cw: suicide
This is a photo of me at 7. I used to have trouble sleeping, overwhelmed by existential questions. One night, I told my mom that I couldn’t stop thinking about how my life would be different if I was born someone else. Another: “Mom, I’m queer.” I learned the word from British lit, a hangover from my dad’s colonial Malaysian education. I always knew I was different. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I had to hide it. A hunch that if I didn’t, I would die. But when you bury life it always finds a way out. Ask the poets who resurrect dead things: like hope.
Living felt like playing a video game. I became a character in someone else’s story. I peeled myself from my body so I didn’t have to feel the pain. But, my voice. My gestures. My body hair. I spilled out of the effigy they made of me.
41% is a comment I often receive. This is in reference to how 41% of trans people have attempted suicide. They do this to say that we die because we have a disorder (not because we are demonized).
What had to be severed to produce this self? I mourn for us and them. I refuse that distinction. I live in the invisible world where people exist, not this one where they pretend. This global callous, that is not life. I know life, because I almost lost it.
I started writing poetry after my first suicide attempt as a teenager. I shared my poems because I wanted to know if someone else out there felt what I did. I learned that my lonely was our lonely. I discovered an underworld that lives beneath the things we say but do not feel. They hunt us because we feel and what is more dangerous than that in a world that anesthetizes our souls into thinking they are merely bodies? We were taught to view each other as sculptures. We spend so much time in fear that we forget how to live. But every stone still has a spirit. I swear it.
I would rather be a soul than a body. I would rather be fluid than frozen. This is why I share when I am hurting. Because I am alive. And it is terrifying and brilliant. It is the most profound argument for love I have ever known.
How ironic that they think my queerness is what made me want to die. When it is the very thing that reminds me why I live.
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