one of those nights

 

I had a nightmare last night and I should have seen it coming because before bed I felt a familiar depressive mood that I hadn’t felt for a while, but over the course of the day had sort of resurfaced. But before bed, I reminded myself that the feeling was temporary and in the morning I would feel better. And I did. I think for a long time I was confused about who I was – I thought I was the depression. I thought I was the isolation and the cynicism. I’d spent so much time estranged from myself that I thought that was who I was. I’ve already made this blogpost before, about being sunflowers and about acknowledging ourselves and our needs. But someone can say something and suddenly you’re 16 again and really want someone to like you, to see you.

 

The nightmare was actually about seeing something horrific, and no one acknowledging how bad it is. A true ‘it’s all in your head’ take. Perhaps, the reminder of that feeling sent me completely out of myself – the, no one will like you or love you if you talk about this. If you reveal those parts of yourself, you will be hard to love. But if no one has told you this today yet, I’ll repeat what my best friend thousands of kilometres away said while we were playing games the other morning: “You are easy to love.” You are easy to love. In fact, it’s the walls we put up in front of the vulnerable bits that make it difficult to feel or express those things. It’s the mask that keeps us from being truly seen.

 

To be loved is scary and its cringy. It’s, “let me leave all the things I thought I had to hide about myself in the open”. What happens when we start seeing our flaws as our successes instead of failures? What happens when we stop naming emotions as bad and good and just let ourselves be. Like, leave yourself alone. You’ve done so much, and you try so hard. You’re doing so well. Even when you make a mistake, we all make mistakes, it’s incredibly human – you’re just being your species. This year, taking responsibility for my depression and how it affected my relationships was the number one thing to uncovering my unhappiness. “Why didn’t they choose me?”, “Why didn’t they reply to my message?”, “How do I change myself to make them like me?”. Why do they have to like me? If I’m not important to them, why am I waiting for them when I can meet someone else who thinks I’m important? I needed to stop thinking I knew what my happiness looked like and let it show itself me to instead. Even when it was uncomfortable, even when it was different, but sticking it out because I can’t leave myself behind again.

what did you say?

I have a few favourite movies but the most recent one is ‘Better Days’ (2019) directed by Kwok Cheung Tsang. Better Days is about two teenagers, Chen Nian – a high school student who becomes the target of the school bullies and is ostracized for her mother, who while trying her best, can’t seem to escape accusations of being a scam artist. Xiao Bei, a teenager who dropped out of school and spends his time doing petty crime and getting into fights. Chen Nian just wants to write her final exams and turns to Xiao Bei to protect her, just for the time being. What results is a soft and tacit understanding between two people the world hasn’t loved enough. There are many scenes I’d like to write about, but for now I’ll settle on one. Towards the middle of the movie is montage of scenes between the two as they grow close, including one when they’re on a motorcycle, speeding through dark, orange-lit streets. Chen Nian says, “Don’t you think maybe I don’t deserve your kindness?” to which Xiao Bei replies, “What did you just say?” suggesting he didn’t hear her, but a small smile says he did – and he doesn’t care.

 

The scene tossed around in my head until I came across a reel that put it into focus, the reel by thedailyvictorian on Instagram that starts ‘Welcome to life, you’ll get hurt here’ is about the sweetness and bitterness of life, and all the things you can expect and look forward to. The one line that resonated with this scene was: “Or someday you’re gonna tell someone that one thing you’re sure makes you irredeemable. And when you search their eyes for disgust, you’ll find only love.” Chen Nian asks Xiao Bei this after saying she knew Hu Xiaodie was being bullied, and even though she wanted to be her friend, she was worried it would make her a target of the bullies too. Useless, because in the end the bullies targeted Chen Nian anyway. But when Chen Nian asks, “Don’t you think maybe I don’t deserve your kindness?”, she is revealing her shame and her guilt to which Xiao Bei doesn’t even acknowledge the question because it’s not a question. She doesn’t need to deserve his kindness – she has it regardless.

 

To ask ourselves if we deserve love, if we deserve kindness suggests there’s a state in which we are unlovable and undeserving – but the truth is, we aren’t. Ever. I used to think I was waiting to be a certain kind of person; that for now, I could only give love and kindness, I hadn’t earned receiving it yet. That was something I would have to work for. And I believed that up until very recently where I sat in my therapist’s office and said, “There isn’t a point where I become loveable, I am always loveable”. Even when my hair is unwashed, even when my room is messy, even when I miss all my shots in Apex Legends. To withhold love and kindness on the basis that you just don’t deserve it yet, is not a concept worth tolerating – instead when it arises, we should respond like Xiao Bei: “What did you just say? I didn’t hear you.”

on space dogs

Lately, I’ve been looking for myself in lots of things. In people, in places, in songs. I spent the last three years thinking that if I projected an imagine of ‘perfect’, then one day I would indeed be perfect. Instead, I let myself get further and further away from myself. It felt as if I was flung out into space and have been hurtling aimless since. This year has been a rescue mission: bring her home. I have a tattoo of the space dog Laika on my forearm, people always ask why, and I usually say something along the lines of ‘oh I just love the space race’. The truth is, I didn’t want her to be lonely. Laika was a dog that the Soviet Union sent to space in 1957, she was a street dog who everyone (but her) knew was destined to die in space. I loved the idea of a doggy cosmonaut, hated the idea of a poor little street dog never finding her way back home. Forgetting her or pushing her from my mind just didn’t feel right, drawing her close, keeping her in my thoughts, rewriting her story felt better. So I put her on my arm, so she would never be lonely again and neither would I. I have felt, absolutely lost in space.

 

So this year I sort of launched a mission to bring myself back – I pointed satellites to the deepest reaches of myself, I sent out probes, I played my favourite songs and movies on repeat hoping she would hear it. Hoping she would make her own way back. At first, I thought maybe there was no way to do this – no way to recover parts of yourself you’d lost. But then, I caught her frequency. A ping in the darkness. That was enough to know it was worth pursuing, if there was a chance, we’d wait for her forever. I wouldn’t say the rescue mission is complete, but it feels like everything I do lately brings her slightly closer. Her favourite food, her favourite clothes, the things she had forgotten she loved with her entire being.

 

I think what I didn’t realize is how important it was to look – before I’d look in one spot, and the deafening silence would be confirmation that trying was futile. I hate this, I’d think. This is only going to end horribly. But when I learnt to stick it out – to stretch a blanket out beneath the stars and watch, earnestly and whole-heartedly, did I see the real results. I think I hadn’t realized how cynical I’d become, how resigned to my fate I felt, not realizing that I’d never been that person – I’d always looked to the stars and felt comforted. Comforted by the many worlds and the possibilities. Stars burning regardless of what happened on earth. I wondered when I’d lost that part of myself, or when I’d stopped talking to the moon. But ultimately, that wasn’t important. I have the mission, and I’m going to finish it.  

sunflowers inside

If I told you I knew already, from the start, this would end like this – you would say I’m self-fulfilling prophecy. And maybe I am – but sometimes you look at something, and you already know its end. It’s “oh I’ve been down this path before, I know where it goes”. And even though I knew it wouldn’t end well, I kept going. Is that my fault or yours? I had the thought this year that I had finally woken from a nightmare, but I couldn’t decide what was better – to know none of it is real and finally break free from it? Or the ignorance of believing everything is out of your hands? Obviously the first, but I miss the bliss of the second option. The belief that none of this has anything to do with me – I am but a hapless passenger on this raft and it heads straight for a waterfall. What do you mean I can jump out? What do you mean I have to swim? Isn’t it better to float, isn’t better to accept the inevitable?

 

It's so much harder to acknowledge that this is a negative thought pattern I’ve created for myself – that at one point served me, but now no longer does. This is a piece of code I run to feel better about something that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s obsolete, but what if the new program isn’t as good? Isn’t as effective? What if it crashes the entire system? So what? Is that worse than falling off the waterfall? No one tells you how hard it is to unwrite the beliefs you have about yourself and your life, no one even tells you, “Hey, that might not be wholly accurate of what life is like”. No one tells you you’re going to turn 25 and your brain chemistry is going to change. Your old coping strategies won’t work anymore, and you will have to uproot everything and start again. It won’t be a choice. It’s living your life thinking you’re a succulent – minimal effort, little teaspoons of water and poor soil, only to discover you’re an incredibly picky house plant that needs water every second day, plant food and to be rotated in the afternoon sun so your leaves don’t burn. And you think, “when did I change?”, only to discover you were always the house plant, you just convinced yourself your needs weren’t important. You told yourself if you believed it hard enough you were a succulent.

 

One of my favourite poems is the ‘Sunflower Sutra’ by Allen Ginsberg, about a sunflower blackened by the grime and dirt of a railway track and urban pollution – but the poem is a reminder, “You were never a locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!”. My favourite part is in the last stanza: “We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside.” We are golden sunflowers inside. We forget how our environments can twist and change us but does not fundamentally change who and what we are. Sometimes we need to a reminder, and to listen to the reminder. Often, we see the red flags, the check engine lights, and we think, I don’t have time to unpack all that – let me just keep going. But if there’s anything I’ve learned those things always catch up to you, the car breaks down and suddenly you can’t move forward even if you wanted to. All this to say, I loved you very much, and of all the people to teach me this lesson, I’m glad it was you – but my heart aches for a future where we could have said, ‘let’s not go down this path, let’s go this way instead’. How lonely it was, to realize we were heading two different directions, even though I would meet plenty of new people, old friends would greet me with warm hugs and new friends would emerge as pillars of strength. I found myself, caught between the known and the unknown and decided I could no longer do what I’d always done and forced myself down an unfamiliar path. And I hated it, I dug my heels and tried my best to resist this – but it was a wave and now I can’t stop, I just have to see where it goes. I’ll miss you, but the person you knew was a liar. She didn’t even realize she was lying to you because she was lying to herself.

 

 

ghosts of district six

 There’s this episode of Unsolved Mysteries that is about the ‘tsunami spirits’, about a phenomenon in Japan after the 2011 tsunami and subsequent nuclear power station melt down – that people would come across spirits who didn’t realize they were dead, unaware of the catastrophe. Taxi drivers would pick up clients only to take them nowhere and for the people to disappear suddenly from the backseat. Young men would be seen walking home, with no home to go to. I couldn’t finish the episode, because whether or not you believe in ghosts or spirits or an afterlife, nothing is more relatable than the feeling of trying to get home. Looking at the images and videos of District Six, how many people still know the way back to their houses? To the corner store? To the cinema? 

Two ladies stopped me for directions to Buitengracht Street yesterday, and I said, follow the road till you see a McDonalds and head up towards the mountain. How intimately I know my way, how every curb stone holds a piece of me. I walked down Queen Victoria Street and saw myself, a few years earlier, walking from where I used to work in the library, up the road and to the right on my way to the Vida the next block over. I often wonder if there are ghosts, what will my ghost haunt? Which streets and sidewalks, what rooms, and buildings? What place has left such an impression on me, that I couldn’t dare separate from it. 

Looking at District Six – at the streets full of people and cars, I wonder where the ghosts are. Are they in their homes? On the street? Are they walking home from a friend’s house, the sky the soft indigo pink of sunset or are they walking to work at the crack of dawn, new sunlight warming their faces. What sounds do they remember? What are they humming under their breath? Who are they thinking about when they look out the window? I don’t understand how it simultaneously breaks my heart and comforts it, to know people loved like we do, cried like we do, that every experience has been felt before. I wonder about what happens to a place when you can no longer return to it. Where does it go?