Just an Illness

 I wish you to know this if I ever die from it

The call to death is just a call to death

I did not die because I am mad at you

I died because death has been calling me

I am sorry if it happened when I was angry with you 

Maybe I’m not really sorry

But that is about my anger, not death’s dedicated line to me 

She calls when I’m happy, asking if it would be nice that this is my last day

She calls when I’m sick and tired, asking if I’d like to break away

She calls when I’m bored, she stalks me and meanders in when she sees the chance

She’s called me all the time, since I was just a little one.

It can get overwhelming sometimes, to keep saying no

It’s worse when she calls me in the middle of me feeling something I hate to feel the most 

She knows all my weaknesses, and she’s always there to shove me when I’m down

I know she’s not worth it

But it’s hard to see past something that is always around

I am vigilant and I am strong but I can’t be that all the time 

I’m not selfish

I’m not attention seeking 

It’s like catching an infection when you’re immune compromised

Medicines and routines and things can help until they don’t

You can try and try and try but sometimes it doesn’t work

I’m sorry if she got the better of me 

And you are reading this after I die

But please just try to celebrate my time on earth.

Burns

They say they loved me when I was a baby too

As if time or growth or your independence could ever stop me from loving you 

They tell me how much they do to keep us alive —and not send us to a home—

As if that is a scale to measure love on 

It is these things that clearly show

They are discussing something they have never known 

I wish they could see how much love it must be to hope after everything that they could feel what we feel 

So stuck on not wanting to be told they don’t know how to love that they miss the chance to experience it

So blind to the extent of my faith in them to weather the futility of trying them repeatedly

Such a bitter irony

The trying child of

parents who will not try for me

The cycle is broken but the circle is not 

Like a cold day in summer or a system reboot 

The path remains even after you change your shoes

At least you don’t have to carry this weight too

I will burn it down carefully, without scorching you

Living Proof

I knew you for years before I knew you.

You’ve been with me since I was born. 

This whole time

I’ve loved you and feared you and carried you

As I will the rest of my life.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it’s all rather unbelievable

You were an imaginary friend for so long 

Before I literally made you up. 

My honey, my cheer, 

The person with whom I want to share all things I hold dear 

It is magical to know you and to have known you before you

You are wonderful and unreal

My new-new.

I am blessed to know this intimacy 

that overwhelms me.

Physics was once a man to me,

But no one teaches superimposition like a baby

History carefully twisted and folded down,

Block by block, link by link

into the most meaningful nothing

You are a quantum event

Silly of me not to see… 

I called it a biological clock

But that pit in my stomach was just me feeling the undeniable gravity

the potential energy

Of you.

You’ve existed forever as nothing

Now you are everything

It’s hard to explain but

I’m so lucky you helped me understand it.

Global Warning

Promises made to me are not promises at all, just noise that occurred in my presence

I am as human to you as another treasured tool, your iPhone perhaps

Maybe that’s why you think I should be extraordinarily grateful for any human right you afford me 

Maybe that’s why you are so incensed that I will not sit back quietly

You can keep punishing me

Didn’t anyone ever tell you that my skin won’t crack so easily? 

Satyagraha is my history.

We are still a chaotic mist teetering on the precipice of valid existence 

You can turn the heat up for a false bump with this sham recession 

(Should I die if I can’t earn a living?)

But it will be as short-lived as any pump and dump (P&D)

Global warming is melting away the pretense of “competing priorities”

In a poetic paradox 

We are slowly condensing into a cohesive sea of atomic affinity 

and direction 

Maybe not today 

But one day

I will be a tidal wave.

It’s already happening.

Suicidal

 Sometimes I dream that you’re dead

You are lying there lifeless

Pale and flaccid 

It’s the first time I feel peace around you

It feels strange to be in your presence 

Without any fear

To be seen and heard

Even with you in the room.

My mind is oddly quiet

No internal broadcast of the cruel things you’ve said or could say

No soundless screams of frustration

No tentative shivering about what might set you off

No breakneck evaluating of safe or unsafe to share

It’s just you and me in the moment

Maybe this is why I’ve always wanted to die 

In my sleep

Death feels a lot like love

Overwriting

To all the children I was compared to:

You are more than just a family friend or cousin to me

I have been thinking about you for years

At first involuntarily, 

now habitually 

Usually unknowingly.

You may not know it 

As you go on with your education, jobs, relationships, parenthood and whatever else you are doing

I am quietly stacking myself against you

Everything from my wealth to my weight and my mind and my skin 

You are so much better than me

My pillow is wet from my eternal inadequacy 

My fists are clenched in anger that breeds pain

Somewhere in between the hours of berating 

And seconds of adrenalin 

that rushed in every time I was slapped, punched, choked or shoved or across a room 

I somehow created a tape of put downs in my head

That reliably plays 

on every single one of my harder days 

even all these years and miles away 

I know you could “never imagine”

You might choose not to believe

I am just the over-sharing, crazy lady

It’s ok, I’m mainly speaking to those like me 

“I see you

I believe you

You are not alone

#metoo”

Press that red button 

I want to hear your voice

Book Review: Educated by Tara Westover

Father’s day and the weeks surrounding it have never been an easy time for me. This one was made harder than others because I’ve been harrowing myself about finishing a book for my work book club. It’s called “Educated,” and it’s by Tara Westover. I cannot recommend it enough. I’ve had over a month-and-a-half to read it, but I’ve not been able to get through more than a few pages at a time without crying, or having a senseless fight with my partner that’s really about the discord in my soul that the book played like a fiddle.

Tara would recount hearing endless lectures about the Illuminati, the brain-washing ways of conventional schooling, or the sacrilegious frivolity of the lives of everyone other than her family; she would write about dodging her father’s volatile moods, experiencing in denial her older brother’s bullying, verbal and physical abuse and feeling betrayed as her mother (primarily) and other family members flip-flopped between resisting and perpetuating the dark environment she lived in-- and as I read her words, I would collapse into a pain I find impossible to describe.

But even while the eerie familiarity I felt towards Tara- despite my wildly different cultural and racial circumstances- struck hard and heavy in the moments that she recounts the traumatic events, ideologies and emotional realities that she lived through, the time she spent uncovering her inner dialogue and intellectual journey hit much harder. As I read the book, it was difficult reliving the trauma of a teacher kicking me out of a level of math I somehow tested into when she found out I lacked the ability to perform long division in eleventh grade (after a spotty history of formal schooling). However, it was really gut-churning to relive the cognitive process of unlearning self-loathing through intellectual exploration. 

Tara gravitated to historiography to relearn her own learning of self in much the same way I exploded when I was exposed to the study of epistemology. I believe it is not coincidental to surviving abuse that I cannot fathom studying any discipline, no matter how perfunctorily, without engaging in a critical history of it. Tara’s angry emails to her parents as she learned about the neurocognitive damage her abusive childhood had left her with are not dissimilar to emails I’ve written, and phone calls I’ve had. Sadly, neither is her raw and eternal yearning for a less warped love from her parents and siblings; her immutable desire to fit into the topographic, familial, cultural and whole history of herself. 

For me, that is what is at the core of the pain of domestic abuse-- it forces you to divorce your own self, and you have to walk a steep and treacherous path back to first knowing, and then loving the person you really are. The damage of an abuser is never just the damage of one person. People often forget that especially with childhood abuse, it takes a village of bystanders and suppressors to perpetuate the abuse. Countless people neglect, gaslight and abandon you when you are abused. They cast so much doubt on you, that you doubt yourself and fear forming real beliefs. They fail to remember things they have seen, or they support you in one moment only to turn their backs on you in the next-- and so, one after another, the countless enablers of the abuser decimate your belief in humanity and eventually, in your own self. Sometimes, you can rationalize the actions of your abuser because you see them as victims of abuse themselves. But seeing all these other people enable the abuse is almost never comprehensible. You really should read the book. Tara goes through this in so many of the same ways I did, and reveals it more emphatically and eloquently than I can. Even as I type these words, the enabling voices ring loudly in my ears “don’t air your dirty laundry in public.”

But I have something to say to all those voices today: “SHUT UP. You are wrong.” 

Tara airing her dirty laundry in public is what is restoring the faith in humanity that you took away from me when you didn’t say or do anything about the abuse you witnessed. She is the one who reminds me that for every auntie who chose to stay quiet as she witnessed evidence of abuse as a five-to-eight-year-old me bathed with her daughter, there is a Tara somewhere who will not be afraid to speak up. That for every tuition teacher who stands dumbfounded and watches me get flung across a room by someone who should be protecting me, there is a Tara somewhere who will call what she sees out. Tara speaking out about how her battered, neglected and devastated inner child stares back at her from mirrors, causes her to rage at her parents and have panic attacks and mental breakdowns in her mid-late twenties is what is helping me accept, nurture and heal my own inner child, who wonders why this is so hard, even when I’m so old and so far away. Tara revealing her own imperfections during this journey are allowing me to forgive mine. Receiving empathy is often a foreign experience for survivors of abuse, especially when it comes to empathy for our own selves; and my empathy for Tara is fueling my empathy for me. 

Something that all of you who blithely advise survivors of abuse to “forgive,” “let go of anger” and “release negativity” should understand is that none of this happens without facing the grave reality of abuse. Tara, recounting a college lecture on Isaiah Berlin gave an instinct buried within me words in her book: “negative liberty… is the freedom from external obstacles or constraints. An individual is free in this sense if they are not physically prevented from taking action...Positive liberty...is freedom from internal constraints...it is self-mastery, the rule of the self, by the self.” To release negativity is an incomplete state. Neutrality is nothing to aspire to. But, to embrace positivity, we have to come face-to-face with our realities, and those realities include our realities of abuse. To let go of our anger, we must see change. To see change, we must generate it. And that will never occur in silence.

Today, I am at a better place with forgiveness than I have ever been. I am not angry as I write this. I have empathy for myself as I accept that I have had both perfect and imperfect reactions to the abuse I survived. That has manifested into peace. I feel like I’m doing my part to effect change. I don’t want those who have abused me or enabled the abuse to eat crow. Absolutely not. As I have mentioned, the sad yet liberating reality of surviving childhood abuse is that it doesn’t erase your love at all. If anything, it amplifies your need for receiving and expressing it. I’m writing today to send that love out to those who need it. I’m writing to remind others that we are out there, and we need you to use your voices and resources to be our allies. I’m writing to ask you to be kinder to the people you encounter because some of them are going through a whole lot. I’m writing to tell you that we can do better than simply eschewing negativity by actively generating positive change. I’m writing to tell my friends and family who need someone to stand by them as they climb out of a dark pit that I am here. I believe you. I want to hear your story. I know you deserve better. You are loved.