unending grief that you all are such horrible suicidist saneist ableist western imperialist white supremacist capitalist eugenicist fascist creatures who would choose the easy thing over being respectful towards another human being's life, & you would do that & still in the end & go home & tell yourself you fought for "social justice" today.
& i'm not just talking about one of you or another, so if you feel guilty & ashamed, as you should.
that's what i've learned now, i should have learned that when i was born but i kept hoping for otherwise, bc i needed somebody to save me, fuck all this social media instagram therapy influencer bullshit, "we are relational creatures" she told me, & she told me she would genuinely miss me if i were gone, & we barely knew each other. & i knew she meant it more than any of you other fucking hypocrites who would teleport immediately away from somebody who was genuinely suffering in front of you in a way you refuse to understand. { unfinished }
i have talked to — probably way more, in number, than the average human being, especially since i mostly talked to non-Insane people — many, many, many people over the years about my suicidal feelings.
all of my close friends, &, crucially, people who told me they would support me,
abandoned me
without any communication, notice, or warning.
i tried to guilt myself to have a will to live last spring, when [] passed.
but i know now that it is not my fault, my guilt — but saneist individuals who spill the blood.
if you are more privileged, you need to challenge yourself to face reality.
okay, here are more specific trigger warnings:
food mention, eating mention,
ab*se mention, s**cide,
psych prison, psych ab*se,
mentions of ab*se/s*xual ab*se/r*pe,
mention of fetishization of asians
3 poems, and an accidental (because i didn't plan it, lol) sharing of my lived experiences in psych prison, and an accidental sharing of some of my self-formed indie analysis of saneism, and its function in society.
This is your life.
This is your reality.
This is not what you dreamed up when You were a kid,
when you were 20,
when you were 21 and 22 and 23.
this is not what you expected.
sitting on a couch in hong kong.
sending emails to yourself because you’re so desperate for love
you’re 26 but you tell everyone you’re 27.
sometimes you wonder if anyone would care if you lied and just said you were 28.
does it really matter?
but then you think well what if someone finds out you lied and then nobody trusts anything else you do for the rest of your life or that any of your work is good.
ALL///NOTHING
all or nothing.
[i think i was talking about the white male who called the cops on me in february 2016, here] ruined me and i hate it.
i hate admitting it.
i honestly don’t understand how people can go back to their exes.
They must not have the kinds of exes I have.
my ex-lovers are dead. i am 26. i want to write poetry. this is the only kind of poetry i know how to write.
i am rewiring my brain with love by force. and it sucks. and it hurts.
Love isn’t enough if I’m not number one.
not a belief. a choice i’ve made. a choice i want
i want to eat more dumplings.
mango chicken sandwich.
This is my life. This isn’t anyone else’s. sitting on a couch in the middle of the pacific ocean. eating box sandwiches and being reminded of the uk. wishing things were different. wishing i had a childhood that doesn’t exist. wishing i had things that don’t exist. wishing. wishing, hoping, dreaming.
living in the past because being pulled into the future by time is too frightening and out of my control.
I’m getting older.
the past is comforting in its pain and suffering and struggle.
i don’t know how to be with other people. a huge part of me resents it at this point.
thinking being in community means losing myself
thinking collaborating means giving myself away
means i have to give someone else my entire soul in order to love them.
moving on. losing control. i’m always
i’m
always
afraid
of
losing
control
and
i
have
every few years
i’m so scared i’ll lose control
and then i see
that i do
and i lose things
well
you can’t prevent loss.
stop telling me to go to therapy.
stop telling me to call a hotline.
stop telling me to get a job.
stop telling me it’s my fault.
stop telling me i’m self-destructive when i spend half my week going to "health""care" professionals.
only the shittiest people would blame someone for having cancer.
my father would tell me it was steve jobs’ fault for being vegetarian that he died of cancer.
stop blaming people.
stop blaming people.
stop blaming people for the life things that happened to them.
stop hitting me and then telling me it’s my fault that you chose to hit me.
stop telling me i wanted you to encourage me to kill myself.
STOP TELLING ME TO GO TO THERAPY
STOP TELLING ME TO TAKE MEDS
IT TOOK ME DECADES AND I FINALLY DID
AND I STILL WAKE UP AFTER ONLY SLEEPING TWO HOURS IN TWO WEEKS WITH VOICES IN MY HEAD SCREAMING AT ME TO KILL MYSELF.
IF YOU WANT ME TO GET BETTER,
BUILD ME A FUCKING TIME MACHINE
GO BACK TO BEFORE I WAS BORN AND FORCE MY PARENTS TO CHANGE INTO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PEOPLE
GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY SO I CAN GO TO A RICH KIDS’ MENTAL "HEALTH" FACILITY INSTEAD OF THE COUNTY HOSPITAL LIKE ALL THE OTHER POOR HOMELESS AND ALMOST HOMELESS PEOPLE
FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU!
FUCK ALL OF YOU. FUCK ALL OF YOU SO FUCKING MUCH. FUCK YOU.
i later found out that i actually did NOT go to a "county hospital [psych prison]". { i did not really know much about where i was at the time, since usually when people are taken to psych prison, they're not always in the uh, best of states. }
i actually was at private psych prisons, that i think were being paid by the state { since i'm on poor people's insurance }. i knew it was covered by my insurance, which is why i thought it was a "county" psych prison.
it's hilarious that they're actually privately owned (or, makes sense? idk, EVERYTHING sucks lol), because they were so fucking awful lmfao.
They didn't even have therapists you could talk to.
in one of the psych prisons i was in, you talked to a nurse that asked you general check-in questions for a maximum of 5 minutes every day.
zero therapy. zero therapists.
Psych prison staff are inherently abusive, since psych hospitals are prisons — you are not allowed to leave without permission, you have no privacy (even when you go to the bathroom), and psych prison staff forcibly drug you.
Oftentimes, psych prison staff are also sexually abusive.
Physical abuse, sexual abuse, and r*pe of disabled and neuro-different people is very common, ESPECIALLY in hospital settings, where they are most vulnerable, or even unresponsive/unconscious. (including medical hospitals, i.e. places that are not psych prisons)
(Of course, all of this abuse happens to disabled and neuro-different people outside of hospitals, too.)
Also, ALL mental "health""care" in usameriKKKa serves to uphold white supremacy, capitalism, and hegemony, and to make you "normal" and "quiet enough" again.
*These thoughts are informed by my lived experiences, my own analysis, and my conversations with my Mad comrades. These thoughts are not from any book.
Mad activism and the movements for abolishing psychiatry, Mad Justice, and Mad Liberation, are dominated by whites, academics, people who are part of the system itself (e.g. therapists and social workers), and non-profits (slash any/all of the above, often at once).
That's a bad thing, because that means that information, knowledge, and the opportunity to share your story is gatekept from the "ordinary" individual, unless you are in academia, or being exploited by the psychiatric system/industrial-complex itself, to validate itself.
january 2023 note: this is actually one of my favourite poems i've written! ever? i don't know. i've written a lot of poetry over the years, especially stuff that i haven't published yet. thanks, trauma & over a decade of worsening disability!
{ the previous two were from 2017.01.30. }
2017.01.31.
I WANT TO BE A WHITE GIRL
JANUARY 2017.
CONTENT:
ANTI-ASIAN RACISM
/ FETISHIZATION
/
I WANT TO BE A WHITE GIRL
I WANT TO CRAWL OUT OF MY SKIN
AND INTO SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE
INTO A BODY AND BRAIN WITH LESS PAIN
I WANT TO CRAWL OUT OF MY SKIN
AND INTO A WHITE WOMAN'S
SO THE WORLD WILL LOVE ME MORE
DON'T TELL ME
ASIAN WOMEN ARE POWERFUL
JUST BECAUSE WHITE MALES WILL DO ANYTHING FOR THEM.
WHEN YOUR ONLY IDENTITY
IS SEX OBJECT
ULTIMATE FETISH
WHEN YOUR ONLY SOURCE OF SUPPOSED "POWER"
IS SOMETHING YOU COULDN'T CONTROL
THE SKIN YOU WERE BORN IN
WHEN THE ONLY THING YOU HAVE
TO LOOM OVER SOMEBODY'S HEAD
IS IF YOU'LL FUCK THEM OR NOT
LITTLE SUBMISSIVE GIRL
TOY THAT YOU CAN BREAK
I KNOW THAT'S THE ONLY REASON MEN ARE NICE TO ME
I WANT TO WRITE A NEW NARRATIVE.
I AM A CRAZY CHINESE TRANS.
I AM LITERALLY, INSTITUTIONALLY, MENTALLY INSANE.
FAMILY CASTS THE FIRST WOUNDS
PATRIARCHY SETS THE INK.
OUTSIDERS WERE JUST AS DANGEROUS AS YOUR FAMILY WAS.
YOU GREW UP THINKING THE WORLD WOULD BE SO KIND
AFTER YOUR BLOOD RELATIONS WERE SO CRUEL
YOU GREW UP TRUSTING THAT THE INVISIBLE SKY PATRIARCH WOULD TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOU THAN YOUR BIOLOGICAL FATHER DID
YOU WERE WRONG.
thanks for reading & supporting✌️ [peace sign hand emoji]
i wrote this a little over a year ago. it's just as relevant as ever.
i really wish ableists=eugenicists would just shut the fuck up, & wear a mask.
*the article title is intentionally troll-y, yes
— from most recent to less recent —
ALL laws in usameriKKKa are made to target & criminalize Black and Brown, and other marginalized, peoples.
ALL laws in usameriKKKa are enforced by white supremacists with guns & the legal right to murder people, aka cops.
Disabled people are forced by ableist so-called "leftist" organizations to only engage in "performative" online organizing, while they simultaneously de-legitimize our organizing needs and efforts.
thanks for reading!
///
author's note:
can you tell i love long titles? lol.
this post, is like, super important to me. i first wrote this in 2018, about an idea for a project i had in 2017.
Writing the below draft over 5 years ago, in January 2018,
about an idea you first had in March 2017,
but really you first had this idea in 2016, & 2015, & February 2014...
& never feeling like you have had even a MOMENT of sanity or stability or housing stability in your ENTIRE life until now, 2023, to publish it."
— 水仙, on January 24th, 2023.
I think what I was trying to say was,
I think what I was trying to say was,
"It's hard not to feel suicidal in a universe that doesn't give a shit about you, in a society that fears you, straps you down, and literally tranquilizes you instead of being brave enough to ask why you feel the way you feel and why you're doing what you're doing."
I think what I was trying to say was,
JANUARY 28, 2013 [1]
Tired.
No new music in the past two weeks. What a rare sight. Been spending most of the last week in bed, not by choice... Tired of my body being out of order. Tired of my brain being out of order. Waiting for it to come back. Always, always. Think that I should feel good that I've gotten a lot better in the past month. Then realize how far I am from where I started and how far I am from full recovery. Healing. Living off nothing for a few months. Still tired. Wondering what the hell I'm doing with my life. Wonder if I'll publish another half year's worth of Letters by my birthday. I started again around my half-birthday. Wish I could write stories, stories about how I showed up at my ex's door on a cool Friday evening, how he tried to close the door on me and refuse to talk to me, how he had (okay, stolen is a strong word) taken — kept — the one thing that I still cared about in the world and then wouldn't give it back, and all I wanted was for him to just give it back, all I wanted was to still believe that someone I spent so much time with was worth still depending on to help save my life.
But no.
People hurt people and of course they get bitter. But J never did that to C even though he was still in love with her, and he wasn't even in love with me. I don't want my life to become a graveyard of shattered hopes and dreams. I don't want my life to become poisoned with bitterness like my heart — how I had to murder everything, how God to spare me more misery murdered for me my mind and my memory, and all of my brain.
Once upon a time, I wrote without giving a care what other people thought. I wrote for myself and for myself only.
Every other week I try to decide: Do I still want to continue doing this? This madness[reclaimed]. Whatever happened to writing for myself anymore? For most of my life I wrote for myself, and I produced my best "work." What if I should just return to the world of 9-5s that I never even left because I never allowed myself (i.e. I refused) to enter it?
What if I should just pretend to be a "normal" human for once and carry on life like everyone else does?
At a young age and filled already with bitterness and cynicism. Once upon a time I had dreams, but life and heartbreak knocks you down. I sound so bitter, so negative, so "unlike myself" — the sparkle-princess of self-love from my heyday. I don't know what I'm supposed to do anymore. I had wished for better years as I got older, more freedom, but as A, my friend who spoke so wisely to me about anchors whom I haven't seen since I met her last month said, it's not the freedom but the anchors.
Nothing feels right to me anymore, and I just want to crawl into a hole.
How emo, how angsty. People don't want to read about these things. They want to read about personal development and making your life awesome. They don't want to read about people when they're down and trying to figure things out and confused and scared for their lives.
This is the kind of thing that makes me scared to write anything anymore. The fear paralyzes me because I feel as if I have nothing left to offer. I feel sick and depressed and I wonder if I will ever lift out of this darkness.
So bitter, so sweet, so cynical, so young. I don't want to be any of those in conjunction with the others. I get the feeling that this is not where I'm supposed to be, and not whom I'm supposed to be with. But it has to be, because it's the only where (sic) I can be. I'm warm, and I feel sick again. As mortality creeps up
[ unfinished ]
JANUARY 28, 2013 [2]
It's January 28th.
I feel lost and scared, like I'm not meant to be here. I'm confused and I don't know how to write anymore. My mind presses down against me, and I'm simply praying for something to make this all worth it in the end. But it must come from within myself. It must be my own strength. But, what then? What is the delicate balance between self-love and interdependence?
/
/
january 17th, 2023
CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING (this one's really not that bad, though)
that in the best of times, we share memory.
lately i have been thinking that if i died, most of the people who would come to my funeral would be people i haven't talked to in years. or maybe they just wouldn't come, i don't know. at most points of the last several years, there would maybe only be one or a few people who i was actually currently talking to, who would probably be at my funeral.
& i know that the people who have hurt me, know that they have committed moral injury. not just on me, but on themselves. bc when we hurt others, we do not hurt alone.
actually, maybe they don't know.
i realized recently what a big part of what my lifelong psychosis is. believing in goodness in others that was not actually there. (sad, isn't it?)
maybe they can justify their actions, maybe they aren't aware of them yet.
the consequences.
but i will make them aware.
i will make them aware one day.
i think i have been thinking about the moral weight of my actions since i was 5 years old. since 5 i have been thinking about how the [capitalist] world doesn't make sense; about how if your immigrant parents don't teach you what a grocery store is but takes you to one, it shouldn't be your fault if you accidentally take something without paying for it, when nobody even taught you what "money" was.
so it breaks my heart. it breaks my heart for them, but i am trying nowadays to not let my heart break so much that i let off some grown adults in their 30s & 40s & 50s who lacked a moral compass, while their 5-year-old child grew one in abundance.
so i forget.
because in the best of times, i hope you'll remember for me.
i wish i could live a life where i did not think about moral consequences every day, but to live a life like that would mean to not think about capitalism every day. is that possible? do other people go home, do those people go home after their days of roleplaying as revolutionaries, hang up their hat, & eat with their loved ones? when was the last time i ate with a loved one like that?
i told you i haven't been happy since that year, but the truth is, i know i haven't been happy since 2010. 19-20 years old, that was the only time i felt occasional moments of peaceful happiness, in my entire life.
in an [i want to say ice cream] shop in pasadena, i stared at a baby in their stroller, & i smiled at them. "what if that's my grandmother, reincarnated," i whispered to you, & you smiled.
so i forget.
not because i want to.
but because my brain gets lobotomized every evening, even without a psychiatric prison warden to do the job.
so i forget.
because in the worst of times, i know you'll remember, even if i don't.
so that is why my funeral will be filled with people who haven't talked to me in years. because they stopped talking to me, so i assume that they forgot about me. but i know now that everybody else carries the moral weights of what they did, in their bones, just like i do. they carry our memories in their cells, even when i can't remember for myself. even when they don't want to. remember, that is.
or maybe they just wouldn't come.
maybe they would assume that i forgot about them, & maybe they just don't care anymore.
maybe my funeral would be mostly empty. like an elopement.
me & my death.
me & death.
life is hard. "love is hard, s" he said to me. & my mind refuses to forget these moments, so why do you?
i think in recent years, we, colonized peoples, are remembering the power of remembering. we are remembering the power of remembering.
they won't get away with this.
but will you?
i'm scared.
all i want to know,
is who i'll love at the end of my life.
i have been thinking a lot about what happens if somebody who nobody knows gets murdered.
disappeared.
destroyed into tiny bits & pieces,
& then
thrown into the ocean.
i have been thinking a lot about what happens if somebody who nobody knows gets murdered.
is that possible?
in order to be born, you have to have known somebody at one point.
you had to have touched somebody else, to exist in this world.
other human beings had to touch each other's skin, for you to exist, regardless of the story of your birth.
i have barely touched anybody since march 8th, 2020. every single human being i've touched since march 8th, 2020, i don't talk to anymore.
i have been thinking a lot about what happens if somebody who nobody remembers anymore, gets murdered.
when i first lived alone all by myself in my own apartment with my own name on my own lease, i thought about that. about the stories i'd read about people, single people or older people, who died alone in their apartments, with nobody to care about them. that their bodies wouldn't be discovered for days, because they didn't speak to anybody regularly enough for anybody to remember to check up on them.
that hurts to write down.
i worried i would be one of them. i have worried that i would be one of them, at many points in my life. & people like to think that a young, systemically-attractive+relatively-thin (because my only value lies in how much you can objectify => fetishize => dehumanize me) asian person like me, wouldn't be one of those people. because i'm too physically [systemically] attractive for that.
it hurts to write that word down.
a word that i invented.
i was speaking to a fellow Mad, Disabled, neuroatypical friend about that recently.
"i am grateful to know you," they told me.
many people say this, but that doesn't mean that they think my existence is actually worthy of protecting. of doing the hard work to actually protect.
"i am so sick of everything
i really am
i just am
most people fucking suck
i just can't
why are people okay with hurting me?
i've always known it wasn't okay, i always felt angry and bitter
but as i "heal", i'm even more horrified
a pause.
"or unless they want to suck up to you, because you're rich"
for decades, i was abused & bullied every day by pretty much everybody i knew, including my chinese immigrant child peers. yet i chose to develop a moral compass since the number of my age was a single digit.
{ if you're going to take that in bad faith & tell me all of your supposed "exceptions", you're missing the point. you can come back to this when you understand. }
You bitches talk about "suicide prevention" when you would run from someone speaking honestly about the "unpalatable" feelings & thoughts they have that don't uphold the saneist ableist white supremacist capitalism that you secretly still cape for, & call them "toxic" & treat them like an inconvenience, a burden, the moment they open their mouth.
You bitches talk about it like it's a slogan to be worn on your wrist, because that is all it is for you. It's just two words that you put in your bio, "mental health advocate" — now that's three words. You've graduated!
I would love to not think about moral weights every day. One day, perhaps. Or maybe not. Maybe when my future children come home & tell me how the white kids at school bullied them for the way their nose looks, I will not be able to stop thinking about every single system that ties to that. Probably. Or maybe I'll take them to a school filled with only children of global majority, & then they'll be teased for being neuro-different, or having non-normative ways of looking at the world. Because apparently even adults who think that they're oriented towards "justice", will always find something to pick out of you, if they think you're a little bit different.
i imagined "healing" to be this pleasant thing, this pastoral thing, this thing that would make me feel "better" — but i always knew that there was a reason why seeing memes, & especially seemingly-earnest posts written by people peddling their self-help/toxic positivity(forced sanity) wares, about "healing" on social media, makes me angry. for me, "healing" is grotesque; it feels disgusting, it feels soul-crushing. it makes me feel more & more suicidal, as the tiny abused children in my body make themselves known.
I was violently abused & isolated every day for decades at both the house that I lived in & school. I had no real friends for a long time, & as an adult neither.
But I chose to develop a moral compass.
if you aren't already, give material support to my continued existence here.
/
/
*re: the paragraph about settler-colonialism — i do not intend any insensitivity or harm towards Indigenous Peoples with these words. for my own context, this has shown up with regards to devastating violence in my own life, & also the aftermath of violent japanese imperialism war crimes & the Rape and Massacre of Nanjing, & european+usameriKKKan imperialism in china.
*re: my talk of funerals, i'm not going to die, tonight anyway — i hope. can't i make & share my art in peace? if white male musicians can scream to the masses about their "dark" ("unpalatable") thoughts, why can't i? *sigh*
end post.
IN THIS TIME OF GLOBAL ILLNESS & COLLAPSE, ARE YOU REALLY OKAY WITH THE WAY YOU'VE TREATED OTHER PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE?
IN THIS TIME OF GLOBAL ILLNESS & COLLAPSE, ARE YOU REALLY OKAY WITH THE WAY YOU'VE TREATED OTHER PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE?
IN THIS TIME OF GLOBAL ILLNESS & COLLAPSE, ARE YOU REALLY OKAY WITH THE WAY YOU'VE TREATED OTHER PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE?
IN THIS TIME OF GLOBAL ILLNESS & COLLAPSE, ARE YOU REALLY OKAY WITH THE WAY YOU'VE TREATED OTHER PEOPLE IN THIS LIFE?
IN THIS TIME OF GLOBAL ILLNESS & COLLAPSE, ARE YOU REALLY OKAY WITH THE WAY YOU'VE TREATED OTHER PEOPLE IN THEIR LIFE?
in this time of global illness & collapse, are you really okay with the way you've treated everybody you've ever met?
IN THIS TIME OF GLOBAL ILLNESS & COLLAPSE, ARE YOU REALLY OKAY WITH THE WAY YOU'VE TREATED EVERYBODY IN OUR LIVES?
I THINK ABOUT THE HUMAN BEING I HURT IN 2015 EVERY SINGLE DAY
I THINK ABOUT THE HUMAN BEING WHO ENDANGERED MY LIFE IN 2016 EVERY SINGLE DAY
NO, NOT THAT ONE
BUT I GUESS, THAT ONE, TOO.
I'M SURE THEY'RE HAPPY WITHOUT ME
BUT I'M NOT HAPPY WITHOUT YOU. AM I?
ARE YOU?
IN THIS TIME OF GLOBAL ILLNESS & COLLAPSE
ARE YOU REALLY OKAY WITH THE WAY YOU'VE TREATED OTHER PEOPLE IN THIS LIFE?
THE REASON I DIDN'T SHOOT MYSELF IN 2016 WAS NEVER BECAUSE I CARED ABOUT MY OWN LIFE.
IT WAS BECAUSE I CARED ABOUT EVERYBODY ELSE'S, WHEN NOBODY CARED ABOUT MINE.
note: i am not necessarily for or against any decisions that the Chinese government makes. i don't know everything about anything. that does not mean you can be anti-Chinese racist or Sinomisic!
* by the way, Sinomisia is the non-sanist word for "Sinophobia".
the suffix "-phobia" is inaccurate, minimizing, and sanist.
compare with: misogyny.
the roots are Greek: mīso-, miso-, "misein"
which all mean "to hate" in Greek.
that's why i use the words:
— Sinomisia or anti-Chinese sentiment, instead of "Sinophobia".
— transmisia or anti-transness, instead of "transphobia".
— queermisia or anti-queerness, instead of "homophobia"/"queerphobia".
... etc. ...
— anti-China sentiment/Sinomisia
— OR anti-Chinese racism
— OR anti-Asian racism
(which are all different things, btw.)
in countries of the global minority,
INCLUDING ME.
AND I AM CHINESE, & I WAS BORN IN CHINA, & I HAVE LIVED IN CHINA!
— living in usameriKKKa
— being bullied every. single. day. for being Chinese when i was a young child
— being s*x**lly harassed every. single. day. for being read as Chinese/Asian as an adult
— western media,
which actively creates, & violently propagates,
anti-Chinese racist & anti-Asian racist stereotypes, and actively propagates & promotes anti-Chinese racism & anti-Asian racism.
every. single. day.
... and i also LEARNED my internalized anti-Chinese racism and Sinomisia,
from just the CONSTANT, DAILY TRAUMA
i experience
living in the west
as a non-white person at all.
please decouple the FACTS about what the Chinese government is doing,
thank you, Comrade 🫡
[ saluting emoji ]
///
footnotes:
*except for explicitly grassroots revolutionary media, outside of the establishment
content note:
alcohol, food
\\\
on friday, i drove home early listening to — it's gonna be better, it's gonna be better... — , crying. i lay in my bed, tired and sleep-deprived, listening and crying. i drank half a bottle of wine and forced myself to eat more asiago cheese and garlic breadsticks than i'd had in a week. i fell asleep early and awoke in the early morning and drove to...
i had lunch in-between and then i drove to...
i met ---- and ----, -----, and i walked to the edge of the cliffs overlooking the ocean nearby. i wanted to watch the sunset. "you know, they come every day? that there's more than one?" they joked. "nooooo....." i replied.
i walked into the waves in the dark.
we went to get food. we talked for two, three hours. i told them everything that had happened to me recently, and it was like none of it mattered anymore. this is me, this is my life, now: i live in los angeles; i live alone in my winter cabin where i drink wine and fall asleep to the mini space heater; i sometimes even light up things that are prettier than they taste.
and every so often — and today is one of those days — i hate everything that i do. i don't hate myself, but i hate what i do, i hate my work, and i don't think it's resistance, or maybe it is, but i haven't felt for years (yes, years) that i have made much of an impact on anything or anyone. i wonder what my purpose for being here is. and not just to be rhetorical or philosophical, but because i need to know. i need to know there is a reason for my being here when for so long and for so many times in the middle of the nightmare, i did not want to be. i am hoping, i am praying. i am waiting for a miracle to make this all worth it, because i have little strength left to fight for myself anymore.
i want my heart to break, completely and fully, so i have a reason to put myself back together again.
///
content note: suicide
december 20th, 2022 —
10 years later, & i still feel this way.*
especially this part:
and every so often — and today is one of those days — i hate everything that i do. i don't hate myself, but i hate what i do, i hate my work, and i don't think it's resistance, or maybe it is, but i haven't felt for years (yes, years) that i have made much of an impact on anything or anyone. i wonder what my purpose for being here is. and not just to be rhetorical or philosophical, but because i need to know. i need to know there is a reason for my being here when for so long and for so many times in the middle of the nightmare, i did not want to be. i am hoping, i am praying. i am waiting for a miracle to make this all worth it, because i have little strength left to fight for myself anymore.
[*minus the alcohol. that was the only winter i ever tried to drink alcohol, & it... really didn't do anything.]
see:
〝 people don't want to believe that you can't recover from "mental illness".
people don't want to believe that you can try to attempt suicide multiple times in one month, and that there isn't an easy answer to "fix" that:
5150 them. 〞
— you could make this place beautiful, june 15th, 2022
you should mask no matter what, even when community spread is "low"
you should mask outdoors, you can still get covid-19 outdoors
you should mask even indoors with friends & family (i'm serious)
you should take rapid antigen tests before every social gathering, & ask your loved ones to, as well
rapid antigen tests are not very accurate for current strains of covid-19.
please swab the inside of your mouth, thoroughly, for higher accuracy — tongue, roof of mouth, back part of gums, cheeks, throat, and THEN nose
open your windows
filter your air
use air purifiers
monitor CO2
eat outside
use heat lamps when it's cold outside (yes it's expensive, but not as expensive as dying or being disabled)
stop eating at indoor restaurants
new ANTIHEROINE. post, by avanti & Rabia. but hopefully, readers like you don't need it. —
Please wear masks, hang out outside with heat lamps (yes it's expensive, but not as expensive as dying or becoming disabled), filter your indoor air, don't eat indoors at restaurants, take COVID-19 tests often.
[masked face emoji, small pink heartbeat emoji]
From my caption from this ig post:
YOU SHOULD MASK EVEN WHEN SPREAD IS "LOW"
YOU SHOULD MASK OUTDOORS, YOU CAN STILL GET COVID-19 OUTDOORS
YOU SHOULD MASK EVEN INDOORS WITH FRIENDS & FAMILY (I'M SERIOUS)
YOU SHOULD TAKE RAPID TESTS BEFORE EVERY SOCIAL GATHERING, & ASK YOUR LOVED ONES TO, AS WELL
OPEN YOUR WINDOWS
FILTER YOUR AIR
USE AIR PURIFIERS
MONITOR CO2
HANG OUT OUTSIDE
EAT OUTSIDE
USE HEAT LAMPS WHEN IT'S COLD OUTSIDE (YES IT'S EXPENSIVE, BUT NOT AS EXPENSIVE AS DYING OR BEING DISABLED)
STOP EATING AT INDOOR RESTAURANTS
SPREAD THE WORD, & SPREAD REAL COMMUNITY CARE. NOT COVID.
content: s**cide, ya know
///
don't let your
supposed
"care" for suicidal people
only show up
after they're already gone
This is not meant to be topical.
I wrote this probably a week ago.
It is always relevant.
/
i wonder
if
in this time
of global illness & collapse
if you would truly
be okay
with the last thing
you said to someone?
i've never met
a non-suicidal abled person
who lives their life
with even a fraction as much
reverence
for life
as i, a chronically suicidal person, does.
that's actually
why i'm
so suicidal
///
image description: the above text, on three different square slides, of thin white handwriting, on a black background.
*please note that the overlaps/intersections of suicidality & disability are complicated, & i am simply too tired to talk about them right now.
i was seven years old,
i think,
when i clearly understood abuse apologism.
"those white girls are bullying me," i told the old white woman yard duty. "they call me ugly because i'm chinese."
"no, they wouldn't.
they're Girl Scouts.
they're good girls,"
she replied.
...
image description:
the above text, written in white handwriting, on a black square background.
after a year of setting myself on fire, this is what i've learned:
forests burn. wood burns. they die and they change and they rot.
rocks don't burn.
and neither does water.
this is what i wrote on wednesday [the 5th]:
these days, i walk to the ocean alone (who am i kidding, i do everything alone — just like the old days) and walk into the water, as far out as i can, as deep into the sand. i stare at the waves and wait for the fear to come that makes me want to step back. i wait for it to pass, but it never does.
and then i stare and wait for the waves to hit me.
i remember snatches of moments. living life as nightmare. crying in parks. staring out the window into pouring rain and feeling heavy and unwanted and cold, the kind of cold like i shouldn't have sent an abusive person that email because they are just going to blame me. i told them that people, especially men, get angry at me because i don't turn out exactly who /they/ want me to be. like clockwork, he was angry about that.
you observe people, you know. you observe them and sometimes they delight you and other times they disappoint you. but most of the time you wonder how they can be so cruel.
new ANTIHEROINE. post, by me:
here's a link to a post you can share on instagram, if you want
i begrudgingly use instagram
even though i'm most likely
already "shadowbanned"
on all four of my accounts
i've been sitting on this poem since june 15th, 2022.
i wrote it from 02:19am to 03:05am that night.
i've been avoiding reality lately;
on purpose —
reality is terrifying.
i don't usually sit on things i write for this long, on purpose.
but i've been avoiding reality lately.
do my words even mean anything anymore?
The same themes reappear:
- Don't ghost suicidal people.
- Capitalism sucks.
- "déjeme decirle, a riesgo de parecer ridículo, que la revolucionarie verdadere está guiado por grandes sentimientos de amor." — che guevara {*i changed the genders a little}. this quote, perhaps worded slightly differently en español, stared at me on the walls of a vegan diner in berkeley after i graduated university in 2011. it's probably (hopefully) still there. i used to repeat those words to myself, even though i haven't been able to finish books very much since 2011. yeah, i physically can't read. so sue me, ableist/classist "leftists". (*please don't, actually — you have much more money than i do, after all)
I didn't used to hesitate to "press publish".
When I used to have big breakdowns, I would write endlessly. Hundreds and thousands of texts, to the same person. Always, always men.
CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING
or so said my twitter bio temporarily, in early 2016, before i planned to kill myself.
maybe that should just apply to everything i publish from now on.
*yeah, i agree.*
[ poem start — june 15th, 2022 ]
usameriKKKans love easy answers.
or is it, that, "people" do...?
i've been living here for so long that i don't think i could make any claims about understanding any other country that well, anymore.
people don't want to believe that you can't recover from "mental illness".
people don't want to believe that you can try to attempt suicide multiple times in one month, and that there isn't an easy answer to "fix" that:
5150 them.
usameriKKKans are afraid of grief.
and so am i.
but my entire body is made of grief —
and yet, still, i avoid it.
people don't want to believe that you can go to therapy twice a week
take those "mood stabilizers" every single day
go to a good, kind, free, covered by state-poor-people-insurance therapist, every week for a year and a half
and still feel suicidal and depressed every. single. waking. moment. of your life.
from awakening to falling asleep through being asleep in nightmares.
people don't understand how painful it is.
if they did, they wouldn't hesitate to help in the ways that they agreed to help you in.
if they did, they wouldn't say "that sounds really lonely. i know someone else who's had a similar experience of feeling suicidal constantly. maybe i should connect you two." and then never do, even six months after they drive you to the ER and after they see you scream and throw up on their floor and after they know you didn't sleep for an entire week straight, at *all*.
i so wish life could be so easy.
that a body that has experienced violence could just heal the way that a minor accidental cut does.
but when it is another human who willfully slices in the wound — what then?
but then,
Why do I persist?
I was going to write about the poem "Good Bones" on the 6th anniversary of the Pulse shooting, which was June 12th, 2022.*
**i thought it would be easier. i was wrong. i'm always wrong — no i'm not.*
i remember what happened the next day, after the Pulse shooting.
the next day, my temporary roommate, a kind white woman, versus other shitty white and POGM "left-leaning" and queerish roommates i've had over the years —
that month, i learned what a Tenants' Union was.
I learned it the same month that my roommate told me her friend in the Seattle Tenants' Union killed themself because they couldn't afford their rent anymore.
i think that person was an immigrant of colour.
my roommate mentioned their friend's suicide the day after the Pulse shooting.
You could make this place beautiful, Maggie Smith wrote.
i'm angry about everything.
i remember the first time i wrote publicly about how angry i was as an adult.
it was january 2012.
but i remember the first time i wrote publicly about how angry i was, before i was an adult.
it was, like, 2003.
"You could make this place beautiful."
Maggie Smith is a white woman. the person who posted the poem on twitter in june 2016 was a white woman. i remember this.
when researching the poem a little while thinking about writing about the poem, (i did not plan this post, i do not plan most of my posts, especially if they're posts i wrote in 2022), the articles kept calling "Good Bones" a "viral poem that was published and went viral shortly after the Pulse shooting".
a "viral poem".
> Smith feels proud of her poem’s popularity, of course, but also a little conflicted.
“It’s a weird thing,” she says, “to have your poem’s success, and in turn your success, be tied to something that is shared because things are terrible.”
And even though "Good Bones" was published in the summer of 2016, Smith had actually written it a year previous, and she wasn’t thinking about world events at all.
She was thinking about her family.
“It was a poem written from the point of one mother feeling anxious about how to raise kids, and explain a world to them that is as wonderful as it is terrible,” says Smith. "How to keep the worst parts from them while they’re young, while not lying to them.’’
"You could make this place beautiful."
So why am I still here?
Because I read white women write poetry and wonder why it is less painful for me to read than to read most other non-Black non-Indigenous asians' poetry and know that they were not steeped in the same trauma I was.
None of them have been. At least there are no pretenses with the white women.
comrade [redacted] and i talked about it recently.
i was lamenting about the asian-usameriKKKan trope of writing about how "everybody used to bully me for my food at school! now they love it, grr white people!
it's literally so overdone that multiple people have written articles with literally the exact same premise."
"Most of those asian-usameriKKKan writers are writing for whites to read," they [who is also asian-usameriKKKan] said.
Trauma porn. Trauma clowning for the whites. Who are we writing for? Are you fetishizing yourself?
And I agreed with what they said. And that made me feel better. And it made sense to me.
white girls and boys used to bully me and call me ugly.
My chinese parents also used to bully me and make me feel ugly.
As an adult, whites fetishize me... but wait.
They fetishized me when I was a kid, too.
Nothing has changed.
I still feel ugly, no matter how I look on the outside.
What is "desireable" mean to you?
Everybody used to bully me and say I was ugly
and then white boys at a hackathon weekend in seattle in early 2014 who probably secretly still wanted to fuck me, still told me nobody liked me.*
*edit, november 21st, 2022* — in retrospect — i reflected upon this recently — this white dude probably told me that "nobody liked me" that day, because it was a make-a-[video-]game weekend hack-a-thon, and we were supposed to make games about a "social issue", and they (a different "team") had a horrifically inhumane idea involving Unhoused people that i told them that they shouldn't do.
and also, bc i was the only non-male PGM there, and also one of the few non-male people either way.
Nothing has changed.
The white kids are still bullying the asian kids about their food.
I'm not sorry, but I hate these memes.
Meme: "an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other nongenetic means."
It's a meme, and I hate it.
I despise most people. Or, at least, I say I do.
I am extremely, extremely "Mentally Ill".
Does it scare you?
I don't know what Mad means yet, and i want to learn more before i call myself Mad.
i find it impossible to be dishonest about myself.
i have tried, for the last 6.5+ years, to hide myself again, very actively, to the point where i don't even know who i am anymore.
what was the point of this?
Oh yeah.
Good. Bones.
Can you follow my train of thought?
Because I can't.
Why can't i just be chaotic?
i wrote something critiquing white women personal essays recently, specifically the white woman's personal essay where she critiqued other white women personal essays lol. and it was a disorganized post with timeskips, going all over the place, and i asked myself, if i wanted to keep it public.
Why can't i just be chaotic?
if so-and-so famous person is allowed to be chaotic bc everybody thinks he's a genius, why can't *i* be chaotic?
*edit, november 22nd, 2022* — also, men are allowed to be chaotic. people who look like me, are not.
because i am TOO chaotic. i am so chaotic it scares people. i crossed over from "chaotic enough to be fun and exciting and sexy" to "so chaotic you scare me."
do i want to be chaotic?
honestly, oftentimes, inside, i just feel like a quiet, depressed, serious person.
calm anger,
critically analyzing everything.
Anyway.
I think
that i am not writing essays to attain a degree.
therefore
if i am chaotic
when i write something
perhaps it's a poem, perhaps it's just chaos,
to me
if i do a time-skipping mash of sources and opinion
it's essay
it's art
but i did want to talk about Good bones, and i'm afraid that i've lost the thread on that. well, *i* know where the thread is, but i'm not sure you do.
do you?
I learned what a Tenants' Union was, on June 13th, 2016, the day after the Pulse shooting. My new roommate, temporary of only a little over a month, was grieving both the shooting, and the fact that her friend from the Seattle Tenants' Union, an immigrant of colour, killed themself because they couldn't afford their rent anymore.
That's it.
That's the poem.
I wonder if I will ever be able to write something that's not about how oppressive systems are crushing us *all*.
I think that if I did, I would be denying reality. And they say I'M the cr*zy one.
"Good Bones" has been the oldest image on my camera roll for a long time, since I saved it, apparently on July 18th, 2016.
I wiped my phone after I turned 26 years old in a psych prison to which I voluntarily went.
"Good Bones"
by Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
i showed this poem to my sister that summer. that was the last year i really spoke to my sister. her child was almost five years old.
"this poem is depressing," she said dismissively.
i wanted to write about another piece of art (a quote that is basically a poem) that has carried me, also written by a white woman, but illustrated by a japanese-usameriKKKan woman (? i think). i saw the comic (but had read the quote in spring 2016, i think. or... *sometime*) during the second week of march 2020. which, you know, was the start of lockdown (i hate that word. i usually say "quarantine", but really, they mean different things. i think of "lockdown" as implying that businesses are locked down. whereas, "quarantine" sounds like it's about individual humans... or units of humans... *pods*...), at least in seattle.
but i think i can maybe split up the hope this time.
you could make this place beautiful.
///
rest in paradise...
Daniel Aston.
Kelly Loving.
Ashley Paugh.
Derrick Rump.
Raymond Green Vance.
november 19th, 2022.
content:
suffering, oppression
///
what is the point of suffering?
why do some people get to inflict it onto others, and some people don't?
and the people who do, never have to take accountability, if they don't want to?
and the people oppressed, have to blame themselves and fawn and apologize for things that weren't even their fault, just to beg their oppressors to not hurt them again?
why?
new ANTIHEROINE. post, by Rabia:
Content:
Ableism. Sanism. Euthanasia/s**cide. "Leftist" hypocrisy.
click here for the post to share on instagram
---
People with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis have been forcibly detained, even killed by negligence, in psych wards, for DECADES.
The groundwork has already been laid for the same to happen to people with Long COVID.
1 in 5 adults who get COVID-19 become Disabled with Long COVID.
Please stop fucking around with those odds.
---
white-majority countries didn't care about hMPXV, first discovered in 1958, when hMPXV was killing African children and people with HIV...
...until this current outbreak, affecting mostly European and white-majority countries, in 2022.
This is damning.
There have been multiple outbreaks in the past, including ones outside of Africa, between 2003 and 2021.
Image Description: Photograph of old movie theatre. Two marquee signs say: NOW PLAYING, PROTECT YOUR NEIGHBOR, WEAR A MASK. Photo by Justin Taylor.
///
this took like an entire month for me to finish working on. i wasn't working on it the entire time, but still — i hope it's helpful. please share if it is.
2013 december 7, saturday
“it’s so cold,”
“the cold comes from the water,” he told me
…
“i wish i could go on adventures again.
like in high school. or, even in college…”
“so why don’t you?”
“i don’t know. i’m so uptight now. no, it’s not that…
the last time i wanted to go on an adventure…
well, people have work in the morning…
i guess i just feel too
“grown-up”
now”
…
…
at the end of the night, we finally hugged and underneath a scarf and a hat and two jackets, underneath it all, i was wearing your jersey. i thought tonight of how he was the only close friend on stolen Dxʷdəwʔabš Lands i had that hadn’t been romantically interested in me, which makes our friendship, though obviously imperfect, the “purest” that i had. unsullied. uncomplicated.
i thought of a lot of things tonight, but mainly i just sat in that passenger’s seat, listening. as space lions floated through the sky and cavaliers pierced my skin. staring at the city, my city, and the water that brings this wounding cold. watching the lights flicker and waiting for the ships to move.
to come home.
content: a quote about happiness, pain, & bad days. pretty neutral content, possibly inspiring.
“I actually attack the concept of happiness.
The idea that — I don’t mind people being happy — but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in western society, which is fear of sadness.
It's a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying "write down 3 things that made you happy today before you go to sleep", and "cheer up" and "happiness is our birthright" and so on.
We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position — it’s rubbish.
Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are.
Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much.
Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say "Quick! Move on! Cheer up!"
I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word "happiness" and to replace it with the word "wholeness".
Ask yourself: "Is this contributing to my wholeness?"
And if you’re having a bad day, it is."
— Hugh Mackay, white male. i don't know anything else about him, and i do not vouch for any of his other words or work.
content: heartbreak poetry
They tell me
little lies, like:
you are strong
you are worth
something more than
this. This. This
I spend my
days reading. Poetry.
Never writing it.
I've forgotten how.
the memory of
you has pushed
out all the
words I once
held like fallen
leaves of dried
clovers in between
my fragile fingers.
How easily trees
snap in half
like my phalanxes.
I once woke
up next to
a stranger and
when she asked
me did you
get your after
rain I said
no. I said
no because this.
This? This. This
This isn't love.
That is what
I told her.
— july 6th, 2012.
this is actually the very first poem in the book. here is the second.
# SEASONGS
content: quotes from two comrades about solidarity, & bullying in "radical" spaces. mentions the existence of violence, power, & abuse. mostly neutral, except for that last part.
"yeah at some level, you can't do good by being just anti-.
'anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-fascist.'
you have to have some kind of theory and practice of how you want things to work,
and make some sacrifices to have solidarity."
[ switch conversations ]
"but the reason why i'm depressed as an adult
is that not only now do i need to pay for food and rent
but i'm realising that the entire rest of the world is also rooted in violence, power, and abuse, just like my parents
and i just thought, as long as someone was NOT my parents, they’d be better than that
but everywhere
cops
especially bosses, too, some people can avoid interacting with cops, but almost nobody can avoid having a boss
still being dependent on abusers for food and shelter
the entire rest of the world is also rooted in violence, power, and abuse.
even like, you know. "radical organisers". almost especially them, for some reason ? like i was never bullied like this at all before i started trying to be part of "radical" spaces"
"Yeah, I’ve wondered about it for a while.
I think it has to do with the fact that radical spaces actually structurally resemble high school friend groups a lot, because both are often formed by a lot of people who just met each other, and in both cases they come together around performing a certain set of values, and quickly form hierarchies around who most embodies those values."
hi! happy july!
i'm grateful for your support this month, as always. ♡
preface, july 1st, 2022 —
i was going to post something else, from september 2013, titled " 091813 vulnerability/all-nighter hangover.txt " — but instead, i came across " vulnerability.txt " from april 2014, before my brain split the fuck apart even worse. i was 23 years old.
content: thoughts, neutral mood
///
we pay a lot of lip service to the idea of “vulnerability” on the internet, especially in the world of “personal blogs.”
we talk about “authenticity,” versus instagrams filled with lies and wishlist lives.
i had this conversation with someone a while ago:
is it really “vulnerability” if we’re controlling what can hurt us?
the definition of vulnerable means “able to be wounded.”
when we instagram our less-than-perfect houses, our faces without make-up, and write about our past struggles to the internet, are we really willing to be wounded by the receivers of those words?
///
nota bene, july 1st, 2022 — personal blogs are kinda dead now. that sucks. i'm working on bringing them back. wish me luck.
The light of my electronics
is too bright.
An echo in the night.
Always, always something
calling for the most expensive
currency. The most expensive
currency you dole out
daily: attention.
# 2013
# poetry
i burst open my own wounds
and cut open my own flesh, like
stars: twinkling and constellating
in the reflection of the moon, simply
mirroring the sunlight.
burning, burning.
-- to the ground.
— 2013 january 16th
---
# poetry
# 2013
# space songs
# moon songs
when you're in love with everyone and no one in particular
when you're in love with the universe and despise all of it deep in your marrow
in a world where corporations still feel the need to add high fructose corn syrup to something as sweet as orange juice
i'm never going to tell anyone my secrets again
— may 14th, 2015. never before published. (i think...?)
# poetry # 2015
✨
i'm thinking of maybe doing a series where i post things in order. i kind of want... need things to be more systematic than this. but a lot of things in my life are shifting right now. Soon.
alone on the california coast
and i often wish i were the only human being in the world
so that nobody can hurt me
and i can't hurt anybody else
# poetry # written this morning
I woke up
an accident to be arranged.
folded in-between the creases of your drowsy new sheets
a sleepy stranger slumbering in hollow bedrooms.
next to unfamiliar faces and turbulent dreams
my mind spun nightmares, my first since age six
and once upon a time, I ran from the monsters of my own machinations (and they leave, they all leave)
I awaken after (four,
five if I’m lucky)
revolutions of your fingertips
(and here I am, alone and behind after being
used to this) (I woke up this morning next to someone I don’t know) and found myself on the mattress alone
— written in my last days in california (try 1), february 12th?, 2012 —
previously: february 22nd, 2012
/
# poetry # Bon hiver
—
The above title reads: 17:27-17:28-17:29-17:30-31-MAY-2015-VS.-02:54-2-JUNE-2015, in glitched-out Unicode characters.
—
Image Descriptions:
Image 1:
screencap of a still from the movie "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind". it is a live-action photo of two hands holding a piece of paper that reads:
"Dear Mr. & Mrs. Eakin
Clementine Kruczynski has had Joel Barish erased from her memory. Please never mention their relationship to her again.
[centred text:]
Thank You.
[footer on bottom right:]
[in large font:]
LACUNA INC
[in small font underneath:]
210 E Grand St, New York, NY"
Image 2:
the same previous screencap of a still from the movie "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind", but with faded out colours.
Image 3:
the same previous screencap of a still from the movie "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind", but it has been "glitched" so that the paper and text has started to become illegible and distorted, but not completely.
Image 4:
the same previous screencap of a still from the movie "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind", but it has been "glitched" in shades of purple and yellow so that the paper and text has become mostly illegible and distorted.
Image 5:
a photo of me taken by [?????] in july 2010, at [?????]. it has been glitched to the point where it looks like 3 mirror images on top of one another. i am wearing a red and white polka-dotted dress and leaning over the side of a pier. the shot is of my back and my face is not visible. there is a body of californian water in the background.
i have been wanting to articulate this thought for a while, i wanted to explain what was around it, but now i realize you know, it speaks for itself
at one point, i couldn't keep my words in anymore, and they flooded the world, and then i smashed them back down again because of one dude singlehandedly breaking a promise
and i got scared and stopped writing and stopped tweeting for six years
anyway
i think it's pretty straightforward
it's really a one-line poem
i wanted to explain everything around it
but there's nothing to explain
you know the clichés and the tropes people say
"we"
"asians"?
flatten, flatten, flatten
/
My parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?" because they don't love me
i think anything i could say about being a racialized human ("racialized body", i don't know, i don't know the meanings of words) on the colonized land built by & filled with white supremacists i grew up on... flattens, flattens, flattens
people
today i think about
lately i've been thinking about
i hate everyone
i wrote something called "i hate everybody" and didn't publish it
but it's true
i hate everybody
with deep, deep envy.
i tell myself i am this or that
i am without any judgment or thoughts or negative feelings or insecurities or self-consciousness
when i see these in others, i try to figure out the exact perfect words to try to make them feel better
so they don't feel insecure around me
or worse, express it
I think about the repeated graphic
among some chinese-usameriKKKans-calling-themselves-"asian"-usameriKKKans-calling-themselves-"asian-ameriKans"
"Have you eaten yet?"
the answer is no. i haven't.
i ate dry ramen by myself in elementary school
and then i cooked ramen by myself in 6th grade on dark autumn nights alone at home
and then i cooked ramen by myself in 9th grade before meals
and my parents called me poor for wanting to eat brown rice.
have i eaten yet? no
i'm hungry
i'm hungry
i'm hungry
a year ago, a massacre happened.
what did i do?
i had no chinese friends back then
really
I am trying to write the perfect poem.
The perfect poem will tell you in the perfect words that
I am angry about...
But the perfect poem will tell you in the perfect words that I am also angry about the fact that every chinese person i know would say that their parents love them.
a year ago, a massacre happened
i did not eat rice porridge
my queer vietnamese-chinese-raised-in-usameriKKKa ("should we use the word 'american'?" "should we use the word 'western'?" i ask my new comrade, as we stay up until 3am talking about usameriKKKan imperialism and capitalism. "please don't talk about cops after midnight"
i requested — "shit") therapist quit on me a few hours before the shooting happened
i started hearing voices in my head
i did not eat rice porridge
i started hearing voices in my head
and i lost my appetite for a year and 28 days and counting
i just want to write a poem that tells you
i hate seeing every(??? Not All) asian kid in this country say " `have you eaten yet?‘ means `i love you‘ "
because
my parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?"
because they don't love me
my parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?"
because they don't love me
my parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?"
because they don't love me
my parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?"
because they don't love me
my parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?"
because they don't love me
my parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?"
because they don't love me
my parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?"
because they don't love me
my parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?"
because they don't love me
my parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?"
because they don't love me
my parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?"
because they don't love me
my parents never asked me "have you eaten yet?"
because they don't love me
#poetry
a city of solitudes
On the most open nights the moon closes its eyelashes to dream of you.
soft shutters on new months and leap years.
The loneliness makes its way with weapons
burning into my shallow skin.
My flesh is not profound enough
for your philosophies.
I crawl into my chocolate shell, a candy center.
I wait for trains that don’t exist.
I smile at strangers and pretend that means something
as I realize: I moved to a city
of solitudes
fearing alone.
— written in new york city, february 22nd, 2012, 8 days after moving to nyc at the age of 21 after graduating university early
# poetry # Bon hiver
I just wanted to let you know that residents of so-called "usameriKKKa" can order a 2nd set of free COVID-19 at-home tests now!
*I just found about this. I love (sarcasm) how good usameriKKKa government is about informing people widely about what is helpful and free and life-saving.