Musings

S T A F F B L O G

Published every month, our blog discusses mental health, intersectionality, and Asian accountability in other social movements (particularly Black Lives Matter).

Getting Triggered
- Simon Wu, 4/27/21
CW: Eating Disorders

“I’ve survived this once before, I can do it again.”

It’s frustrating to not have agency over your physical body. It’s even more frustrating to not understand when, how, or why that agency was lost.

Usually, I’ll know what triggers my body to reject its basic instincts. Sometimes it’s a location or a time of the year. Perhaps it’s a certain food, or a familiar bathroom stall (I remember each and every one). Maybe it’s staring in a mirror or watching myself on Zoom for too long. But sometimes, it’s nothing at all. No leads, no hints, no hope.

Logic is comforting. A structured line of cause and effect can be reasoned through, the problem can be diagnosed and treated. We can make a plan or a goal, something to work towards—to look forwards to. But irrationality is far scarier. You don’t know where to begin or what you can do, and it just feels so fucking helpless.

I like to think I’ve grown stronger, that I’ve slain this beast once before and I’ll know how to do it again. But this particular relapse makes me feel like all my past experiences, the work I’ve done on myself—it was all useless. It makes me feel like I’m going through it the first time all over again.

Everyone be kind to yourselves. Sometimes, irrationality has its own ways of sorting things out.
~SWu

Having Tea with My Inner Demons
- Emma Chang, 1/24/21

For the past week, I’ve been sitting in my room. My suitcase is packed, my luggage clustered by the door. Waiting. Ready to go. In less than four days, the new semester will begin, and yet I can’t help but feel a strange dread towards my imminent return to campus. An absence of enthusiasm for my continued studies still saturates my brain. I had hoped that spending time at home would help me heal, yet here I am: still wallowing in stagnation. Each monotonous day passes slowly as I confine myself in my room. Waiting. Ready to go. Gazing at the gray, rain drenched landscape so typical of the Pacific Northwest, the sky offering no indication of providing a respite from the deluge.

My cello has sat in its cherry red case for months. The third movement of Schumann’s Fantasiestucke lies untouched on my music stand. I feel like my youth has been stolen away. My passion and energy drained away, seeping into the cracks of the fractured fissures framing the world. I’m so tired…...and yet when confronted with the broken world I see before me I know I am nothing more than a scared little girl. The same thoughts chase each other in an endless ouroboros through my head. Nervous breakdowns every week. Frustration. Having to wait weeks before I could get in an appointment with a therapist. Frustration. My medications aren’t working as well as they used to. Fear. If they’ve stopped working once, will they stop working again? What if I run out of solutions? Fear. Will I be trapped in this endless cycle of recovery and relapse forevermore? If I’ve been working towards recovery, why am I still stuck in the same place? Is it simply futile for me to keep trying to live my life when my own mind seems so dead set against it? Framed by the stark winter background, my inner demons thrive.

And yet life continues. I’ve been reminding myself that the path to recovery is by no means a linear one. Nor is it predictable. There will be setbacks. Unexpected events. Frustration and anger and fear. I may walk through valleys for days on end. I may scale imposing mountains. There will be storms that I must weather and times where I must shelter in place. As long as I keep moving and searching for a solution I will get better eventually. For the present moment, I can stop and allow myself to recuperate before persisting on.

Recently, I came across a concept derived from Buddhism referred to as “Having Tea with Mara.” The story goes that Mara, a demon king, fought with Buddha. Even after his initial defeat, he returned again and again. But instead of constantly fighting Mara or pretending he wasn’t there, Buddha would invite Mara to tea. For a moment, they would be at peace with one another, simply accepting and acknowledging the presence of the other.

In a flight of fancy, I chose to explore this idea, the idea of acknowledging my inner demons. I sat down and drew them: dysthymia, OCD, loneliness, heartbreak, anxiety, grief, intrusive thoughts. Made up other names and silly personality traits for them. Now my pain was no longer intangible and invisible. I could look at them and say “I see you and acknowledge your existence in my life.” In this way, I found it easier to accept the darkest parts of myself.

On rainy days like today, I put on the kettle and make a cup of ginger peach tea. I look out the window while the water boils, knowing that though the struggle is far from over. Dysthymia and OCD will always be a part of me. They aren’t simply going to disappear with medication or therapy, but they can be made more manageable over time. I am learning how to live with them. And realizing that dealing with mental illness doesn’t have to be a constant battle. There are times when we can be at peace.

New Year, Same Old Me
- Simon Wu, 12/31/20

For a while now, I’ve noticed a pattern of stale sameness in my quotidian quarantine routines. As days blur into weeks that blur into months that blur into an entire year, I’ve found what’s newly foreign about life during Covid-19 isn’t the loss of familiar day-to-day structures, but rather my newfound degree of comfort with an absence of purposeful architecture. I’ve found comfort in not expecting anything new. I’ve found comfort in accepting uncertainty. Above all, I’ve found comfort in squandering the luxury of time—to just exist in a frozen moment of my life without worrying about what I’ll do in the future.

Except time doesn’t stop for me. It doesn’t stop for anyone. And as we’re approaching the end of the year, I’m shaken from my cradle of comforting mundanity. When I look back on the year 2020, I don’t really process what has happened. Rather, my mind skips to what didn’t happen: the milestones and experiences missed, the hours of productivity and moments with loved ones lost. I view the year as time robbed rather than time lived, and immediately, I begin to regret my previous contentedness with being unproductive. What is it about the upcoming New Year that rekindled my discomfort with doing nothing?

“Time is money, time is wasted.”

I’ve noticed we tend to articulate time with capitalist language. We are socialized into understanding time as a zero-sum, linear concept. Once time passes, it’s supposedly lost. And maybe these articulations are subtle, but they manifest themselves in impactful ways. I’ve been taught that mistakes in my academic career will perpetually put me behind all my peers, unless I directly sacrifice indulging in self-forgiveness and happiness to catch up. I’ve been haunted by regrets and what ifs each night before I go to sleep, analyzing them as opportunity costs to my self-fulfillment. I’ve been told that my years in college will supposedly be the “best years” of my life—the best years that have now been mooted by Covid-19.

What I’ve realized is that our relationship with time is artificially constructed, and there’s no clearer example of this than all the talk I’m hearing about being “ready for 2020 to end” and “let’s hope 2021 will be a new year.” That’s not to say I don’t believe in optimism and leaving behind negative experiences, because I do believe that compartmentalizing is an incredibly useful tool to process emotions. Rather, when we demarcate years as distinct from each other, we may lose a degree of flexibility in using this tool. If the start of 2021 sucks, we don’t need to wait for 2022 to superficially appear before we can leave the old bullshit behind. We don’t need to feel obligated to change or start something new just based on a calendar created by some white Romans long ago who wanted to celebrate Easter earlier in the year*. Time may heal all wounds, but healing is a process that doesn’t have a timeline.

Perhaps it’s not time itself, but rather our orientation towards time, that creates our frustrations with unproductivity. If we can only view time as a commodity, then wasting it is inevitable. And if maximizing profits is what’s most important under capitalist logics, then self-devaluation is also inevitable, and no amount of “trying to be more productive” can bring us to a truly consistent place of contentedness. Maybe we don’t waste time, but time instead wastes us. Let’s make it our New Year’s resolution for 2021 to begin investing in forgiving frameworks of time rather than parasitic relationships with productivity, and maybe our first step could be abolishing “New Year’s resolutions” entirely. After all, what’s so unreasonable about just setting and starting our goals at our own pace?

Happy New Year, everyone!
~SWu

*and I’m not even going to BEGIN to get into the histories of how the Gregorian calendar has been used to delegitimize plenty of non-European traditions like Lunar calendars or Indigenous holidays

Foundations for the Future
Reflections on mutual aid, abolition, and justice
- Jing Jing Wang, 9/30/2020

The past three or so months have been less than ideal in a lot of ways, namely the continued pandemic in the USA and the systemic racism that continues to this day in our world. But in the midst of it, mutual aid has been brought into the public eye on a scale that we haven’t seen before. It’s important to recognize that mutual aid is not new in any way, various marginalized communities, and I believe especially the disability community, have been practicing mutual aid and alternative care webs for a long, long time.

As the protests, led primarily by youth and poor and working class people of all races, in Minneapolis, Seattle, and across the country began, we saw an outpouring of mutual aid and solidarity. I began to get involved as well. I watched and heard stories of people who donated masks, graphic designers making flyers about everything from legal information to protest safety guidelines, medics and first aid responders who took time after their own work shifts to staff marches, groups that organized mobile kitchens, individuals trained in de escalation protect protestors from white nationalist aggressors, healing practitioners offered up services for those who were traumatized by the police violence. Until then, I had never seen mutual aid form in my life in such an intentional way, clearly recognized by the language we used, and through a shared understanding that it was made necessary by the systems in place that fail us.

We join in hopes of a better future, where this kind of love is the basis of society. These communities are diverse groups of individuals who are working together to create the foundations and microcosms of the kind of society they want in the future. To see the groundwork of trust and investment in each other happening in real time has been incredibly rewarding. Alycia Ramirez says it well in an interview for Crosscut, “I would hope that this mutual aid gives people a glance into the future.” It definitely has for me, but the process is far from easy.

As we push for abolition of the police and the prison system, both of which have inflicted immeasurable violence against communities of color and specifically Black people, we are also forced to confront difficult questions about the future. How do we begin to imagine a future without the criminal justice system and police as we know it? What might take its place? These are not new questions, though some of us may be tackling them more in depth for the first time. Transformative and restorative justice are examples of possible alternatives to a punitive system.

One of the first times I encountered some of the concepts behind restorative justice was about three years ago. At an event, a friend of mine was pitching the idea that we have to reconcile with rapists in some way. Looking back on it, she was kind of getting at a point that Angela Davis articulates in “History is a Weapon”:

Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.

Davis’ point rings especially true if we are imagining a future without the punitive criminal justice system. The first step to finding a solution is admitting you have a problem. If we “disappear” these people by labeling them as criminals and imprisoning them, we will never really tackle the root causes.
To be transparent, my understanding of restorative and transformative justice are still rudimentary, and if you’re interested, there are many resources out there that you can use to educate yourself the same way I am doing now. The definitions of restorative and transformative justice are hard to pin down, but both recognize the value of all people and are alternatives to the current punitive criminal justice system. Restorative justice is a process in which every party that was involved in the incident has an opportunity to process what occurred, to meet with each other, repair whatever harm has been caused, and reintegrate into their community. Transformative justice is similar, also relying on community care and mediators or circle keepers instead of the state or other institutions, but with a larger scope. Transformative justice works to change the systems that allowed such violence to happen, not only restore the relationships and well being of those involved. But both processes have the same goal at heart and the difference in terminology seems to be a matter of preference at times.
If you want to learn more, here are some resources I used to write this piece. Some of these will undoubtedly show up on our resources pages, which will be continued to be added to over time. I strongly encourage you to do some self-education on the topics of abolition, Black liberation, mutual aid, restorative and transformative justice, and the intersections and nuances of the Black experience (queer, trans, disabled, etc.). And if you’re able to, get involved with mutual aid in your community. COVID19 is not ending anytime soon in my opinion, and the pandemic of racism isn’t either, this fight will continue.

History is a Weapon by Angela Davis
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/davisprison.html
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/transformative-justice-explained
https://transformharm.org/transformative-justice/
http://restorativejustice.org/
https://crosscut.com/2020/06/food-medics-free-rides-home-seattle-protests-see-rush-volunteer-support

What space does “Black Lives Matter” have for non-Black Asian Activism?
A note of reflection, accountability, and action regarding It’s Real and Black Lives Matter moving forward.
- Simon Wu, 8/13/2020

Formatively, the months following the June 6th Black Lives Matter protests have been challenging and uncomfortable for me. But this discomfort isn’t a pejorative, painful, or purposeless experience. In reality, I’ve come to understand it as powerfully constructive--not for the sake of bettering myself, but for the sake of reshaping how I understand my interactions with the world. In fact, these are 2 things we (non-Black Asians) should begin to normalize:

That certain forms of discomfort are radically productive, since protecting institutional power and structures are MEANT to feel comfortable/secure if you profit from them.
That when we ask, “to what end does the role of education play in transformative justice,” the answer shouldn’t be “to educate myself better” -- but rather, “to guide my actions, ideas, and politics to minimize harm and maximize good for Black folx."

In other words, “how can we ensure that we, as non-Black Asians, avoid making Black Lives Matter about ourselves?”

To better engage in critical reflection of where we stand in relation to Black Lives Matter, we need to understand the recent shifts in political discourse surrounding the movement. “Where did the momentum and energy for Black Lives Matter go?” The freedom to move on from the June social media tsunami is a privilege that Black people can’t afford, because for them, it’s not a trend. But for non-Black folx, it can be. In this light, the question we should be asking isn’t “where did the energy go”, but rather, “what allowed the energy to escape?” As non-Black Asians, we often hold an entitlement to the “people of color” coalition, but only insofar as it centers our struggles without holding us to the same support and accountability we demand from the Black community.

“As our identity classifications evolve, that’s my hope here. That "people of color" will no longer do—that we won’t give into the illusion of identity it creates.”

--Jason Parham, founder and editor-in-chief of Spook magazine (1)

Non-Black Asians have valid racial pain, but that doesn’t prevent us from fetishizing our relationship with it in ways that don’t belong to us, like trying to brand anti-Asian racial slurs as the “Asian N-word,” like exceptionalizing anti-Asian violence during COVID-19, or analogizing it to what it feels like to be Black in America. We can afford to be tourists and visit Black suffering. Black people do not have that same luxury.

And if the words “but not ALL (non-Black) Asians are anti-Black--” are forming in your head right now, take a moment to contemplate where your need to exceptionalize yourself from your privilege or to absolve yourself from feeling discomfort comes from, and ask yourself: is this line of argument critically productive? To what end am I making this distinction? How does this actually help Black folx?

We are trained to believe we’re exceptional--that we don’t have racial privilege despite our relative proximity to whiteness, that we are entitled to feeling the same pain as Black/Indigenous folx just because we’re all “people of color,” that we are the worst victims of the Model Minority Myth despite profiting from the socioeconomic privilege it grants us at the expense of other racial minorities. Nine times out of ten, it’s not productive to fixate on the distinctions between Asian and White anti-Blackness, in the same way it’s not productive to argue, “not ALL white people are racist,” because it obfuscates the greater picture: this justification buries any culpability we have from profiting from anti-Blackness, simply by virtue of being non-Black. That’s never to argue that we individually shouldn’t try to change, but rather, that ignoring the complexities of our interactions with institutions and histories makes investing in anti-Blackness inevitable. Again: our focus shouldn’t be directed towards grandstanding on exceptional individuals, but rather towards changing the current political infrastructure that renders individual exceptions meaningless. As non-Black Asians, we should not center ourselves in Black Lives Matter, even when this activism is taking place in our own communities. And although our activism can come from places of good intent, what we often fail to understand is the difference between building coalition politics around Black movements instead of building coalition politics to accommodate ourselves--case in point, “Yellow Peril supports Black Power:”

“While at the time, “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” was a way for Asian Americans to voice support for Black communities and unite against oppressive forces, activists point out that today, Black Lives Matter is a different movement in a different era.”

--Taylor Weik, co-founder and editor of よ! magazine (2)

“Our politics need to evolve with the racial landscape in America. It shouldn’t be ignored that some of the most vocal “Asian American Activists” happen to be middle-to-upper class, East and South Asians. Given some of the more prominent examples of Asian American Activism during June (e.g. the Yale letter to Asian parents, Subtle Asian Traits posts, etc.), it’s becoming increasingly more apparent that the extent of this type of activism prioritizes the wrong things: centering how fighting antiblackness can help the racial progress of Asians, as opposed to actually focusing on supporting Black life because it’s the decent and uncomfortable thing to do.

It’s undeniably true that we need to actively repay and defend the selfless, thankless contributions that Black women have given to (quite literally) every other disenfranchised community in America, especially Asian Americans. And I understand the macropolitical necessity to galvanize support and avoid alienating older generations who still hold critical amounts of political power in our communities. But on an individual and interpersonal level, the way we currently politicize activism analogous to “Yellow Peril supports Black Power” frames supporting the Black Lives Matter movement around the needs and stories of the Asian community instead of the Black community. We shouldn’t need a self-serving reason to support Black Lives Matter, because it’s been historically proven that with this logic, once “Yellow Peril” disappears, so does our resolve to support Black Power. Our obligation to support Black life is not contingent on its utility to Asian life.

We can show our support for Black folx with “Black Lives Matter” instead of “Yellow Peril for Black Power.” Let’s normalize prioritizing and believing Black folx when they address Asian anti-Blackness, instead of reinvesting in the Asian activist-ventriloquist, who speaks for Black life instead of doing the hard work of building Black credibility in non-Black Asian spaces.

Understanding why this blog post is productive also requires understanding why it’s unproductive. It’s ultimately unproductive for a non-Black Asian American to be lecturing, because it is not sustainable to only acknowledge Asian anti-Blackness when it comes from non-Black Asians. It’s unproductive for me to be writing about Blackness for the same reasons--because it directly trades off with the amount of credibility we give to Black people when they write about their Blackness. It was unproductive to have started this post with my discomfort, because my feelings shouldn’t be the object of interest in this broader, trans/inter/non-coalitional movement, no matter how Black folx may choose to articulate its boundaries. Above all, it’s time for us, non-Black Asians, to decenter our own political interests from Black Lives Matter, and to hold ourselves accountable for our counterproductive and parasitic politics. I’ll end with this question: what are you willing to give up in order to protect Black life?

~SWu

Address criticism to: simonswu23@gmail.com

References:
1https://www.wired.com/story/rethinking-phrase-people-of-color/
2https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/history-behind-yellow-peril-supports-black-power-why-some-find-n1228776

The Privilege to Grieve
- Simon Wu, 3/31/20

One of the most fascinating phenomena that the human psyche has ever evolved is its capacity for self-sabotage, one that betrays every instinct for self-preservation, for self-aggrandizing posturing, for selfishness.

Self-sabotage conceals itself with many masks--seasonal patterns of hormonal imbalance, debilitating fears of elapsed or imminent failure, or the masquerade of the imposter in your social circle, just waiting for the facade to drop. And given the irrational nature of psychological self-sabotage, we can chalk most of these symptoms up to the fog of socialized norms, qualifiers, and standards--emotional conditions that can gradually be peeled back with the steady hand of logic, ones which can be replaced with countersocial reterritorializations that repudiate the credibility of racially-coded beauty standards and meritocratic success models.

And in this strange period of March 2020, we begin to see the collisions of racialized pandemics and job security, political dissonance and ecological devastation, choked global networks and college decisions. Some of us may be forced to quarantine with shelter and food but toxic parents, with disappointing college decisions but an access to basic education, with geo-racial security but financial anxiety. And in these tangled times, we might also turn to the blade of logic to clear the way, to provide us with the clarity to see past the thicket of hype-driven WeChat articles and Ivy-covered gates.

But sometimes, the most subtle forms of self-sabotage locate themselves in periods of critical reflexivity and social awareness. Sometimes, we fail to recognize the blade of logic can be double-edged: it reminds you that you’ll be okay, but also punishes you for ever worrying you won’t be. After all, why am I complaining? I have nothing to be depressed about. I don’t even have it that bad. So many people would KILL to have what I have--[a roof over my head and food on the table/a college education/a family that unconditionally supports and loves me].

And thus, today’s mask of sabotage shelters the question: who has the right to feel sad? Or perhaps more accurately, who has the privilege to grieve?

Understanding that privilege is universally a *touchy* subject, one deserving of nuance I can’t completely/authentically deliver and encompass, I’m nevertheless going to make a few things things clear:

I believe recognizing and internalizing various and intersectional layers of social privilege will ALWAYS be a good thing.
While I do believe to a certain extent in the ordering of privilege (e.g. East Asian folks tend to have easier access to socio-economic and educational opportunities than Black and Indigneous folks), the intersections of privilege run an infinitesimally small race to the bottom. Every person in the world has some degree of privilege in one way or another, and many attempts to run (for lack of a better term) the “Oppression Olympics” rely on essentialized and artificial qualifiers.
Privilege is an intrinsically uncomfortable discussion because it works AGAINST normative power: it isn’t meant to be visible and symbiotic because it requires the re-thinking of histories and values. It requires unraveling the myth of the Land of Opportunity, of hopes for Rags to Riches, of equity under equality. It requires understanding the foundation of the United States, Canada, and other settler states as ones fueled by Black exploitation and Indigenous genocide. It requires the recognition of people with disabilities, of the normalization of patriarchal politics and homonormative acceptance. It’s a task that is all too easy to avoid, to push back, or to skim over. And consequently, it’s why this uncomfortability is so important to experience.
While I don’t believe anyone is a bad person because they hold privilege, I DO believe that it is productive to hold some level of guilt about privilege INSOFAR AS this guilt helps us recognize and remember of the ways in which we subliminally participate in and profit off of different structures of power, so that much-needed discussions about exploitation, dispossession, and expropriation are less often swept under the rug.
Finally, nothing I or anyone else believes can be divorced from the position of sociopolitical privilege that they occupy. I implore you to critically analyze my privilege before evaluating these ideas.

All this being said, I’m not here to reiterate my usual spiel about self-reflexivity along the sociopolitical spectrum. I actually want to discuss a flaw in the traditional ways we analyze privilege: one that takes into account hyperficial socialization and the psychomaterial implications it creates. After all, what does the privilege to grieve actually mean? I’m using this concept to characterize nebulous questions bound by layers of moral skepticism: Who is more deserving to feel pain? Whose pain is the most valid?

This quandary is identifiable when we cite examples of our socio-economic privilege to disqualify or trivialize prioritizing our mental health. We may tell ourselves “other people have it worse than me” to avoid reaching out for help or seeking therapy, that “there are kids starving in Africa” after purging or skipping another meal. I’m not asking for everyone to ignore the significance of privilege entirely, but rather to realize that the proximate suffering of others has no inverse effect on our own pain when the pain is a product of localized socialization--that when we isolate both instances in a vacuum, we remove important contextual information that oversimplifies the comparison. Different people are raised with different standards, with different are different metrics for success and different consequences for failure. And while these distinctions may be superficial, they still can create real, psychological impacts.

College decisions immediately come to mind. And I’m not talking about college in context the millions of households across the world who face actual, structural barriers to attaining a college education, but rather the specific demographic of Asian American households which valorize a future hidden between Ivy walls, of students who have been taught that anything less than top 10 equals failure. And for everyone disappointed by college decisions, I’ll save you from re-reading all the words you’ve heard before: that college isn’t a reflection of your true worth, that the college application process is a lottery, etc…because even though we might logically recognize that to be true, it doesn’t make us FEEL good. It doesn’t break down the emotional weights that squeeze down on our chests, feelings of self-worthlessness, losing confidence, and of course, comparing ourselves to our peers. And while the material impacts of only getting into a state school are incomparable to not being able to go or afford to go to college at all, it doesn’t disqualify the psychological pain that we experience.

And obviously, I want to point out nuance. I’m not trying to provide an excuse for the falsely-equating of the impacts of individuals disparately affected by institutional discrimination, nor do I condone trivializing the magnitude of inescapable, structural oppression that backs certain forms of psychological pain but not others. But even if no conversation we have is ever complete without including discussions of privilege, it doesn’t explain why we shouldn’t allow ourselves to feel pain when we desperately need to.

These words come from a Chinese, queer male senior living in a Washington State suburb, who only got into the two least competitive colleges they applied to out of sixteen total--and I implore you to consider that from two different yet related perspectives: perhaps one of understandable emotional pain and bleak statistics, but perhaps also one of incredible educational privilege and precious opportunity.

And eventually, after you reach a certain level of social/emotional awareness, there’s probably nothing more anyone can tell you to make you feel better. But at the same time, no one can tell you that you don’t deserve to feel like shit.

FInally, to end with some wise words from my QUEEN Florence Welch:

It’s always Darkest before the Dawn*.

Illegal Hugs and Coronavirus Kisses,
~SWu

*(“Shake it Out”--Ceremonials, Florence + the Machine)

To Be Weak
- Linda Liu, 11/20/19

I am writing this on November 2nd, 2019.

On this exact date one year ago, I learned how to be weak.

It was the day after I submitted my first application to university. There was some sort of strange, mechanical emptiness in the world around me. I felt a crushing need to write something down.

So I locked myself inside a dark room.

But as I stared into the ghostly glow of my laptop screen, my mind was suddenly blank. And it remained blank for the full two hours I spent staring at my blinking cursor.

I anticipated words to be spilled; I expected sentences to flow; I visualized a wave of emotions boiling through my veins. I waited for my keyboard to roar under the rage of my burning fingertips—but it never did.

Nothing came out of my mind, my hands, or my mouth. The screen of my emotional diary remained blank with the cursor like a mocking presence. All I could manage to type in was a single period. The end.

Fuck this, I thought. I’m going to that concert tonight.

On November 2nd, 2018, just under 24 hours of submitting my university application, I went to a concert, alone. I went to a concert alone and sat in silence. I was surrounded by waves of screaming and crying.

I felt happy.

I expected myself to feel so much more. But I didn’t.

There was no rushing urge to scream or shout or laugh or cry. In fact, there was no surge of any sort of emotion in that click of a mouse just a day before. The green checkmarks on the Common App screen were reassuring, but not in the way I imagined.

For all my life, I have been living in a fear of disappointment. I would rather see my coaches scream in anger than catch the glimpse of disappointment in their eyes. I feared the look that told me they expected so much more, that I could have done so much more, that I should have done so much more. I feared the sound of my mother’s sigh and the lingering sadness of that wordless expression. And I did everything to avoid that fear.

As I sat stewing in the heavy silence of my room that night, I began to pick apart the tangled lines of my fear and its origins. Lingering in the shadows was the long list of expectations—of hopes and of dreams written over my shoulders and crawling down my spine. It was the weight I carried for my family back home and the burden I chose to swallow alone. It was my fear of not living up to the figure that was drawn in my books.

And before this day, I tried to be everything I thought people wanted to see. I tried to grow into the exact shape of that future shadow, and I did everything to avoid the sound of a sigh. Because a sigh said so much more than any word or phrase: a sigh was confirmation of my incompetence, of my failure, and of my defeat. And a sigh never failed to remind me that I was not enough and that I might never be.

But on the night of November 2nd, I was enough.

As if being lifted by some bizarre force, in those first moments past midnight, I felt invincible. I was suddenly no longer afraid because I was tired of constantly being fearful, tired of being worried, and tired of being tired. I was tired of writing in an emotional diary like it was some miraculous cure. I was tired of acting strong.

Because I am not strong.

And I only appeared strong because I have not yet learned how to be weak; because I have not yet understood that it was okay to be weak.
There is no way for me to forever avoid the burning gaze of my naked reality—because I am weak. I am not strong enough and never will be strong enough to carry that burden of expectations so high above me. I am weak because I want to live for myself.

The results no longer mattered. What mattered was what I lived up to.

And on the night of November 2nd, I was happy.

The Liminality of Adolescence
- Jeffrey Liao, 11/8/19

November. A month of leaves falling crisply in a perfect circle, of endless green giving way to red and gold, of skies pregnant with rain. November is a shapeshifter - it is sunset hues against a summery dusk, it is salt-slapped wind against cheeks, it is thunderstorms pounding against windows. The liminality present in November - that transitory period between autumn and winter, unsure of itself and its place in the world - is a mirror to my own state. As a high school senior - almost eighteen, spending a final year together with family and friends, preparing college applications - life is currently stuck in the in-between, the pause on the page before a new chapter, the fly caught in spider silk, suspended in amber.

For high school seniors, November is a time of frenzy. Early deadlines for college applications, the half-way mark of the first semester winding down, the liminality of existing between what is and what could be. At my school, where almost a third of the student body is Asian-American, where immigrant upbringings have shaped our worldviews, there exists a certain pressure - whether implicit or defined - to gain acceptance to a prestigious university. The Ivy League - and other schools of such caliber - are often deified in immigrant communities as a mystical golden gate to success. Education - specifically elite higher education - is seen as an opportunity to climb the American social ladder that our parents were never afforded.

Yet such pressure is often both stifling and regressive. In a generation that faces higher mental health concerns than ever before, in a society that increasingly views college as a necessity rather than an option, the pressure on our youth to perform well in all aspects of life - be it academic, extracurricular, or social - at such a young age can cause or amplify feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and mental turmoil. Last year, when I read online that a girl in a nearby town committed suicide after getting rejected early from her dream school, I felt my body grow numb and heavy. I wondered what it meant to work four years tirelessly, striving toward the same goal, the same dream, waiting for you on the horizon, off in the endless distance. . .

For current seniors, this horizon is sharply dawning upon us. It is our choice to either allow ourselves to be blinded by its mysticism, its fiery hues and promises, or to realize that there will always be another horizon - another dream - waiting for us, if only we reach out and grab it. I refuse to let myself become defined by the name of whichever college I attend. I refuse to let myself succumb to the academic pressure that has become normalized in our present society. When I open my decision letters in the coming months, whether it’s an exalted ‘Congratulations’ on the screen or the dreaded ‘We regret to inform you. . .,’ I know that no matter what the outcome is, my effort - my aspirations and accomplishments, my mistakes and shortcomings, the experiences that have shaped who I am - still stand proudly. And that’s enough.

In Defense of Pettiness
- Ana Chen, 10/31/19

I recently read about the INFJ Door Slam, and I was shook enough to write a whole post on pettiness.

Basically, the INFJ Door Slam is when an INFJ (my personality type) cuts someone from their life. The number of times I have done this: to fake friends, a few dates, and one ex-boyfriend, is extraordinary. Although not always a person of extremes, I’m unabashedly picky with my interpersonal relationships - it takes me forever to open up to anyone, resulting in a small friend group, and I can immediately sense when something is wrong in a relationship.

According to several credible sources on the Internet, INFJ’s are people of contradictions. Infamous for devoting themselves to their loved ones (read: blinding themselves in the process), they second-guess their intuitions for the sake of maintaining a relationship. But when they finally reach a point where they can’t stand the energy, time, or pain caused by another person, they snap to the opposite extreme: they sever the relationship on all fronts.

Bruh, I thought, scrolling through the article on the INFJ Door Slam. If this isn’t my petty ass.

Following on the heels of the first thought: why do you call it pettiness? This is your defense mechanism. And it’s a good one.

I have never once regretted a “Door Slam” - I need order in my life and relationships, and removing toxic people from my life has always turned out well. But truth be told, I fear being labeled as petty. This fear nags at me during Door Slams, during my refusals to socialize, during each time I bemoan my high school. I fear being viewed as a diva. And I’ve defined much of my life by pushing aside that fear, a habit honed after years of pursuing individualistic activities such as writing and ballet.

So, going back to Door Slams: is my refusal to accept a compromise - my refusal to distance someone, rather than to completely shut them out - just an arrogant breed of immaturity? Do I use self-love and a “take-no-prisoners” attitude to justify self-righteousness?

With a bit of reframing, I came to the essence of the question. I was worried about how my actions would be perceived by other people. Would outsiders see me as immature or petty, especially those on the receiving end of the “Door Slam?” But a counterargument: considering how I’m cutting them out of my life, considering how I know what’s best for myself, why should I even care what they think?

Pettiness is a measurement of personality. It’s not considered attractive, mature, or normal for anyone to jump to extremes. I’m inevitably affected by others’ expectations towards interpersonal relationships and activities; my tendency to chase after validation from others only amplifies this. Being someone who overthinks and (usually) considers as many perspectives as possible before acting, the perspective that feeds most easily into my self-doubt and my overanalytical tendencies is the one opposite to my instincts.

Undue concern with trivial matters, especially of a small-minded or selfish nature: that’s the Google definition of petty. The key word for me is “trivial:” any intangible measurement of size is extremely subjective. A trivial action for others - such as deleting someone’s number, ignoring a text, refusing an invitation, or snapping a retort - could have huge implications for me. This is especially true for anyone who shares my sensitive nature, who tends to spend a good ten minutes scrutinizing a text message or to jump to conclusions about people (read: this is not always good).

It’s another INFJ quality that they suppress their high sensitivity out of shame - even when their intuitions are correct, they worry about being labeled as oversensitive and high-strung. So matters that are by nature huge to them (or any other sensitive personality types, honestly), especially signs indicating the deterioration of a relationship, are pushed aside.

This is especially true for women, who are seen as bitchy, high-maintenance, or obsessive if they refuse to settle for less than what they deserve. In my first romantic relationship, when I realized I was putting in all the effort, I was scared to speak up or to initiate a break-up. What if I were just being needy and sensitive? What if I were taking things too seriously? I clung onto that relationship for half a year, suppressing all my better instincts. It was no surprise that when he broke up with me, I immediately lashed back: within fifteen minutes of the break-up, I’d deleted all his texts, pictures, and socials. I felt furious: at him, yes, but at myself most of all - why had I settled for him when my time and energy were already strained to the breaking point? How had my fears of leaving him overcome all my better instincts, especially when I felt so liberated by the break-up?

I don’t regret that choice. And as aforementioned, I don’t regret any of my choices with my relationships. Time and time again, the simple act of discarding toxic people has proven so healthy. I’ve learned to use a break-up, whether that be romantic or platonic, to invest my time and energy in myself, to explore the parts of me that I’d diminished or shut off for the sake of a relationship, to refocus on genuinely fruitful endeavors and relationships. And there are fruitful endeavors and relationships that deserve your energy - it’s just a matter of finding them.

Lack of importance or worth is another Google definition of petty. But by shrugging off small details, by defining the minuscule as unimportant, you run the danger of relabeling yourself as sensitive or needy, of stripping away your own importance and worth. This isn’t to say that overthinking is healthy - in many cases, it’s not. But it’s just as unhealthy to talk down to - or diminish - yourself and your needs. It’s healthy to change your thought patterns and expectations, but not when doing so cuts into your self-worth.

And if you’re struggling with this dilemma, if you fear judgement, think of it this way: you are not reframing pettiness as self-love and a realization of self-worth. Self-love and self-worth are reframed as pettiness by a set of unrealistic, harmful, and often painful expectations.

I’m not saying that pettiness is a good thing. Rather, you should think deeply before labeling your actions as “pettiness.” So-called “pettiness” for the sake of your mental/emotional health is not selfish or immature; to the contrary, it speaks to a very strong sense of self and purpose. I call this kind of “pettiness” self-preservation: it treads the line between self-care and selfishness. Of course, self-preservation implies a certain defense mechanism (which it is for me!); this is different for each person. Note: defense mechanisms aren’t bad, either.

Pettiness for the sake of hurting someone else, though - that’s bad. And sometimes the line between these two sorts of pettiness isn’t clear, especially if you’re doing something like a Door Slam. I know this touches on the sensitive topic of family, but that is something I’m not qualified to discuss, nor something I wish to discuss right now.

But what about forgiveness? What about chilling, about not taking things so seriously, about compromise? I don’t think any of those directly conflict with self-preservation. One of my general values is to give everyone second chances and the benefit of doubt; the past year has taught me not to demand perfection from others, and rarely from myself. The perceived conflict between compromise and self-preservation lies within priorities. Often, your values clash, and you’ll have to prioritize one over the other (and this prioritization takes many forms! There’s a spectrum - you can have both). Like many other choices, neither is wrong; like many other choices, it comes down to understanding and trusting yourself.

So to everyone who’s reading this, and especially to my girls out there: you know what’s best for yourself, and you’re not petty for doing it.

It’s perfectly fine to be that bitch.

TW: Suicide (death, shootings, grief, and more)
- Jing Jing Wang, 10/23/19

It will always be hard to write words like these. Last week, a sophomore committed suicide at my former high school. I found out from an Instagram post that was simply captioned “Our condolences to those who are grieving.” Part of me panicked – I thought there had been a shooting. My friends still go to that school and my little brother is a sophomore. As I dialed a friend’s number, I took note of the tension in my body: my hunched back and raised shoulders, shaking hands and frozen face. Finding out that it was a suicide was somehow both worse and better.

The tension slowly leaked out of my body with each breath, but my heart was sore. I tried to call my brother, but he didn’t respond, so I settled with sending a text asking him to call me back when he had a chance. I dialed my mom’s phone number.

My mind churned as I sat outside the dining hall waiting for her pick up. The balmy sunset of southern California felt at odds with the feverish scramble of my thoughts.

My mom told me that my brother said he was ok, he only kind of knew the boy, and that he would be home in a few hours. She would remind him to call me. As we talked, the threads of my thoughts began to spool out into coherency.

The recognition of grief in my community brought the absence of a friend to the forefront of my mind. They passed away in a car crash over a year ago, but I am still struggling to understand how exactly I feel. All I know is that it leaves me unbalanced.

The reminder of suicide felt connected to the way a new friend had just confided in me about her mental health struggles – things she had never shared, things that I won’t repeat here.

His death seemed to mock how I could have even attempted to recite all the ways I’m fucked up in a detached but humorous way to my college’s psychiatrist not even a month ago. Even as I laughed I knew it wasn’t funny. But when I am removed from the urgency of suicide ideation, there are only so many ways to talk about it without plunging headfirst back into that unpleasant pit.

The suicide brought up memories of when I was there too, even if I never followed through.

After talking with my mom I still felt unstable, but she was right: I couldn’t let myself slip. College has just started and we already decided that if things get too rough I’m going home, no matter what.

That night I stayed around friends and people and tried not to let myself dwell on it. Even so, there was a restlessness beneath my skin, a feeling that I needed to be doing something, that there was too much emotion for me to contain. I sat stewing in all these different thoughts as the people around me laughed and chattered. It helped, but I felt off.

It’s been a few days now. I am settled in my skin again. This stranger is already gone and I am heartbroken and helpless, but I am ok, my brother is ok, my friends will be ok. That is all I can ask for right now.

Still, my reading for next week’s class is about suicide. Specifically, it’s about suicide in female Asian American populations, something that hits home even though I’m not a woman. It’s going to be rough. But I will be ok. I have myself and friends and family and strategies and community and resilience.

There’s a lot more I can say, but it boils down to this: stay safe. Take care. Watch out for the people around you.

Hollow
Linda Liu, 10/16/19

H.O.L.L.O.W. Hollow—A word that brings the awkward lines of my ninth-grade slam poetry assignment back into my mind, fresh and raw as if it was only yesterday that I tried to piece together this missing part of me.

She picks up her pencil to copy the phrase written on the whiteboard
The phrase that goes: “Dear daddy, I wish…”
Yet she stumbles to write the very word “dad”.
Because for years she has come to forget the taste of that word
The sweet sound becoming so blurred
She forgot when she last heard…
And why is it so slurred?

That was the first time I ever wrote about my father. In fact, that was the first time I ever thought about him and the distance we had between us. That was the first time I tried to shape the hollowness inside me into words, and line after line, I failed.

I failed miserably. I could not even come close to capturing the emptiness I felt. I pushed on the surface of its existence, praying that it would let me in. But it would not. It refused to be molded into words and constrained within sentences. It was afraid of being heard.

The harder I tried, the more guilty I felt. I told myself I have no right to be sad, and even less to be angry. I have no reason.

Because my father loves me.

Because my father loves me more than he loves anything in this world. Because he loves me so much that he would send my mother to a foreign country thousands of miles away for my sake. Because he would give up the presence of himself in my life so I could have a better childhood.

Yet this was a suffocating love. I reached hard for it, throughout my childhood years, in hopes of touching something that was far from my control. I watched as his love fell through my fingers like falling sand.

I counted the days I would see him each year—on one hand.

I counted the months since I last said the word “ba-ba”, and I cried because the two syllables rolled on the tip my tongue like a foreign language that I feared to mispronounce. I felt the hollowness growing within me. Its roots were deep inside the two short syllables, tearing at a love that I could so clearly see so but cannot touch. It was as if there existed a thick glass wall between us, and all I had the power to do was watch as he tore his heart out and bled in front of my eyes.

I began to understand why my mother does not cry: She fears the emptiness behind her, fears that there is no wall for her to fall back upon, and fears that no arms will be open to catch her. And I too, live in that fear.

In the dictionary of my family’s language, love is often a word not spoken. Love is hiding a sickness that brought my mother to the surgery table; love is lying about my broken ankle; love is telling him over and over on the phone—as tears swelled in the back of our eyes—that we were doing great. Love is learning to push ourselves away from the man who loves us the most. Because he cannot afford to worry, thousands of miles away.

The hollowness keeps growing. And night after night, I hate myself for feeling what I feel.

Because I have no right to blame him for his absence in my life, for all the hardships my mother and I faced, or for all the insecurities that developed in the hollowness of a fatherly figure.

Because he has given up everything for me to be here, because he loves me, and because I love him too.

And it is exactly the fact that he loves me that torments me. It would be so much easier to place blame on someone who does not care about me, but he does.

I know he was never there to catch the falls off monkey bars or to witness the joy of hard-earned medals. But I also know that he wants, more than anything else, to have been there.

And that is what haunts me.

Knowing that this isn’t anyone’s fault, that this hollowness belongs only to myself, that there will always be this distance between us that I cannot overcome… that is what haunts me.

This hollowness inside me swallows every word I fear to say. Because there are always people with less fortunate situations, because my issues are “just [me] overthinking”, and because I need to stop “telling [my] life like it’s some big fucking drama”.

Because my father loves me, and therefore I should have no right to feel hollow.

This is what haunts me.

What is “Asian American” Anyways?
Jing Jing Wang, 9/21/19

“Wait. What do you mean ‘we’re not white’?”
When my younger brother was starting sixth grade, we were chatting and that came out of his mouth. Apparently he hadn’t realized in his twelve years that we were definitely not white. We’re Chinese! (Or Chinese American) ‘Yellow’ – if you want to go there. He said he’d only heard race described as black or white. And when I thought about it, he was right. I’ve never heard anyone un-ironically use the term ‘yellow’ in Seattle.
           I wasn’t sure how I even knew I wasn’t white. I still don’t know when I realized. We grew up in the accelerated program, which means we were surrounded by basically only Asians. Once I was bored and counted the number of white kids in our class. It came up to six out of sixty. Even so, the academic pressure we faced was a uniting factor that meant more to us than race ever did. Still, we knew what we were. Somewhere along the way we picked up the stereotypical jokes about slit eyes, math smarts, glasses, and piano. We would toss them around carelessly; they did fit most of us after all.
           As I’ve told the story over the years I’ve come to find this wasn’t an experience exclusive to my brother. An Indian-American friend of mine used to think the same thing. My mixed race friend used to believe their white father was Asian like them. Black hair plus brown eyes equals Asian, right?
         While I never struggled too much with what it meant to be “Asian American,” I know many people have. And this kind of identity confusion and instability is difficult to deal with. We aren’t ever seen as truly American simply because of our phenotype, and are always made fun of or considered “other” in Asian communities for not speaking the language, or acting American. Constant questions of “where are you from?” and “oh, you speak with an English accent” follow us no matter where we are. There’s even a divide between second (or later) generation immigrants, and their first generation parents, many of whom never really consider themselves American. A lack of belonging in both of these communities isolates us.
Plus, the label of “Asian American” has its own set of problems. Our community is incredibly diverse, with people from different countries, backgrounds, cultural histories, and relationships to the West. This makes the idea of Asian American as a pan ethnicity virtually impossible. Instead it functions as a political identity and alliance. The experience of Asian Americanness differs from individual to individual. We get to define and celebrate what it means to be Asian American through articulating our own lived experiences.

Fall
Janelle Rudolph, 9/11/19

Fall: it's finally here (well, almost).
Fall is an aptly named season. While leaves fall, so too do the spirits of students as they realize that school has just come along to end 104 days of summer vacation (thanks, Phineas and Ferb!). Getting back into the swing of things after a much-needed summer respite is certainly challenging. For those of us that are high school seniors, however, when Fall comes it brings with it the looming shadow of college apps, the deadlines of which approach faster and faster each day.
On this subject I have only one thing to say:
Do not let rejections destroy you. Don't let your life be ruled by a few lines of text that simply say "I'm sorry, but we are not able to offer you admission...". I am aware that these few words have the power of pulverizing dreams into dust. However, in the grand scheme of things, they do not have the power of pulverizing You into dust. If you fall, you can get back up again.

Accessibility Among Asian American Activism
Simon Wu, 9/5/19

I want to preface these thoughts with an acknowledgement of socio-economic privilege:

At It’s Real, we want our content to be relatable to ALL Asian Americans. We frequently talk about issues like media representation, immigration, model minority, intersectionality - issues that touch the diaspora of every corner of the Asian/Subasian continent.

And yet, we often essentialize what these shared experiences mean, how dimensions of geography, education, money, housing, and employment can drastically transform our relationalities between these concepts.

"What Loneliness Feels Like," Alice Mao. August 2019 issue.

It’s not uncommon for the more wealthy and privileged members of a particular community to be the most vocal. Asian American activism around the country, including It’s Real, often speak out on aforementioned issues of media, immigration, and model minority. But clearly, mainstream portrayals of such problems are directed at a very specific demographic of Asian Americans: middle to upper class, financially stable, secured housing in cities near big tech hubs, and having some level of a college degree.

Take a gander at Crazy Rich (East) Asians, a movie widely heralded for its breakthrough in bringing issues of (East) Asian media representation to the mainstream stage. And while this movie was significant push of more (East) Asian portrayals in movies and the acting industry, we shouldn’t ignore how the movie is literally called “Crazy RICH Asians,” and consistently glorifies wealthy and luxurious lifestyles (not to mention ableist rhetoric). Most of the movie is filled with filthy rich characters, with the possible exception of Rachel’s mother (although even she was able to find job security as a real-estate agent). For a movie so widely praised for its “accurate” and “honest” portrayal of Asian culture and the success in making it more palatable in whitestream culture, it’s saddening to think that the only ground for what’s “acceptable” is the overlap between “Asian” and “Wealth”.

Or for a more grassroots-type Asian media revolution, look to the phenomenon of Subtle Asian Traits on Facebook. Not only is it extremely Sinocentric, but despite over one million otherwise diverse voices, it seems to have but one personality trait: Boba Tea. Some of you may snicker, but remember that not everyone has the luxury of an extra 6 dollars to spend on a 16 oz of sugar and milk every day. In fact, not every Asian American may have access to a Boba store nearby, especially if they live away from a larger city.

As for immigration, we can’t ignore how mechanisms for legal immigration, particularly from countries like China and India, are puppets of neoliberal-capitalist control. There’s a reason why we have higher caps for giving out H1-B and high-skilled EB-5 visas than diversity lotteries or refugee and asylee applications. It’s also why the majority of Asians that get to immigrate to America are instant fuel for tech-hubs in the Silicon Valley, granting us a new reputation as computer science machines.

The Chinese Exclusion Act is frequently cited as one of the earliest examples of Asian discrimination in the immigration process. What’s important to remember is that the role of Asian immigrants in America has vastly changed over the past few decades. The 1880s were rife with frequent public lynchings, police brutality, and worker exploitation of poor Chinese “coolies,” who worked for grossly watered down wages and who were quite literally starved for death on railroads. Some forget the origins of Chinatowns as poor, ghettoized neighborhoods for immigrants to survive through prostitution and labor work. And although the demographic of wealthy, educated, English-speaking, high-skilled citizen dominates the stereotype of Asian immigrants nowadays, we shouldn’t ignore vast populations of Asian immigrants who still live in modern coolie-like conditions, or try to equate their immigration struggles to white people calling our lunches stinky when we were kids.

Even stereotypes as universal as the Model Minority myth create problematic essentializations of Asian livelihoods and experiences. For wealthier families, it means having their kids devote a majority of their time to studies and relevant extracurriculars, being quiet and obedient, and getting accepted into a top-tier university to find a well-paying job in the future. For poorer families, it means already living with a stigma as a failed Asian family. The Myth of the Model Minority isn’t JUST the governing stereotype that’s responsible for Asian parents becoming angry when their children apply for art school - it’s a constant reminder for those who do not assimilate into the whitestream that they are not valuable in society.

This notice of privilege isn’t meant to trivialize personal experiences with orientalism, nor is it meant to be a guilt-absolving “now I know and I’m a better person” kind of piece. It’s rather a reminder that more work needs to be done with Asian American activism in forefronting issues of intersectionality. Issues of class and economic status, much like issues of multiraciality, misogyny, antiqueerness, ableism (etc.) need to be a priority rather than an afterthought. By saving the male, cishet, able-bodied, and ludicrously-Rich asians first, we only reify systems of neoliberal oppression and domination on a sub-level of the racial hierarchy. Progress cannot operate within and through these structures of neoliberal control--after all, we can’t beat the system by participating in it. Rather, we need new forms of grassroots movements, counterlogics, and transnational forms of micropolitics that challenge ideas of what “traditional” activism look like.

~SWu

Parting: Artist's Statement for the July Issue
- Victoria Hsieh, 8/22/19

Parting evokes some of our best and worst memories. In a literal sense, part could simply be to divide. While I first thought of parting my hair as a piece of possible cover art, I soon realized that this word fit in well with how I often felt. I struggle to let go of fleeting moments that are both fragile and beautiful, but recent events in my own households have only emphasized the need and importance for humans to move on. In this cover, my brother is centered as he had come to symbolize how quickly times have changed and loss of youth but also a parting with naïveté. Thank you for reading and this and please do check out the amazing work featured in It’s Real.

Before the Thunder
- Simon Wu, 8/15/19

I’ve never been one for physics -

In fact, I quite hate it. A lot. Like, substantially.

Which is also a reason why I utterly detest dull physics metaphors, as they bring back some of my worst academic memories in high school.

Maybe it’s also because my physics knowledge is utterly atrocious, which means utter embarrassment for me when I inevitably misuse basic physics concepts.

Unfortunately, I hit a bit of a creative roadblock while pensively pondering prospective perspectives to discuss in this musing.

Like, what even is thunder?

It’s loud, that’s for sure.

It’s booming, that’s redundant.

It’s electric, that’s...inaccurate…

And so forth went my train of thought, which always seemed to circle back around a particular distinction between “thunder” and lightning - and realized that all the initial ideas I had, the sparks of promise, the jolts of inspiration, were kind of pathetic -
Or, I was kind of pathetic. Because I don’t understand physics and thought that thunder and lightning were the same thing. And as my frustration grew from this creative roadblock, so too did my regret for voting for this monthly theme. Like, what did we even THINK this theme could inspire? Did we even consider the ground that this theme gave artists? And even despite the broad, interpretive nature of each month’s topics, meant to catalyze creativity and ignite inspiration, what creative does “thunder” direct us towards? Sure, it sounds cool - but then again, that’s kind of the point of thunder. All it does is sound.

I mean, come on. Lightning is so much cooler.

It burns down trees.

It was responsible for the discovery of electricity.

It birthed wonder and fear into early civilizations, symbolizing some of the most POWERFUL deities in many religions.

Like nah, Thunder. You’re not the star of the show. Don’t try to steal the spotlight--you have thunder of your own. None of that.

Ideas come to us in bolts of lightning, not thunder.

Lightning strikes first - thunder percolates in afterwards…

That seems pretty counterproductive honestly - lightning is the destructive catalyst of power that burns down cities, strikes down trees - an audible warning might be nice.

But then again, maybe that’s true for most ideas.

Often, we have jolts of inspiration - new ideas that seem good on first glance, but unfortunately, it’s only after future retrospection that we realize maybe, just maybe, these ideas probably weren’t as good as we previously thought. Like this midweek musing. Oops.
In all seriousness, particularly in discussions of mental health, sustained creativity is hard. Occasionally, we might get momentous jolts of inspiration, ideas, motivation - only to have that very momentum (I hate physics) peter out quickly afterwards. We find ourselves once again stuck in pits of apathy, fatigue, and cynicism.

Storms pass. So do periods of creative drought. There’s no point weathering out in the rain. Sometimes, it’s good to wait for the thunderstorm to pass. Other times, we can learn to dance in the rain - maybe take a period to bask in the drought, seek enlightenment in the sun - go with the flow, start writing or painting or dancing and see where your gut takes you.
I mean, that’s what I did.

On second thought, given the general incoherence of this musing, constructive planning and thought might be beneficial.

~SWu.

The Making of a Storm
- Janelle Rudolph, 8/7/19

Thunder, this month's theme, has a variety of definitions. In nature, it is the powerful, earsplitting crack that occurs after a lightning strike pierces the sky. A thunderstorm can often be frightening and dangerous.

And yet, a thunderstorm's power can be looked to as inspiration. When you perceive today's issues and injustices as you observe life around you, if you feel strongly about it, then do not feel as if you are powerless to engender change. Let these issues be your lightning strike and let your voice be the following crash of thunder that alerts the world.

Throughout history, the Norse god of thunder, Thor, has been regarded as a symbol of strength. So too, your voice will be your strength as you stand for what you believe. You may be one, but you can be strong. And in that vein, what is a thunderstorm without multiple thunderclaps? Your voice, joined with others, can be as powerful as a force of nature.

Thunder
- Jing Jing Wang, 8/1/19

It’s summer right now and Seattle is far hotter than usual. It means that it’s the perfect time for evening walks; it’s still pleasantly warm but there’s no sun beating down. I’ve been taking time to go out more often, whether it’s biking with my mom or walking with my grandma. I keep remembering an evening from a few years ago. There was a summer thunderstorm with sun and rain and deep rumbling thunder. But it was extra special because the entire sky turned red. There are some beautiful photos of it out there, but I didn’t get any. I went on a walk with my best friend and then we laid on her driveway looking up at the sky afterwards. You know, when you just look up and feel tiny but not insignificant? More like calm and peaceful. It felt a bit magical.

I’ve definitely gotten my fair share of people telling to to not bother with therapy or medication or anything else, just go outside and exercise and do yoga! Or acupuncture. It’s frustrating. But at this point I know that I can figure out what works best for me and it’s a mix of all of the above. Sometimes some fresh air and sunshine really does help.

More than the Sum of its Parts
- Janelle Rudolph, 7/24/19

I'm sure everyone has heard that something is "more than the sum of its parts" far too often. If I described an individual as being more than the sum of their parts, you would most likely unthinkingly agree that of course, a human being is far more profound and complex than just the surface traits and behaviors they exhibit.

So why do we as a society tend to forget this?

It is frighteningly apparent that society doesn't remember this when on social media platforms, a person is hate-message-mobbed by prejudiced individuals for a single aspect of themselves that they reveal on social media. In a similar vein, I have heard countless friends lament that their acquaintances are having 'a much better summer' than them simply by glancing at the edited and posed photos that were posted on social media, or assume that they know a person's life story by looking at their academic stats and achievements.

In today's world, it is altogether too easy to forget how human beings are more than the sum of their parts. Human lives are not defined by their aspects: it is ultimately the individual that decides how to evaluate their own life.

Parts, Perry, and Post-Structuralism
- Simon Wu, 7/17/19

We are all diverse people-

I mean, unless you’re TRULY just a crusty able-bodied cis-male white hetero dude with a decent amount of money.

Kidding, of course.
Kinda.

But the truth is, it’s not JUST identity that makes us who we are. There are so many more intangible aspects that can redeem even the blandest of the bland, palest of the pale, pastiest of the pastiest--things as simple as our passions, talents, personalities, or even just interests. I guess you COULD make an argument that because we are made up with infinitely more things than just race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, ability, mental illness, socio-economic status or education level (just to name a few), we probably ARE all unique, individual beings. We are unique because the PARTS of our bodies are diverse--because they create unique, malleable assemblages that are constantly changing, in flux because the world around us is always changing. Like a rhizome.

So why do I believe that identitarian factors, including components like race, gender, queerness, are still significant to analyze? And specifically, why is it so imperative that we discuss the intersectionality of all these conjoined factors?

It’s because I, as a queer, socio-economically privileged, Chinese cis-male, grapple with a lot of issues with these parts of my identity. And it’s not as simple as just internalized racism/homophobia, or not “accepting myself for who I truly am”--it’s that I cannot completely fathom how these parts of me relate to my identity as a whole, even after I have come to reconcile the individual parts.

Y’all may have heard me mention before about my internalized diaspora between two parts of my identity: my queerness and my asianess. You may have read about how I think these two parts of me are contradictory, paradoxical even--as model minority forces me to conform, yet queerness is deviant and ontologically structures itself around opposition to the norm.

Well, it’s deeper than just that.

The can of sad, soggy worms that I want to open today is not necessarily about the relation between certain parts of me, such as my race and queerness, but rather about how I represent each part of myself at a given time. It’s about which part I identify with the most, which part I think really DEFINES who I am.

And yes, the easy way out is to say “no one part of me can exist without the other--it’s the permutation of these unique factors that make me who I truly am! I am more than just my queerness…”
Blah blah blah boring. And yes, that’s probably the most TRUE answer. But obviously, the truth isn’t necessarily what feels the most RIGHT. We lie to ourselves all the time.

So what should we do at times when we think all that we are is just one Part--our race? Our gayness? Our mental illness?

Does it really do us any good to tell ourselves “this is real, this is me, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be?”

Obviously not.
Sometimes, we can’t HELP but feel as if we have exceptionally failed as an Asian, as a queer, as a functional human being. Sometimes, we can’t HELP but feel as if we are not Asian enough because we’re too gay, or not gay enough because we’re too Asian.

Sometimes, I WANT to be more gay than I do asian. Sometimes, it’s the other way around. And every time I feel such a way, it’s like self-mutiny--it’s like I’m ashamed of a certain part of myself, or that I feel weighed down by a certain part of my identity.

And yet, I don’t think that all this is necessarily a bad thing.

Nowhere in our genetic code does it define our identities as [40% Asian, 30% gay, 30% disgusting cis-man] or whatever. I think it’s liberating that we have the freedom to CHOOSE how gay, asian, or aggressively toxic (kidding) we can be at a certain point, and that we don’t have to stop choosing. The assemblage is ever changing, ever fluctuating, and the rhizome never ceases to add new delicious mycelial nuggets of flavor to our deleu-guittarian identities.

Hell, I think it can even be powerful to get up and say “this is the part of me, that you’re never going to ever take away from me”. Especially doing things like forefronting your Asianness in the face of Orientalism, asserting your gayness in face of homophobia, making fun of your cis-maleness because it’s uninfrangibly fragile and probably makes you act like a piece of shit in various scenarios. I don’t think it makes the other parts of our identity less valuable or valid--on the contrary, I think it builds a stronger cohesiveness to our being, a firmer confidence in the other parts of our subjectivities.

Finally, I think there’s a fine line between choosing to be proud of a certain part of ourselves and unfairly essentializing our diverse identities into specific categories. I think there’s an even finer line between pride and stigmatizing ourselves because of mental illness. Speaking from experience, I know I’ve been caught in the vicious cycles of depression or anxiety or bulimia--where I’ve formed a parasitic relationship with my mental illness because I derive self-worth from feeling sorry for myself, for thinking my illness made me special. And although we don’t want to silence or stigmatize our experiences with mental illness, it’s also probably not the move to be proud of that part of ourselves either.

Maybe we should redirect that pride into other things--like proud that we have CONQUERED it, or are SURVIVING with it. Maybe we can be proud that we haven’t self-harmed in over a year, or that we’ve gotten our purging behaviors down to less than twice a week. Maybe we can be proud that we got out of bed today before 2 pm, or that we ate breakfast for the first time in a month. Maybe we can be proud that we at least are decent enough people that we have people care about us, and maybe doing so will actually help us believe that it’s true. Or maybe we can just be proud that we’ve made it this far, and that all the parts of our identities have played some role in getting us to survive for this long.

I think those are parts of me that nobody’s ever going to ever take away from me.

~SWu

Parting: A Sweet Sorrow
- Andrea Liao, 7/10/19

We part with a myriad of things throughout the course of a lifetime, from fleeting moments that cannot be rewound to aching losses that leave gaps in our hearts. More often than not, we do not get to choose what we would like to keep nor what we are willing to sacrifice.

We each experience parting in our own way. Throughout my lifetime, I have experienced (i.e. read, listened to, seen, and written) countless pieces that attempt to capture the sentiments and convictions associated with "parting."

When I imagine parting, it is rendered in uneven, breathless strokes across a splattered canvas it is heard in the aching, dulcet tones coming from my parents' old record player. It is bared in the vulnerable, painstaking words I read aloud to myself in the dark. It is executed in the elegant, weeping arch of a dancer's figure. It is limned in the flickering, ebullient montages of my childhood memories.

There are so many ways to characterize parting and so many instances throughout our lives in which we must come to accept it. I have learned that coming-of-age is as much a trial in loss as it is a struggle for identity. Learning to let go with grace is critical to this process, and doing so enables us to truly become.

You see, a life can be defined in partings.

But a life can also be defined in triumphs, in joys, in successes . . . and in so much more.

Entropy and Art
- Ana Chen, 7/3/19

Newton’s second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy, or chaos, in the universe is constantly increasing. We can use that law as an analogy for practically anything: adolescence and aging, society, politics, language.

Its pertinence is art is especially interesting: while art as a whole is constantly changing, an individual piece could be considered static after its creation. Of course, interpretations of a piece constantly change; the piece itself could decay; with choreography, different dancers could portray vastly dissimilar visions; the artist could’ve created a piece that intentionally shifts and changes through the years. But the piece itself, with the artist’s intent and interpretation, remains as still and stoic as the Mona Lisa. This remains true even if parts of the artwork - assuming that the artist intended for this to be so - do not exist right now.

I know this is branching into art theory, and I’m neither qualified enough or wish to take sides on a discussion of whether art stands separately from interpretation. The above paragraphs are just scaffolding for my next few observations (which, again, are just notes from an artist who hasn’t extensively studied art theory or philosophy).

In my opinion, the best art both exposes and defies Newton’s second law. The best art provokes discussion or critique and/or a whole host of reactions. It also brings people together.

Take Martha Graham’s Lamentations, for instance. In an acclaimed portrayal of grief, a single dancer sits enshrouded by a translucent purple fabric. She struggles hopelessly against it, but never emerges from the fabric. After the debut of the piece, a mother walked up to Graham.

“My son died in a car accident,” the mother said. “And before seeing this piece, I was unable to cry. I’ve cried for the first time in months - thank you.”

That’s the beautiful thing about good art (and I’ll let you be the judge of good art) - it increases the entropy within an individual while uniting those who experience it: the artist and their audience, individual members of the audience, perhaps those who haven’t even seen or heard the art. Of course, art also wields divisive power, both within an individual and a community. I won’t cite examples of this, but Vincent van Gogh jumps to mind. Any modern artist could face an attack on their work.

But I won’t go much farther into this: I just want to say that in the chaos that is today’s political and social scene, it’s always cathartic and humanizing to turn back to art.

The Nature of Owing
- Ana Chen, 6/19/19

To be in debt is a strange state. Very few of us like to adopt it, but, as it sadly is with the positions we don’t want to be in, very many of us are in it.

What makes debt stranger is that often, we can’t quantify it. We can’t always define it, either, when it comes to interpersonal relations or ourselves. Phrases such as “I owe you a date” or “I need to work out twice as usual today because I didn’t work out yesterday” implies a sort of system - one that seems simple but also exposes the nuances in our interactions with others and ourselves.

It gets more complicated when the guidelines for owing aren’t clear: how much do you owe in a friendship? A romantic relationship? To family? Should we think outside owing altogether and just give our time and emotional energy because we are - or are supposed to be - compassionate beings? Do we naturally have a sense of how much we or another person owes, and do we wire our actions around that instinct? Or does that sense fluctuate with the cultures to which we are exposed? Besides, where are the boundaries between debt, duty, and kindness? And how are they determined?

I believe that roles in interpersonal relationships are defined by their responsibilities - in other words, the role and its responsibilities are inseparable. Both the duty and definition of a friend imply compassion and support; both the duty and definition of family imply love and solidarity. This inseparability of duty and definition informs most of how I treat the people around me.

Consider this: debt implies a certain balance - a “zero” value that could be achieved by giving or taking enough. Simultaneously, this “zero” is nebulous - it’s different for both, or all, members of a relationship. But duty does not imply that balance, that “zero.” Duty implies giving continuously for no other reason than it is implied in the role you have assumed - for better or for worse - in relation to those around you.

In this sense, duty is much closer to compassion and selflessness. The difference lies in what duty and compassion are based off: duty centers on your interactions with others, whereas compassion centers on (hopefully?) your status as a human. Of course, there are definitely overlaps between the two.

How does this apply to me? Of all my interpersonal relationships, I value my family the most. Although I don’t believe I owe my friends or most of the people around me anything (recall that my definition for owing implies a zero-sum mindset, which is pretty blargh), I often find myself wondering if I do owe my family for all their tireless devotion, time, energy, and money. Does doing my duty as a daughter and sister suffice? Or is there truly a balance I should strive for, a point where I can say “yes, I have repaid my family?” How do I quantify repayment? And should I even aim for repayment, or is educating myself and being a good person enough, considering that is the goal of my parents?

I don’t think I have the answers to those questions. And I haven’t stood at the other end of these questions either - I’m not a parent. Besides, the nature of debt towards family is so different in each culture and family that even if I did have an answer, it would most likely not be relevant to you. So all I can say is that, because I am a daughter and sister and friend and (occasionally) a significant other, and because my duties as a daughter/sister/friend/occasional significant other are inseparable from my responsibilities as one, I will continue to give and serve as best as I know how.

But as usual, there are a few holes in my logic, and I’m starting to sound like a broken record from the Middle Ages. But if we start treating those around us with selflessness and not through a lens of debt and gain, we can truly cultivate meaningful and enriching relationships.

However, I’m not advocating for selflessness at the risk of your own health. You have a duty to yourself - a duty which I prioritize (I’m not saying everyone does or you should) over all others. Balancing self-care and self-respect is hard amidst the narcissism cultivated by various elements of our society and the destructiveness that could come with compassion. But it’s healthy, if not vital, to stop to breathe and to consider whether a relationship is good for us, whether that be with others or with ourselves.

I think this is where owing comes in: if nothing else, it is a vague yardstick for the health of a relationship. Many times, I have used the concepts of debt and owing to distance myself from others or to give more to those who truly treasure and appreciate me. And considering the importance self-care and self-respect, I think this is the best context for “owing:” not as a tool for stinginess, but as one for self-love.

Yikes, I don’t really know how to end this. Yeet bye!

Pride: A Double Edged Sword?
- Jing Jing Wang, 6/12/19

Pride has two main meanings for me. First and foremost, it is a word that encompasses the confidence, respect, and love that my fellow LGBTQ+ folks and I have for ourselves as a part of these marginalized identities. But in previous years, as I have delved deeper into the messy intersection of those struggling with mental illnesses and the culture of Asian Americans, I have found that it can have a far darker underbelly.

When I first realized that I might have depression in 8th grade, pride prevented me from asking for help. I thought that my exhaustion, academic struggles, and lack of interest in everything were my own fault, the way individuals with depression often think. I had been in the accelerated program since first grade, I had never struggled this much before, I knew that I was capable of doing better. It felt like a personal failure, and therefore a challenge I needed to overcome. Alone. So I didn’t occur to me to ask my friends or teachers for support. As my mom grew more upset and angry, unsure of what was happening, I closed off from her too.

At one point it got bad enough that I remember sitting downstairs lacing up my shoes as my mom walked through the upstairs hallway.

“Mama?” I called staring at my shoes, “Do you think I have depression?”

She kept moving. “No. Maybe. No, I don’t know!”

I didn’t mention again until months later. Even though I knew from my research that people who had depression often had therapy or took medication, I still wasn’t completely convinced that it wasn’t just my fault. I was too proud to ask for help. Even asking if she though I might have depression felt like an admission of weakness.

I think the experience of suffering because you are too proud to ask for help is fairly universal. However, when you add the concept of “saving face” on top of that, it can become a whole different beast.

I can only speak from the perspective of a Chinese American, and in my experience, the western concept of “saving face” differs in a crucial way from the Chinese concept. When westerners talk about “saving face” it’s about personally avoiding humiliation. For Chinese people, the stakes are higher. Whether we are conscious of it or not, pretty much all Chinese people have been influenced by Confucian values, specifically filial piety. Filial piety is the idea that parents have the obligation to care for their children, and children should care for, obey, and to bring a good name to their parents and ancestors. So, with this cultural background, “saving face” has the connotation of not only saving your own face, but your parents and ancestors’ as well.

Coupled with the fact that mental health issues are still deeply stigmatized, misunderstood, viewed as shameful or uncomfortable to discuss, it is easy to see where the problem arises. If struggling with mental health is shameful, admitting to something shameful reflects badly on both yourself and your family, and recognizing that you struggle with mental health issues is crucial to getting help, you’re going to hit some roadblocks.

Of course, this pride, which can manifest as both personal pride, or familial pride, is just one of many factors that impacts Chinese Americans with mental health issues and their families. Dealing with inequity and discrimination, the traditional academic pressure, adjusting to a new culture for first generation immigrants, lack of education on mental health, and lack of accessibility (for example, language) in spaces that teach about mental health are all part of the messy puzzle that is our relationship with mental health issues.

And, of course, for queer Chinese Americans who struggle with mental health, our genders/sexualities are just another cherry on top. The disconnect and harm we often are subject to in our relationships with our parents as a result of our identity only make dealing with mental health harder. But that’s a conversation I have already written out before, and I think I’ve said my piece for today.

Note: If you want to read more about the intersection of queerness, mental health, and being a Chinese American, you can do so here. ( https://www.thestranger.com/queer-issue-2018/2018/06/20/27819158/what-its-like-coming-out-as-queer-in-a-traditional-chinese-family )

June!
- Simon Wu, 6/5/19

The month where the homosexuals™ congregate in cacophonous crowds, gaggle with their garish garments and bust down their boisterous bussies.

Or that is what most people think when they associate the idea of “Pride” with the month of June. And although QUEER pride (particularly queer ASIAN pride) is definitely a cause to celebrate, we on the It’s Real team didn’t want to limit the theme of Pride to just Queer pride. Although It’s Real is a magazine dedicated to the struggles of mental illness in Asian communities, we can be proud of so many other things - like our cultures, overcoming our struggles, and even just persevering to exist another day.

Don’t get me wrong, this is the PERFECT opportunity for all y’all queer asian folx out there to submit all the amazing content you produce, particularly expressions of your queerness. But also remember that although it’s amazing we have a month dedicated to ourselves (although not exactly because IMHO Pride is still excruciatingly white, misogynistic/transphobic, ableist, etc.), you don’t have to feel pressured or limited in your expression of your queerness to just this month. Queerness is something that exists outside of the month of June too - and that doesn’t give people or corporations the excuse to silence us once Pride month has passed.

And let’s get something STRAIGHT - this is NOT an excuse for all y’all cishet folks out there to go out and start “all lives mattering” the shit out of queer pride with your “straight pride” movements - which is wrong for SO many reasons. But I can save that conversation for another day. For now, just remember to take pride in things that don’t shit on other people. Pride may be a deadly sin, but we can use it to spread positivity. Maybe the rainbows can cancel it out. Or maybe the gays™ are just destined to burn in hell. Who knows.

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

~SWu

More Beyond the Surface
- Ann Truong, 5/29/19

Burnout is defined on Google by “the reduction of a fuel or substance to nothing through use or combustion”. It’s a concept commonly thrown around by professionals in the workforce, and completely foreign to me up until this year, my last year in high school. Burnout, put in the context of school and academia, is when someone endlessly works until they cross a threshold of exhaustion.

So why is this a problem, you may ask? If you’re tired, just take a break. Go out with friends and watch a movie, or go to the mall. It may seem easy to overcome, but in reality, it isn’t. Especially in the Asian American community where hard work is valued above all else, earning anything subpar from what is expected brings disappointment and shame. It’s a toxic cycle that continuously feeds on itself. One bad score may lead to more bad scores, leading to a lowered self esteem and lack of motivation. One bad work mistake may go down the same path.

This is especially problematic when mental health is so understated within the Asian American community. Burnout, what’s that? It can’t be a thing. Depression? Stop being so sad all the time. Anxiety? Stop worrying, you’re wasting your time.

When family goes into the equation, things tend to not get any better. Why are you so fat? Why can’t you do better? Why are you so lazy and sad all the time? Why don’t you do as well as [insert a better cousin here]? A barrage of questions are thrown carelessly every time a get-together happens. This only perpetuates the cycle of shame and fear, preventing familial knowledge of one’s own personal mental well-being.

Especially when this happens all the time, when trying your best still isn’t enough, you get tired. And you don’t want to try anymore.

It’s said that your family always wants the best for you, and they might, but the way they express their concern isn’t always the best. Asian American adults sometimes don’t always understand everything relating to mental health since they most likely grew up without much of it themselves.

So this is just a shoutout to everyone who has gone through or is going through burnout right now. Even though it isn’t validated by your family and those you deem closest, your mental health and well-being is still legitimized and valuable. Taking care of oneself is important, and in order to continue, professionally or academically, we must heal.

Thank you for reading. :’)

Reach Out
- Janelle Rudolph, 5/22/19
CW: this talks about suicide.

To all you readers that are in a dark place right now--to anyone reading this that thinks they can’t go on,

Please talk to someone. You may feel like no one cares about you and that the world is better with you gone, but we promise you, that is so wrong. You are loved. You are loved more deeply than you know. You MATTER. When you are gone from the world, your pain doesn’t go away. It is passed to everyone around you that cared for you.

Please ask for help. Asking for help is NOT being weak. Tell someone how you’ve been feeling. The national suicide hotline is 1-800-273-8255. Or try 1-800-784-2433. Just tell someone. If you can’t call the hotlines, try talking to US. We are not professionals. We are not authorities. But, we will listen if just typing words out to express how you feel is all you can do. Our email and dm’s are open as listening ears.

Please don’t hide your pain. You CAN get help. Ending it all is NOT the answer.

Mascary Stuff
- Ana Chen, 5/15/19

Almost all of my close friends and family know I can make metaphors out of the most mundane ideas. So here’s one of my more ridiculous analogies.

Those who know me know that I love winged eyeliner and mascara (filling in my shapeless eyebrows too, but that’s a sad subject we won’t touch today). And those who know me exceptionally well know that while my eyeliner is far from waterproof, my mascara definitely is.

I’m a shameless cryer (more on this later - for now, I will just say that crying is extremely healthy and good fodder for many angsty poems). This year has brought almost as many tears as laughs, and it has heralded massive changes in how I view the people around me.

You see: my eyeliner represents the impermanence of the “pretty.” Winging your eyeliner brings attention, compliments, a whole slew of “wow-FIERCE!”’s and “you-look-so-nice”’s. Mascara, on the other hand, is subtle. It’s messy and harder to apply (at least for me) than eyeliner. But my mascara never smears, despite its high maintainence.

I think you have a pretty good idea of where this is heading: mascara is the subtle but constant buttress of family and close friends. Eyeliner is the unstable but flashy support toted by acquaintances, fleeting friends and those who offer you pretty words and empty hands.

I am no party girl, but I think it’s nice and cool to have a big social circle. Nonetheless, I think it’s pretty telling how I spend much more time on eyeliner than mascara in the mornings.

Now, I’m not saying that we should boycott less-than-close friends or amiable relations or liquid eyeliner. I’m just saying that we should take more time to cultivate the relationships that are truly fruitful and dependable.

This month, I made a commitment to spend at least twenty minutes a day with my family - whether that’s talking to my brother, chilling with my dad (usually behind the wheel of our BMW as he yells at me to cut my speed), or doing the laundry with my mom.

And while it’s not always easy, considering we carry some dysfunctions typical of an Asian American family and a few unique to our own, it’s taught me humbleness and gratitude. It’s taught me to appreciate my parents’ tireless toiling and sacrifices. I’m trying to extend this mindset to my close friends as well, to give and reciprocate to those I love and trust.

For many of us, loving someone is easy. It’s translating that love into action that is hard. Of course, one could argue that love without action is not love at all. But I disagree. There are so many different forms and expressions and intensities of love - that, coupled with our personalities and cultures and experiences, makes it impossible to box this complex biological/sociocultural/cognitive phenomenon in this manner.

Call me naive, but I think love does not need learning. It’s this expression of love that requires our attention and practice, that demands us to relinquish our egos - if only for a few moments - for the sake of those who love us.

Here’s the irony: we, as animals, see much more advantage (and an easier time) in fostering relationships with those farther from us than with those who love us unconditionally and therefore demand so much more. Why spend time on those whose love and support is guaranteed?

Here’s the answer: it’s may be more tiring, but it’s not nearly as draining. Of course, this doesn’t account for the toxicity in many families and friendships, but that’s an entirely different beast. Just know that spending more time with those close to you not only enriches their lives, but also yours. This “enrichment” (wow, now I sound like the principle of some snotty elementary school) is different for everyone - I’m not even entirely sure what mine entails.

It’s ma-scary stuff, but trust me: it’ll make you far less of a lasshole.

Rotten Roots
-Simon Wu, 5/8/19
CW: Internalized racism, homophobia, antiblackness, fat shaming, mental illness, settlerism, semi-graphic imagery about bulimia

And no - I’m not talking about my permanently chlorine-damaged hair from 6 years of swimming.

Rotten Roots is my guilt,
Rotten Roots is my humiliation,
Rotten Roots is the shame I feel for who I am,
For what I wear, for how I look,
For how I sound, for how I act,

Rotten Roots is my dark exodus,
My diasporac turmoil,
My loss of self-being, of self-belonging,

Rotten Roots is a deracination from my motherland,
The festering of my pain,
The decay of my hope for a better future,
The putrefaction of my family.

Rotten Roots stretch into the deep crevices of my brain,
Contaminating, Polluting, Befouling my thoughts into
Rancid internalized racism and internalized homophobia.

First and foremost, I think it’s important for us to take the time and recognize that Pacific Islanders constitute a different, independent demographic, who deserve to have their own ethnic identity instead of being thrown into the big, homogenous pot of “Asian." This method of understanding is key to address many unique issues that Pacific Islanders face, including struggles for self-sovereignty and autonomy in Hawaii, blood quantum, land erasure, assimilation, and cultural genocide. Indigenous peoples deserve more than a(s)t(e)risks.

Furthermore, it’s important to recognize the sinocentrism that comes with the term “Asian American.” And although I, as a Chinese American, can only speak to my experiences with China, we cannot essentialize the “Asian” experience to just mine. Ethnohomogeneity is something else we need to be mindful of in our conversations about race.

Nonetheless, May is officially “Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.” As such, it’s very appropriate for the topic for this month’s submissions to be Roots.

But as much as I believe in the strength and power from cultural pride, unity, and appreciation, there is a darker side to my roots as well. As much as I am proud of being Chinese, I can’t help but detest certain things about my culture, my traditions, and my mother country.

And no, this isn’t going to turn into an “omg look at how white society brainwashed me” or "when I was little my classmates laughed at my food" rant about internalized racism. It’s instead going to be about the actual racism, antiblackness, homophobia, xenophobia, and nationalism that I associate with my culture. It’s going to be about my resentment for China when I learn about their homophobic bullshit, the embarrassment I feel when my family says racist things, the boiling of my blood when I hear the reductive gossip among the Asian parents in my community, my revolt when I’m expected to defend Asians and Asian American history in face of decades of misogyny, xenophobia, and antiblackness.

Speaking of face, I believe that many of you Asians, from all parts of Asia, can empathize with the frustration with the cultural denial of things like mental illness. It’s always "tough it through" or else you will be weak, "just be happier" as if it was so easy or simple, and "don’t tell anyone else" for fear of losing face. It’s hard to have faith in and respect for your culture when it always trivializes your pain, when the most important value is your image even at the expense of normalizing your suffering.

How can you love your culture when it doesn’t even teach you the word for love? How can you love it when the mere topics of emotions and empathy are taboo? When it’s never all right to care about the suffering of other minorities, when the “model minority myth” justifies believing that people living in poverty just “haven’t worked hard enough," when it’s always anti-affirmative action, even at the expense of less fortunate and privileged individuals?

How can you love your culture when it makes you wish you were white?

When it makes you wonder if you deserve the kind of acceptance that you see in movies?

That’s something really funny, actually. There was this movie I watched last year: Love, Simon, about a white gay kid named Simon coming out to his family. It was really tough to watch, because my name was Simon too. And I never got to experience that kind of acceptance.

I remember coming back from that movie and literally dreaming about what my life would be like if I had a normal, accepting white family. Where I wouldn’t have to lie to my parents when I went out with a group of girls, where I wouldn’t have to repulsively pray that my extended family in China won’t live long enough to see the day I marry a man because I don’t want to face their rejection. It’s hard to love your culture when you know it will respond, “I love you too - except for your sexuality.”

And admittedly, some if it is internalized racism. It’s hard to love your culture when it’s constantly fetishized, especially within queer communities. It’s hard to love your culture when it always reminds you that you’re not attractive enough, that you’re not skinny enough. When your culture regularly tells you that “you’re too fat”, but acts surprised when you go to the bathroom after every meal to stick your fingers down your throat. When it faults you for your illness, even though it was the one that gave you the disease in the first place.

And how do you reconcile your obligation to your family with the constant antiblack, anti-indigenous, and xenophobic rhetoric you hear from them every day? How can you love your culture when it’s mostly ok to be racist, when you hear your relatives constantly bragging about China’s sickening nationalist rhetoric of sinosupremacy? It’s hard to love your culture if it means loving the racism that comes along with it.

Sometimes, taking pride in where you come from is not so straightforward and easy. Sometimes, it can even feel shameful.

So what’s the takeaway here? That being Asian sucks and we should all feel guilty about who we are?

No, that would be reductive.

Is it that although certain aspects of our culture sucks, we should embrace the good parts?

No, that would be cherry picking and assuaging whatever guilt we have about being complicit in structures that benefit us at the expense of less fortunate demographics.

The actual answer is hard, complicated, and admittedly, I don’t think I have it.

I stand by what I said earlier about there being strength and power in the solidarity and pride from celebrating our culture. And I definitely think there is good to be found in embracing your identity - including the bad bits. And that’s not to say that you should ever be proud of the racism, homophobia, misogyny etc. ingrained in your culture’s values, but that you understand, learn, and recognize the invisible wrongs that you may have ignored or kept quiet about for so long. It’s a reclamation of your shame, a willingness to accept guilt - not for who you are, but for how your position as an Asian American reaps certain benefits at the expense of others.

Culture can change. Values can change. And it’s not like homophobia or antiblackness or settlerism can or will ever be entirely rooted out of Asian culture, but it doesn’t mean that we should give up and accept things for what they are. On the contrary, it’s kind of our duty, our obligation to all of the good ways that our culture has shaped us, to transform our culture into the best possible version of itself. That's the beauty of the rhizome - it constantly splits and grows, creating new possibilities and opportunities for being, for what we define to be "Asian." We need to cut off the rotten roots - not ignore them - before they infect the rest of the plant, the beautiful flower that is being Asian. Or however you identify, because labels suck.

Happy History Month <3.

~SWu

Roots
-Sanya Gupta, 5/1/19

I’m going to start with the customary definition-esque thing because why not.

Roots (n)

the part of a plant which attaches it to the ground or to a support, typically underground, conveying water and nourishment to the rest of the plant via numerous
the basic cause, source, or origin of something.

Roots (v)

cause (a plant or cutting) to grow roots.
establish deeply and firmly.

Before I even get into this… writessmusing (??? I’m still not entirely sure what to call this), I want to point out that Google’s example for the word “roots” is "vegetarianism is rooted in Indian culture.” I mean, yes I am a vegetarian, but I just found it hilarious that Google was basically defining what my roots were. Great, yet another person to tell me what I am and am not, to define me.

I would like to argue that being an Indian American leaves you in the super awkward position where you have no cultural roots. When people think of Asia, likely the first place they think of is China, then maybe Korea or Japan, Thailand or Vietnam if you are lucky? In a nutshell, they think of the “yellow” ones, and, no, I do not mean minions. Seldom would someone think Asian and immediately go India! or Pakistan! or any “brown” region. It seems like rather than uniting Asia into one cultural fusion, there seem to be three major groupings: the stereotypical Asian, Indian, or Middle Eastern. What more, while Asian and Middle Eastern seem to both group various cultural backgrounds into one grouping, it seems that Indian implies that all 1.3 billion of us are just a group hanging out in a bucket. In a discussion with a peer in APUSH, the Facebook group Subtle Asian Traits came up and let’s just say he was incredibly surprised when I told him that I was in the group. “But you’re not Asian!” Ummm, is India not in Asia??? “No but like Subtle Curry Traits exists for a reason.” So basically, I could not be a part of a Facebook group simply because my roots lead to the southern tip of Asia rather than eastern Asia? I’m sorry, let’s look at a map real quick.

So we have Asia crudely outlined in black, my apologies, I am not the best drawer nor am I great at geography. I might have estimated the divide in Russia and Turkey kind of inaccurately, but, for the most part, that should be correct. Now if we look at the country outlined in red, what do we see? Is that… India?! Wow, would you look at that, it turns out India is in Asia after all. Therein, shouldn’t it be justified for me to be an Asian? Damn, we’re making all kinds of fun discoveries over here today.

In all seriousness, I don’t really care if you don’t want to call me an Asian, I will not go cry over a bowl of rice (am I Asian now? jk). Culture and a person’s “roots” are what we as a society use to split people into groups which in itself is a bit obscure. If you want to call me an Asian, have at it. If you want to call me an Indian, sure why not? Hell, if you want to call me a pumpkin, I will be a bit confused but I honestly will not care. Just please don’t call me a pumpkin spice latte… that is where I draw the line, that is too much sugar for one drink.

Nevertheless, thinking about lineage and roots is quite enjoyable especially because you can do whatever you want with that information. If you want to run around embracing your Asian (or whatever racial identity you have) roots and eating endless bowls of rice, good for you, I hope you have fun! If you would rather keep your roots to yourself or defy the cultural stereotypes attached to your lineage, that works as well, I hope you have fun as well. Honestly, it does not matter what you do with your roots, just don’t be a jerk to anyone else and negate their perspectives. If someone who is half white and half Asian wants to be Asian, let them okay? It will not be the end of the world, I assure you, life will go on :-) I guess that is a good golden rule: do whatever you want, just don’t be a jerk.

When we were coming up with a theme for May, we thought about the cultural aspect of It’s Real and how many of our past themes had related mental health and the struggle involving mental health in ASAM communities. We wanted to offer all of you an opportunity to really embrace your roots and find a theme in which you could express your roots more freely. Anyway, aside from that, during our small discussion, the fact that I was the only Indian on our admin team came up and the truth in that made me a bit uncomfortable. It was almost as if I was out of place and like I had tried to shove my way into their Asianness. Upon further deliberation, I realized how that is often the case for a lot of Indians and even Middle Eastern people, we almost have to prove that we are Asian and it is often like other people are defining who we are for us. We have to justify our Asian to everyone else. I know this might have read like a rant and you might be thinking that I am being too dramatic, but, I’m sorry but I really don’t care. With all due respect, I don’t have to justify my thoughts to all of you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Remember, you can do whatever you want as long as you aren’t a jerk :-)

Thank you for reading and take care,
Love you 3000 (if you get that reference, you are my favourite)

Friction
-Emi Luo, 4/24/19

This will be short, probably. It won’t be particularly eloquent and it might look like a mess.

A lot of the time, we tell people the same thing: don’t be afraid to get help. Find a friend you can trust. Go to a therapist. You’re not alone. It’s going to be okay.

Not to diminish the value of those words, but we give this advice to people so much that they’ve probably heard it a million times and it may or may not be all that helpful to them. So instead of telling someone with mental health problems what to do, i’m going to talk about what we can do as allies and friends.

Fucking listen. Pay attention. And don’t just listen, but offer to listen. Check up on your fucking friends. Be active about it. If you get a bad feeling, don’t brush it off. Ask them if they’re okay. Don’t ignore signs. Don’t be afraid to find help yourself if you think they’re in danger. Don’t wait until it’s too late or close to show how much you care. Go talk to your friend who needs it right now. thanks.

Friction
-Simon Wu, 4/17/19

Friction is everywhere - and no, I’m not talking about physics.

Wow, Simon. Thanks for pointing out the obvious.

Yeah, no problem. Everyone goes through shit in life. Everyone has conflicts, goes through fights, makes mistakes etc. etc. etc.

Boring shit. Mundane, everyday, normal forces.

Except it’s really not. Paradoxically, friction is perhaps the one thing that keeps life from being completely uninteresting. Whether we like it or not, the only way we truly enrich our lives is through discomfort, unfamiliarity, and struggle.

That, however presents another paradox in itself: we’d like to think that peace is desirable, that familiar things make us comfortable and that is good. Yet, we also can’t deny that the only way for our present circumstances to change is through friction.

Which is all fine and dandy if you’re happy with your life, with what you do and who you are. Unfortunately, for the rest of us who feel like shit on a daily basis, it’s kinda hard to just suck it all up and face the fact that we will probably be telling ourselves it be like that sometimes for the rest of our lives.

Fortunately for us, we represent 100% of the sentient beings who ever existed in the history of the universe ever. Nobody is completely satisfied with who they are. There will always be something that we want to change about ourselves.

Shut up Simon, you’re beginning to sound like a bad Disney movie.

No you shut up, I literally watched 100 hours of Netflix over the span of my spring break which is literally 216 hours total and although I really regret it it’s also kinda fun kinda fresh and kinda sad because I completely destroyed my eyebrows yesterday.

Hahaha you’re right, I guess that’s cliché #2 in my cringe-o-meter:

No but really, it sucks to feel like you’re not enough and know that the only way things are going to get better is through struggle. It sucks knowing that you won’t be handed solutions to your problems on silver platters, that there’s no button you can push to “pause” your life and escape to another world. It sucks knowing that you can’t just stop time so that you can sleep and wait until you feel better before you move on with your day. It sucks to admit that feeling shitty is sometimes just a PART of your life.

After all, struggle is HARD. Discomfort is DISCONCERTING. Friction HURTS. Why would we ever want to go through such horrible things?

Well, because it’s the OnLy WaY wE gRoW aNd LeArN!

(ok ngl I’m probably putting more effort into this little gimmick here than the actual article and that’s kind of a problem and it’s probably really distracting but it’s fun so wtv)

In all honesty, telling you all that we all encounter struggles in life and that we must persevere to reach the light at the end of the tunnel is actually worthless. I have told you nothing that you don’t know already.

But that’s the problem right there: we know that conflict is inevitable, that everyone has struggles and that friction is everywhere. Yet, why do we also choose to ignore the more obvious things that come with it?

Mental illness is something I struggle with, whether it be things like depressive episodes, periods of irrational anxiety, literally repulsive eating habits, or obsessive thoughts about self-punishment. And many of you all with mental illness can likely also empathize with how our journeys through mental illness aren’t straightforward at all like me (hAhaHa I never could resist a good gay joke), but rather they look something like this:

Progress is rough. Sometimes, you relapse. It’s frustrating because you just can’t know what’s going to happen next, when your next dip might occur, or if you will ever feel okay again.

And it’s time and time again that I have to remind myself how my feelings of despair, of unending dread and the grief that I will never be happy again, are simply untrue.

Roll your eyes all you want, but I don’t rebuke these depressing thoughts because of the ever-so platitudinous advice that we have all heard a thousand times over.

I don’t listen to my brain because I know it’s been hardwired for self-sabotage.

I don’t listen to my heart or emotions because I know that they’re in no condition to be making these demands.

I listen to reason and logic. I remember that EMPIRICALLY, when I have encountered these emotions in the past, they never lasted forever. I recognized that the reason why I suddenly feel so bad is because I wasn’t feeling as shitty for the past week or so. And that’s when I realized that progress is a sneaky lil’ bastard. You don’t instantly feel 10% better the next day or automatically earn 20 happiness points to your next reward each time you do something good for the world, you simply wake up a week or a month later and tell yourself: “hey, I don’t feel that shitty today, and I haven’t for a while now”.

And admittedly, it was hard to have faith in reason at first. But the more and more times I have struggled through these cycles, the easier it has been for me to cope with my nefarious thoughts. And that’s the thing with friction: it changes you.

And I’m not going to say it’s always for the better in the end. I’m not going to say it will make you happier. I don’t ever want to essentialize neurodivergent experiences. Yet, the one thing I firmly believe in is that friction makes you stronger. Friction makes you wiser. If you’re stuck in a bad place, friction is worth the pain and discomfort and struggle, because it offers you an opportunity for change. It will never offer you clarity, security, or certainty, but it will always offer you a second chance. And a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, sixth, seventh, and all the way up until you finally decide that you’re 100% happy with where you are.

Which, let’s face it, probably won’t ever happen for any of us. But I ultimately think that’s the beautiful thing with our existence: unlike our bodies, our lives will never get old.

Hey, that was kinda legit stuff up there^
Let’s see if I redeemed myself on the cringe-o-meter:

Not bad. Could be a lot worse.

I hope you all don’t PUNish me too hard for my sins.

*Finnadab*

Love that for me

Skrt skrt skrt

Yeet outtahere

- SWu

Emotional Dependence
-Ana Chen, 4/10/19

In retrospect, a lot of my writing is trying to apply cliches to my own experiences. So here’s a concept that is not quite a cliche, but which has been discussed to a great extent: emotional dependence.

When asked which words describe me the best, my friends almost always respond with some variation of “intense” or “passionate.” I’m infamous for taking everything from schoolwork to personal relationships too seriously. Because I spill so much time and energy into what I care about, I inevitably end up with deep emotional attachments to my work and loved ones.

But the danger comes when this attachment evolves into dependence. Any relationship I have, whether with people or pastimes, can easily deteriorate from one that connects to one that consumes. I become obsessed with a goal, an accomplishment, or (very rarely) a person. Any ups or downs with one of the aforementioned entirely dominates my mood. An example of this is sixth grade me: if my pirouettes weren’t going well during ballet, I’d throw a fit at home.

Often, when I desire something too much, my stomach twists. This twisting, caused by anything from college apps to pitch conferences to the fear of neglect, deteriorates easily into anxiety and physical pain. If I don’t receive what I so badly want, I suffocate in a trench of misery and self-pity. But if I do, I become a veritable firecracker: laughter jaggedly gleeful, body trembling with happiness.

“You need to calm yourself,” my dad told me the last time one of the latter episodes happened. “Yes, you might be happy. But you need to cool down, learn how to manage your emotions. You can hurt yourself if you keep being this wild.”

He’s right: my emotions are just as volatile as what I’m usually pursuing. And because what I pursue is almost inevitably difficult to grasp (considering my infamous status as an overachiever), my emotions are extremely volatile. What my dad is arguing for is an inner peace (hey look, another cliche) that arises from a strong sense of self.

But the irony of self-strength is this: only through validation from outside sources can we learn to appreciate ourselves. This validation doesn’t have to come from awards or prestigious colleges - it can be as much as a comment on Instagram or a supportive touch of a friend. The few people who don’t need this validation are either admirably strong or foolish, for humans are (along another cliche) social creatures.

This paradox of internal appreciation and external validation is funny, and I don’t see any way out of it. What I suppose I’m arguing is to maintain a strong sense and awareness of self. Live by cliches if you see fit: take defeats and victories with equal grace; stay both humble and hard-working. Would I sound too much like a yoga instructor if I say finding stability and calmness in your actions is vital to mental health? For me, three practices help with this.

First, don’t forget to celebrate small achievements. It’s easier to retain your calm by viewing huge milestones as a compilation of small steps. Don’t disregard your small accomplishments; don’t “save” your celebrations or joy for something bigger. This won’t only help with that sense of stability, but also with your self-esteem.

Second, practice self-care. This directly relates to finding joy outside the world of accomplishments/resume-packing/competition. Write in a journal; sing in the shower; do skin care; take a few minutes to reflect every night; allow yourself to waste time. Self-care, both mental and physical, boosts your self-esteem without dependence on outside sources. But there's also irony in this - self-care almost always leads to compliments (e.g. "wow, your skin is glowing") that can easily turn a self-orientated mindset (I'm avoiding the term "self-centered" for obvious reasons) into one dependent on others. I guess there's no solution to this problem: just keep in mind why you are practicing self-care.

Third, communicate. Learn, if you can’t openly talk, with and from those whom you view as your rivals. Express your concerns to your loved ones. Of course, this isn’t possible for everyone, me included. But communication can lighten a lot of emotional burdens. It’s surprising how draining petty (or not so petty) rivalries can be. But it’s also healthy and necessary to acknowledge how you can’t change everything. It’s healthy to recognize when to move on, how to parcel your time and emotional energy.

These are just some tips that have helped me through quite a few unhealthy mindsets, ultra-competitive environments, and destructive habits. But emotional dependence is natural and necessary in some cases, and it’s natural to obsess and compete and act bananas. External validation is not a problem, as I seem to assume in my second point on self-care. We’re all human! Just try not to take anything - including this essay - too seriously.

Happy Wednesday!

Friction
-Andrea Liao, 4/3/19

Friction (n.)
·       the resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over another.
·       the action of one surface or object rubbing against another.
·       conflict or animosity caused by a clash of wills, temperaments, or opinions.

Over the years, my friends have all been guilty of using some variation of “vibrant” or “cheerful” or “spirited” to describe me. At times, it made me wonder if I had somehow turned happiness into a state of being.

Contrary to these terms, my life has not been one of endless joie de vivre. From a young age, I recognized—and, perhaps, resigned myself to the fact—that the life I chose to live would be a constant struggle between who I wanted to be and what the world around me expected me to be. I failed to realize that, over time, it would become an internal battle of conflicting wills as well.

I constantly find myself surrounded by friction: friction coming from the people I choose to keep in my life, friction coming from the milieu around me, friction coming from myself. Whichever direction I turn, the force of it will always be opposing me.

In a poem titled “Effacing Identity” that I penned at age 14, I confessed on paper: “I’ve never understood reality/and how to live with it/but I can efface identity/until I find one that fits society,/even if it doesn’t fit me.”

It wasn’t until I wrote this poem that I came upon the realization that false happiness is indeed something I have employed. I have often replaced feelings of grief and regret with a smile. I have often expressed feelings of despondency and anger with laughter. Anything short of perpetual elation would alarm anyone who thought they knew me. Somewhere along the line, being happy became a method of coping, while being able to present the façade at will became a way of compensating for my shortcomings.

I found escape in stories: reading them and writing them, drawing them and dreaming them, listening to them and singing along to them. I would read a book just to throw myself into the pages, I would listen to a song just to run away with the lyrics, I would write a poem just to get lost between the words. When asked what about my favorite pastimes, my response is always, “anything that has a storytelling aspect to it.” Even now, I still believe that the reason I am always seeking stories is because I am not satisfied with my own.

So here are four things to take away:
1.     Happiness should not be taken for granted, whether it is your own or someone else’s.
2.     Friction is all-encompassing—no matter which way you go, you will always be met with opposition. Never let its force impede you.
3.     Find escape; there is no shame in it.
4.     Do not let someone or something else define who you are or who you want to be. Find that for yourself. Go out there and seek it. Never back down or turn away from the things you believe in or desire.

Silently Screaming
- Sanya Gupta, 3/26/19

In front of me here is a (fairly) blank page… I could continue by saying that this page was a representation of how my life is a blank canvas, but that is extremely cliche, and I will spare you and myself the agony of reading that.

Hello, my name is Sanya, and I am the social media director for It’s Real. When I reached out to Ana to join this staff, I believed that my job would be posting on social media, updating the website, and that’s it. As obscure as it sounds, I never once thought that I would have to share my writing with the world. I mean, I love writing, and I have notebooks filled with poems and prose, but publishing my writing for others to see? Not my cup of tea. So, when Ana asked me to write this week’s musing, I was perplexed… why would someone want to read what I have to say? why would someone want to know what goes on inside my head?

As I marinated on what to write, much to my surprise, my mind instantly wandered to speculations that would contradict my otherwise, outwardly bubbly persona:

hunching over a small granite sink, pushing your fingers as far down your throat as they would go just to vomit out your imperfections
trying to drown over and over, aimlessly throwing yourself into the trashing waves or off a cliff into the murky waters below
running the dull part of a blade up and down your skin fighting the impulse to give into your disgusting addiction
looking at a pill, bringing it close to your mouth and forgetting anything even mattered
hating yourself for being the way your are…

At that moment, I realized I was shaking as I often am when I let my mind ponder over such ideas. While struggling to materialize everything that was spinning in my head, I came to the realization of the intersection (of course I was going to bring this month’s theme in here) between how I viewed my life and the impact everyone around me had on it.

The truth is, I don’t know who I am, or, more importantly, who I want to be. I would be lying if I said that I thought I was smart. That I was sure that I would grow up to change the world. That I was pretty. A label that I would never give myself. That I was the right weight. That I did not catch every single bit of hesitation from my relatives: “Oh Sanya, have you considered losing some weight?” I was told at the age of 10 or “Sanya, are you fasting or something?” at 13. I would be lying if I said I did not spend those nights crying in some secluded corner of my grandmother’s home, trying to vomit out the fats that I despised so much. Hating every curve that made my body the way it was. I would be lying if I said that I don’t do that anymore. I would be lying if I said I had never wished to somehow get rid of the “pepperoni-like” imperfections that lay on the surface of my face. “You should do something about those mountains on your forehead” I have been told over and over and over again. I would be lying if I said that I have never thought that I was just not good enough. I would be lying if I said I had never wanted to be perfect.

I hope that was not too strange for you to read and I apologize for my writing if it was not what you expected on a Wednesday afternoon (or whenever you are reading this). If it was what you expected, well, all the power to you, we could probably be buddies. I feel like I was going somewhere with this and then I let my mind go wherever it wanted to. *shrug* I guess that’s what writing is, an interconnected mess… or at least that’s how I would describe my writing. I’m sure Ana Chen would disagree. Before I relieve you of my thoughts (I’m sorry, I just need 30 more seconds of your time), I wanted to leave you with one quote by Gloria Steinem, one of my favourite authors. It may contradict what I wrote above, but it is essential nonetheless, “Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.” Well, I have been staring at this screen for over two hours, so I shall leave you now, take it easy y’all.

Much love <3

A Few Words
-Janelle Rudolph, 3/21/19

Today I’d like to take a little detour from the theme of the month to offer some encouragement in these trying times. AP and IB exam season is looming nearer and nearer, and I can already feel the dread creeping into the atmosphere at school (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg for most of us). So here’s a few things I try to remember in those moments when life takes a swing at my face (it’s got a mean right hook!) and in those moments when everything’s a little worse than that, too.

It’s okay to admit you’re not okay. Society is, in general, not kind to those who acknowledge that they need help, especially in ultra-competitive environments. It’s difficult sometimes to “show weakness” and ask for help from others, whether it’s the therapy kind of help or even just asking for a favor. The first step is to admit to yourself that you need help. That can be the hardest part. Asking for help isn’t weakness. It takes a whole lotta strength to do that.

It gets better. It really does. You’re going to get up this mountain, and when you do, it’ll be downhill walking from there. And if you reach another hellish peak, you know you’ve scaled one just like it before, and you made it through. Unscathed? Perhaps not. But you did, and you can do it again. And there’ll be people on the sides of the road waiting to help you to your feet when you stumble. They might even be walking with you.

Which brings me to this: you don’t have to weather the storm alone. Talk to someone. You’re not going to be the only person being put through the wringer. Don’t be afraid to find solace in the people you trust.

I won’t pretend to know the problems you’re facing. I refuse to be an armchair psychologist (especially when I haven’t even taken AP Psych?? Do I know anything about how brains work? Absolutely not), but I hope this morsel brings you a little bit of buoyancy in those days you feel like sinking.

As Chumbawamba so eloquently put in 1997,
“I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down.”

Periods, Poetry, and other Particulars of Mental Health
-Ana Chen, 3/13/19

When asked how I create poetry and its pertinence to mental health, I usually blather about feminism/interpersonal relationships/culture/recovery. All of these topics are worthy of discussion, but the mantles they bear are far too lofty to fit on my poetry.

Truth be told, poetry is simply the easiest way for me to throw my emotions on paper. My poems adopt themes and purposes only in retrospect; years of BS-ing essays and commentaries have taught me to weave some deep-sounding meaning for my writing.

A few years ago, my writing’s lack of grandiose purpose worried me. Could I even call myself a writer if there was no historical scheme or social cause behind my words? My work felt like paltry imitations of the brilliance that was Sylvia Platt, Isabel Allende, Jodi Picoult, Ocean Vuong, and all the writers who discussed race and feminity and humanity without sacrificing their artistic voice. I, on the other hand, wrote poems to describe the miniscule: the scars on my fingers after I maliciously burned myself on the stove, the cold snare of a measuring tape and the blue electric of a scale, the loss of my hair and period. As for an artistic voice, I developed a style stunted with anger and curbed with frustration. In other words, I was not proud of my poems.

Looking back, however, my poetry is a near-perfect mirror of my self-destruction and recovery. As I adopted new perspectives on mental health and myself, my poems morphed from tirades of self-hate into conversations and dialogues – not just with myself, but with family, friends, various other sources of tension in my life. I began to use poetry as (as clichéd as it sounds) a lens for studying and questioning myself, rather than an attempt to force my experiences onto the looming concepts of culture and feminism and mental health.

I believe that shift in mindset: from poetry as projection to poetry as introspection, was one of the primary factors behind my eventual recovery. Writing about myself far easier and more fulfilling. It gave me more room and creativity to maneuver with my words and ideas; through words, I began to study and shape myself. Take, for instance, these two poems. The first was written in 2016 and the other just a few weeks ago.

2016:
A woman trying to be human, not man, as she sits at her office means millions of honeyed barbs stabbing her every day, whether she feels them or not.

Starvation that drapes skin over skeletons means millions of fake fundraisers thrown out like feathers from a pillowcase.

A young child forced into a wedding veil means a million veils more thrown over her when she returns home, carrying her daughter and a bloodied face.

Turning away from the smoke spilled by the hour into the sky means millions of men contaminated each day by the sickness of ignorance.

A Muslim girl tugging her hijab over her head each morning means a million hostile eyes tugging at it during the day.

2019:
supernumery? all right, i’m silent only because
i stumble over my words more easily than these
stilettos, but let’s pretend i can actually wield
this blade called stillness, can sculpt a woman

divided by zero. insouciant crooked teeth: am i
a revolutionary or just parasseuse? dollar store
ermine capes & clip-on gold hoops – sometimes i fuck
myself when i realize my kingdom is a circus but

nah, i’ll just melt this tiara
into my eyes, thank you. stuff my stomach with sarcasm &
chalkboard cocoons. to my pupils, my
purgatory pupae: go talk to my lawyer, i

am not responsible for these white lies but please
do shoot the messenger, this princess hirsute & bleached beneath
her fiduciary sequins.

The first is about the social issues I wanted desperately to tackle but couldn’t. The second is about myself: my struggles with imposter syndrome and anorexia. I will let you be the judge of the two - although the second leaves much to be wanted, it is massively better than the first.

So the moral of this essay? Write what you know, for yourself. In return, your readers will translate your writing into what they know, for themselves. It is this symbiosis that makes a poem – or any piece of writing – beautiful.

It is as writer Roxana Robinson said, “A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention, to be ready for radical empathy. If we empty ourselves of ourselves we’ll be able to vibrate in synchrony with something deep and powerful. If we’re lucky we’ll transmit a strong pure note, one that isn’t ours, but which passes through us. If we’re lucky, it will be a note that reverberates and expands, one that other people will hear and understand.”

Intersect
- Simon Wu, 3/7/19

Hi y’all! My name is Simon Wu (pronouns he, him, his) and I’m on staff of the It's Real family.

It’s March, and if you live in a location anywhere close to where I live in Seattle Washington, you know that March is the nebulous month where the weather gets all wonky and confused - a sort of perennial puberty, if you will, where we see the seasons change from the cold barren months of winter to the birdsong and budding flowers of spring. It’s the season when the snow begins to melt, greenery begins to grow, where nature begins to reconstruct itself and bring everything together once again. March is the time of new possibilities, of new beginnings, of new patterns in our ecosystems, of new potential *intersections* in our creative pursuits.

However, if you’re anywhere near as nihilistic and apathetic as me, you probably thought that everything I said above is a load of BS. Truth be told, I probably don’t care about flowers blooming or birds singing, I don’t care about what season it is (unless it’s testing season! Look out, May’s creeping up!), and I especially don’t believe that there’s any good reason that March is the specific month to begin thinking about intersections. In my humble opinion, we should be constantly questioning the way we interact with other people and ourselves throughout the year, in order to have a deep and rich understanding of our identities and relationships.

According to French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “Nos subjectivités sont toujours en mutation parce que nous sommes définis par la manière dont nous sommes connectés au monde:" our subjectivities are always in flux because they are defined in relation to everything around us*.

*I definitely just made this quote up because my proficiency in the French language is not adequate.

Not long ago, a very smart person (who I appreciate very much!) explained to me just what this old white French dude was saying. They told me that one of Deleuze’s fundamental ideas is the distinction he makes between “being” and “becoming”. Deleuze believes that we as individuals are always in a state of becoming - which, in regular English, just means that we as individuals are always changing because the way we interact with the world around us is always changing. As we continue existing, we learn and we grow, we form new ideas and meet new kinds of people. Because of this, our very identities are always in flux. We exist in respect to the world around us, and thus it’s the endless intersections in our lives that make us who we are today.

So realistically, it’s silly to restrict the expression of our entire identities to this one silly and arbitrary month.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think that we should be taking hypergeneralized and overprivileged life advice from French postmodern armchair philosophers with a grain of salt. Yet, I do think that chewing on some of Deleuze’s ideas might help get our creative enzymes flowing and break down some of our food for thoughts (or food for THOTs, as I like to say! Go follow my cooking Instagram @notvegetarianSpam). Our intersections with the world are never static. They’re constantly in flux, changing and evolving as we ourselves change and evolve. I think it’s just as important to take time and explore the new intersections we create as it is to reflect on how our past intersections have transformed. Spring, after all, is a time where the new and old come together.

I finally want to end with a few notes on the importance and significance of this topic to me. Y’all may have noticed that this month’s topic, “intersect”, is intentionally vague, similar to the past two months. We do this not only to encourage and inspire creativity in our readers and submitters, but also because we recognize that “intersect” means something different to every individual. Personally, when I think of the word “intersect”, I think about intersectionality - the beautiful and intricate ways in which my identity as a gay, cis-male, Chinese immigrant interacts with the world around me. I firmly believe that understanding intersectionality is key to avoid essentializing and homogenizing Asian identities, since all of us are different, beautiful people who have amazingly diverse experiences with the world. Thus, I’m making it my mission this month to bring intersectionality to the forefront of my discussions of my mental health, which will include my experiences with depression, anxiety, and bulimia.

But that’s just me - intersect can mean so much more in so many different ways to other people. Intersect can describe our hobbies, our passions and interests, our relationships with our parents or our communities, the coalitions we build with people different from us - the potential for creativity and interpretation is endless. So I implore all y’all to share your unique experiences with those around you. And it would mean the world to us staff here at It's Real if you could share our magazine as well. Lastly, I want to give another HUGE thank you on behalf of the entire It's Real squad to all of our contributors. Just this past month, we’ve reached 1,500 unique viewers and 5,000 unique views. All of us here are amazed by the progress and success we’ve made with this platform, so here’s to another incredible month of intensive intellectual introspection!

So is there a real reason why March is the month of intersections?

Don’t think too much about it. We’ve all got bigger things to worry about.

SWu out.

Duality
- Antalique Tran 2/14/19

"Seems weird but I can have two voices in my head, a personal dialogue, with one hysterical patient and one rational psychiatrist. But sometimes the psychiatrist doesn't want to work. Or the hysterical patient doesn't want to listen. Or both. So I'm left with the psychiatrist knowing there's something wrong and how to fix it, but the patient unwilling to take a step forward. Or even the psychiatrist just wanting to back off, to let the streams run their course."

Friday, October 19, 2018, is when I dated this journal entry. Ink scratched away at paper as I isolated myself in a seventy-two square feet space at the end of a dorm hallway. In that moment, I wanted to be alone with the subdued noises of car tires rolling across pavement, the dimmed stars, and the interplay of the cold windows and warm radiator. But that did not mean that I wanted to be lonely. I was at harmony with my surroundings, but at tension with myself. I put a front of a bubbly and confident persona for others—so well, in fact, that I would believe the front myself until I came back home and the hidden thoughts regained control. Opposing forces paradoxically coexisted.

Mental health issues seem to be where most of my duality originates, and perhaps where it originates for other people as well. As a university student struggling with depressive tendencies, I genuinely want to do work for a majority of my days but mentally cannot. I want to get a problem set done, want to review my notes, want to pursue an art project. Yet inner thoughts come out and glue me to my bed, strip me of my motivation, and I lay there—tired but sleepless, resting but restless—beating myself up over wanting to be productive but unable to rid myself of the mental exhaustion. Speaking as the rational psychiatrist, it's silly. I understand what helps me get through the troughs of life, yet there are many times when I cannot motivate myself to do them.

Duality also exists in my other parts of life. As an extroverted introvert, I love sitting down with random people at dining halls but also need to get away from people to recharge. I enjoy destroying the punching bag in the gym but also caressing a sonata from the piano. All my friends can attest to my lack of restraint with roasts and insults, but they also understand that I will always be there to support them. I want to please my parents—boat refugees from Vietnam passing on the American dream to their children—by pursuing a career path with guaranteed financial security, but I also want to take risks by exploring the intersection between visual arts and sciences.

These types of dual concepts exist in everyone—most likely not the same experiences nor personalities nor desires as I just described—but the yin and yang for certain does. Remember that you are permitted to experience these dualities because we all go through them. Good days will be there despite the bad, self-love will balance out self-deprecation, and the psychiatrist will always be there for the patient.