mysecretdiary

[mysecretdiary]

03.18.21

I am at a loss today. I feel as if my body has been shaken up and carved out completely hollow.

I've already cried, sighed, shouted, and ranted. I've tasted the salty tears of my grief and frustration. The words of my father rang around in my head, "tears won't do anything... crying is useless." It's true that tears won't make the dead less dead, or justice more just, or the world less evil and corrupt.

There's no worse feeling than feeling helpless.

All we do in this world is try to exert whatever force and power we have over the ways of the world and other people to get what we want. Some people choose to move for goodness, some people choose to move for evil.

I know that the world is not black and white, and that people are complicated, and histories are complicated. But I've seen and felt the burning hot poker of hatred before, and the desire for complete annihilation, and there is consummate nothingness in that.

How do you fight nothingness? How do you fight back against someone who wants obliteration and destruction? There is nothing that a wall of fire won't consume.

Why is it that the violence of men and the violence of whiteness, leaves only festering putrid rot inside of its victims?

There is no punishment that could possibly be equal to the suffering of those murdered and their loved ones. Only the people robbed, stabbed, murdered, are the ones who suffer, and the ones who must carry the wound.

I carry this wound inside of me, like an unwanted tumor, one that cannot be cut out. A tumor that bears the signature and the DNA of the people who hate me. A tumor that throbs and seethes with poison at every new act of violence.

I wonder what it will take to cleave it from myself. Born in China, born a woman, born in a body that strangers want to violate, desecrate, destroy with their hatred. Born in a body that must keep on, that heals over past wounds until ugly scars remain. Born in a body that the cops have called a "soft target" after being violently assaulted and robbed in the street in the middle of the night, right outside my apartment. Born in a body, not much unlike the body of the girl who was stabbed in the exact same place now, 7 years after I was attacked there.

Maybe they want to cut out the piece of me they hate, and after they cut it out of me, they think they will be cured.

A man wielding a gun, wanting to "eliminate his temptations", shooting women, born in a body, that he sees as his temptation, a vessel only for his desires, that he must eliminate to alleviate his pain.

Born from a women's body, these women, bore love, bore life, bore dreams, daydreams, nightmares, fears, thoughts, hopes, mundane routines that brought them delight and bodies that worked to provide for their families, bodies that liked to climb, and jump, and leap, and run, and sit, and swim, and sleep. These women, murdered, bodies that lie still now forever.

The parts of me, cut out, lie still forever. Death is inside me, it is swallowed up acts of violence done upon me, and every human body like mine.

[mysecretdiary]

03.10.21

Is it possible to be loved wholly as a woman being loved by a man??

It seems like even when a man is not intentionally trying to be cruel or oppressive, being loved by a man, as a woman, inherently different and societally inequal to a man, means to be hurt and to be oppressed.

I have fantasized about love and fantasized about being loved by a perfect, loving, nurturing man for so long, and yet that fantasy get crushed over and over again.

I know that fantasy could never meet reality, but is it also too much to ask to be loved by a man in a way that does not rob me, or crush me, or dehumanize me?

[mysecretdiary]

03.03.21

I spoke with my therapist today. A lot of thoughts have been circling my head, honestly dizzying and making me feel overwhelmed and very confused. I've been feeling a lot fear around the hate crimes happening lately in the asian community here. The violence makes me feel unhinged, like it's in the air. All the violence is buzzing in the air, the blood that's been shed is hanging all around us like a mist.

I was interviewed by on saturday at the AAF anti-asian hate crime rally and it was on news12. It felt really satisfying to speak on it, and to be around people who look like me and people who really care about this. I hope to god and the universe that things get better.

We talked more about my identity issues as well. I feel as if my identity and my qualities could float away so easily. I don't feel confident in any of my qualities or in who I am. It's been a problem for a long time. It's so frustrating to feel like I don't know who I am. My therapist says those thoughts are coming from my emotion mind. That I'm feeling like my identity is fragile, but my rational mind knows better. She says I have to build on the things that make me who I am with intention. What do I care about? What do I want to do? It confounds me. I'm afraid to even commit to one thing, and then I end up doing nothing at all. I don't know where I'm headed, and I can't even start.

I do plan on volunteering with some of the time I have on my hands, and I hope that contributing my time to something outside of myself will help. And I want to write more, and I want to act more. I want to start taking acting classes again. I want to continue writing. I have a lot of ideas, and they just swim around in my head like goldfish inside a plastic bag, circling around endlessly and pointlessly, neglected, until they're all belly up dead and bloated.

[mysecretdiary]

03.02.21

The last few weeks were really hard. I've been having a really hard time after a breakdown a few weeks ago.

[mysecretdiary]

06.21.20

feel horrible today. feel psychically disgusting. like all of the resentment and anger and rage in the universe is being expressed through my body. Had dreams last night I was sitting at a table with my parents, except there was two of my dad there. And one version of him was yelling and berating the other version of him, and I was sitting in the middle trying to defend the one dad that was being verbally abused. 

slept in only to find multiple missed calls from my mom. I don’t want to talk to you. feeling dissociated. hard to follow even one train of thought. 

remembering a time years ago when i did not want to talk to them, and my silence of course lead them to resentment, but I didn’t know that they could be vindictive. there’d been a lot of armed robberies in the neighborhood where they lived, and just as my mother is prone to panic, so am I. So I started to call them, to no answer, and left messages saying that I wanted to make sure they were ok because I heard about all the neighborhood break-ins. A man had been shot in his house only a few blocks away. There was no answer all night and not the next day either. And when they usually reply within the hour, I was growing desperate, but there was no answer still. I called my dad on his work phone, but there was no answer. This was very strange to me. I began to have a panic attack, hyperventilating, feeling desolate and completely lost. the only family I have. I have family on the other side of the world, but I don’t even have their numbers and didn’t know how to reach them. the world beneath me was breaking apart. I hoped maybe there was something wrong my phone. I borrowed my roommate’s phone to try to call them again, and my dad picked up. I was astonished that he answered the phone, and asked him why he didn’t answer before. He said he wanted to teach me a lesson. To show me how it felt when someone doesn’t answer. 

The spinning, dizzying, breathless, tumult, it fills my body with dread and shivers of rage and grief. I can’t even understand. All the feelings that rush around inside me. I feel like I could vomit. I feel sick to my stomach, and so angry that I feel like I could vomit and never stop vomiting. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to speak. I don’t want to hear. Because it feels like there could be no good to come from any of it. 

[mysecretdiary]

summer of 2017

Summer of 2017

Summer of uncertainty. Summer of restlessness. Packing up the memories of some other woman's fractured family. Just brushing on a new layer of paint over what lived here before. Telling ourselves that's what we need. As if heaving up everything from before and just stripping it bare and wiping down the dust will eradicate the choices that we made that brought us here in the first place. The box of books is heavy and yet it still feels somehow just like a drop of sand against the relentless tides that are pulling me forward. I can't build a levee high enough fast enough to keep myself from getting pulled out. It won't work. It's impossible. I know it. And she must know it too somewhere inside her that even with her new man, her new hair color, her old last name, that this house was here before them, and it was theirs first and she can't paint that over. Unless she gets lobotomized it's always there. Even if she never talks about it again. 

I feel like I'm paralyzed. Lying with my palms up in the ocean and people keep telling me to swim or to paddle in one direction or the other and in my heart I know that there's only one I can go because if I spread my energy out to try and go all of the ways I'll drown before I make it anymore and so I just stay stuck and don't move a single inch. I don't even breathe. I feel like I've been holding my breath for so long just waiting for someone to tell me that I'm doing this wrong. I just keep waiting for someone to finally look at me and say hey this is not where you're supposed to be. How did you manage to sneak over here? Get back here right now! And yet it never happens. And so I keep floating out here. 

Summer is coming. I can feel it on my skin. I can hear it in the birds that sing all day and the children that scream and laugh into my open window. The sun begins to set so late that it makes me dizzy. Makes me stumble home drunk at midnight wondering when I had missed dinner. 

There's a thin layer of sweat over me always now. And my hair sticks to my forehead and the air smells heavy like jasmine. 

I keep seeing men that look like him. And it doesn't make me miss him. It makes me want to hide. Because I think that he'll regret it. He wouldn't want to see me. I don't want to think about all of the places that they'll go together. But I don't want to be her. But I don't want to be here with me either. 

People who were supposed to be alongside me all year have already left and time just rushes past unyielding and unforgiving. I hardly had time to know them to notice that they're gone. 

Getting drunk popping Ativan and telling everyone that life is meaningless. 

Do I have good memories before then? What does that even mean? It was all just normal. It was so normal before. Before what. Before everything. I was so normal. And now looking back on those memories of when I was 7 were things better then? Was I happy then? Is that a concrete thing to hang onto? I'm not sure I believe in that. 

I was me and I was me. I don't know. 

"That Laura that you knew before isn't there anymore. She's gone and now all that's left is me."

////

I'm in Rome by myself. Eating alone. And honestly I don't feel that self conscious. I've really gone through everything alone. I feel really strong right now. Like I can do it all! I mean I do need help. But I can do so many things alone and that's something I should be more proud of. 

 ///

The worlds just spinning by and it's honestly so dizzying just going on and on and I just had a thought of visiting ny in July and it honestly makes me really scared bc what will it be like this time? Things have changed so tremendously since the last time I was there. And I don't know. And if i see him again I will probably throw up. I really don't know if I can handle it. 

////

Thinking a lot about success rn and what it means to get what you want. 

Just watched Kristell speak at this google fashion event right next to the louvre. I mean it was really cool. She was the only woman to speak and i know like logically she's a very successful woman. But then I look at the people around her and it really makes me think about what 

Had a horrible anxiety ridden feeling all day and then when we were at the bar Marie ran into her ex that she hadn't seen in a year. And this fucking asshole came up to us twice to try to talk to Marie and Marie told her to fuck off. It was clear that seeing this person really affected her. She said her heart was beating wildly and I know it took her a lot of courage to say what she had to say. And I'm really glad she did. It felt so good to see her express herself the way she needed to. It was so empowering. I've had a very intense day honestly. I feel horrible. There's so many things that I won't ever be able to reconcile with. And I don't know how I will be able to or how I will be able to face my demons. And how in the face of a person you can just crumble into nothing. In the face of one specific person, everything that you are, everything that has brought you to this point, everything that you love and everyone that you love around you, still.... that pain is urgent and it surges up. It's so real. It's so visceral. 

///

Don't know if I really even like him. Feel like my heart is swimming in a void. A lukewarm pool of salt water. Like my heart is floating in the Dead Sea 

///

8.14.17

I am so tired. Dissociating. In San Francisco. Feels like I am trying to escape reality

Been feeling weird all day. Feelings of disgust and repulsion are returning to me and I do t know what that means and it scares me

****

[mysecretdiary]

nameless poetry

I dreamed of an endless torrent of vomit

Young girls who get pregnant are beautiful objectively 

But to themselves grotesque 

She used to be flat, rail thin, empty and bones,

But she filled out, one month in, just 30 short days

Her navel and her breasts and her back grew heavy

She was full with someone else

And it made her vomit

Endlessly day and night

////

Steel whirring

Being ignored makes me suicidal

I wish I had run out into traffic so then I would be dead

And she doesn't think about the next word out of her mouth so she says a lot of things that could be interpreted as cruel as bitter as disgusting

Everything out of your mouth is an original thought that

You stole from someone else

And so I don't know you

But a patchwork of quotes and smiles and eye shadows that you wave in front of me to distract me from me 

////

Can't believe I used to be in love with someone who used James Joyce as a coaster

I watched boys play soccer until their shadows grew grotesquely long and their thick calves became spindly and tossed out in various unnatural angles

And the sunset

And my father grew tired and he took me home

I don't fit in places anymore

The shape of my hand was worn into a doorknob on Greene

The sound of my voice held in a hallway on lefforts 

These are places that don't know me anymore

There are new people in these rooms, they don't know me either 

They don't know how many hours I spent curled over crying onto that cheap plastic futon

Or how I fell in love with those plastic wrinkles making marks in my arms

[mysecretdiary]

06.12.18 Lostness

I think the center of understanding myself and understanding the nature of my “lostness” is focusing on love.

If I could understand what it really means to love someone, and not in the obsessive consuming way that I understand it now, I could figure out how to manifest all of the things that i want for myself in the world.

I need to understand how to love, how to express love, and how to accept love. Most importantly for myself as a start.

We have to start back at the very beginning, or as far back as my memory and the memory of people who share my blood.

How did love first touch my ancestors? How did that love get passed down to me? How was it shown to me the first time? How did i come to discover and understand love for myself?

These are the things I will have to examine and understand in order to move on.

And then the work in adjusting my behaviors and emotional reactions to be more beneficial towards self-improvement will start.

For a very long time, in my native country of China, women’s roles have been defined quite clearly

For most of my life, I always thought that I wasn’t afraid of love. I prided myself on this fact and built so much of my identity on the idea that I was a proud, self-proclaimed hopeless romantic. I didn’t shy away from being romantic. I adored all things unabashedly sentimental, listened to love songs on full volume, the more saxphone, the more riffy guitar solo, the more crooning the better. I read love poetry, Lord Byron, Sappho, Pablo Neruda every chance I had.

I thought these things made me unafraid of love, but now I realize that i’m wrong. Being a romantic, being sentimental is not the same thing as being in love. In fact, being a romantic requires a person to live in memories and fantasies. I’ve come to realize that being in love is actually unbearably terrifying. Being in love is being uncertain, yes, I am happy, but I’m also worried, about saying the wrong thing or wanting something that’s incompatible with the person I love.

I’m in love, and I live day to day, not knowing when that love will leave me, just as quickly as it had arrived in my life.

It consumes me. I know nothing else. I wonder how a person could function, could continue living like this. Being obsessive about one thing, no matter what that one thing is, is not fully being alive, and yet it’s how each day has passed for me. I feel like I’m driving myself out of my mind.

This is how love has felt for me. It has been a single minded obsession that gorges itself whenever possible and lives starving and deprived and aching every moment in between.