Month: May 2024

I didn’t have to see her dead body.

I think the problem is that it’s not always bad. If it were bad every day, it would be so much easier. When she died I didn’t see the body and the family was ashamed of that– but I knew that I would be dealing with it for the rest of my life, so why did I need to see the actual body?

It seemed that compared to what I would later be experiencing, the body would be nothing. I wish my family understood this but I don’t know if they do or not.

Am I okay? Did I need to see the body? I had friends who said that you had to see a dead body in order to grief– that that is where the grieving starts, with what’s dead. I don’t think it was necessary for that.

There was a time when my relationship made me miserable. I don’t really understand romantic relationships. For one, it seems like they are supposed to preoccupy most of our lives. By most, I mean most of the time in our lives. Now, there was a time when I was obsessed by Romance, literally obsessed, spending every waking hour of every day steeped in it. Living with me must be like living with a time bomb. The central thing was that you had no control over any of it. It just happened. A good example would be every time I waited for a boy to reply to my text. I also like how these fairy-tale stories involved Disney men. I was waiting to be subsumed by another. I was waiting for someone to complete me— that delicious, tangy over-take of feelings. That’s co-dependency. There was a time when my relationship made me miserable. I don’t really understand romantic relationships. For one, it seems like they are supposed to preoccupy most of our lives. By most, I mean most of the time in our lives. Now, there was a time when I was obsessed by Romance, literally obsessed, spending every waking hour of every day steeped in it. Living with me must be like living with a time bomb. The central thing was that you had no control over any of it. It just happened. A good example would be every time I waited for a boy to reply to my text. I also like how these fairy-tale stories involved Disney men. I was waiting to be subsumed by another. I was waiting for someone to complete me— that delicious, tangy over-take of feelings. That co-dependency. That over-take. But these feelings kinda themselves evaporated recently because I realised that romance was not that important to me. I hated the days when I was stewing in a corner because of some failed romantic project. And those projects always came with price tags attached. I’ve realised that that was when I was more attached to my own romantic ego rather than what was true and fulfilling. I finally understood something— it was almost always after the fact that something would be good, but during the experience I invariably hated it. I thought I had to perform something, and it wasn’t my own authentic self at all. But surely the actual authentic thing about relationships is after the fact, when things aren’t exciting anymore, when there is no kazoom left. The idea you’re just there to guard over someone, this monolith that you had created, but not actually let the thing flow outwards. What flows outwards is totally something you can’t control, it’s a bit like “wearing your heart on the outside”. That feeling that you can’t ever take anything for granted, because it can explode in the next moment. I think that that is what I have learned.

Immigrant communities thinks saying things like “you are hard to love” is normal, which then makes a cascade of deep depressive feelings that can last a lifetime. They can use their children to fulfill their basic needs like the need for attention, or the need to blame someone for their own misfortune. As a result their kids cannot truly see themselves except as an extension of their parents. They become “tool-ified”, their value is predicated only on what they can do, rather than who they are. Kids who grow up this way have no real sense of self, and when they look in the mirror they are just an extension of their parents, no more, only less. I grew up this way. I sometimes thought I sucked so hard I would torture myself and fail; my brain was on fire. In an effort to douse myself with any kind of wetness that could induce calm, I went on a campaign of self-destruction and war. Yesterday marked 7 years of sobriety (even though that word is now, like much of my life, pretty fluid), when seven years ago in New York after a female empowerment workshop and a horrific accident I decided to stop drinking. When people pray, I try to ask them to keep people like me in mind; if you’re white, it’ll be hard to understand. It can be jarring to meet someone like me who actually just doesn’t pity herself or those in her community, who has moved beyond it.