Trigger warning: mentions of suicide.
It feels absurdly unprovoked. I remembered it yesterday, and again today. I remembered it last month and the month before that. For the past two years, ever since I finished reading Chang Yi-hsuan's novels, thinking through her writing has been like a media player I cannot switch off. It runs while I work, while I rest, even while I'm out trying to have fun. No other novel has ever trapped me inside thought for this long. I think of it as a kind of language study.
Yesterday, while watching Lesbian Space Princess with a friend in Macau, my mind drifted again in that peculiar way—drifted, or maybe just started screaming at full volume inside my head. In queer narratives, I am not queer enough. On the asexual spectrum, not asexual enough. In feminism, not feminist enough. In narratives of sexual trauma, not enough of a victim, not accusatory enough, not even identified enough with that position. I have rarely drawn from other people's stories of violence the nourishment I was supposed to find there.
Most of the time, what I get is courage. But I don't even know what I am meant to use that courage for. When an event is only an event to me, interpreting it does not require courage. What it requires is the resolve to hurt other people. Depression in life does not stop. It does not vanish just because it is June. I have always struggled to think of what happened to me as gendered violence. More precisely, it felt sexless, not gendered at all, and in this world only The Farewell Letter—or Ms. Chang herself—has ever treated that fact correctly. Only The Farewell Letter seems to understand the real question: do you want this life you have been given? Do you want this "sexuality," this imposed "sex"?
Both The Farewell Letter and A History of Sexual Meanings include the same kind of scene: people using sexual innuendo as a joke to test a teenage girl, or even a child, enjoying her apparent ignorance, when in fact she is already far ahead of them. Do you want this life? Do you want this kind of sexuality? I never wanted any of it. Every time I encounter that scene, I feel sick. I want to vomit out all the garbage, all the filth that has been stuffed into my body. The humiliation of being crammed full of trash messages has nearly reached the point where it affects my ability to remain alive in this world. I never wanted any of these things. And everything that came after was worse.
After the film last night, I truly wanted to escape this world for good. Rationally, I could understand how the plot and its elements were arranged. I could even politely appreciate some of the details I would normally find cute. But on the level of sensation, what I received felt like invasion, and it crossed into something I could not bear. This afternoon, after parting from my friend, all the screaming came back into my head. On the pedestrian overpass I wanted to jump. At the crosswalk I wanted a car to hit me.
If this is the ending you are facing, would you still want to get some shared thing from other people? Something like "understanding"?
Last night I also talked a little with my friend about therapy. I asked him what psychotherapy is like, and he asked whether I had never done anything similar before. I said I do not think every problem needs to be solved. He said maybe that just means it is not affecting me that much—like ADHD affects daily life, and therefore needs to be addressed, or at least can be addressed.
What I thought was this: perhaps the event itself is not the problem, and that is why it does not need solving. I rarely have actual problems. I do not have the kind of problem that can be resolved within a lifetime. What else is there for me to say? My only problem is the burden of being alive, and where exactly its ending is.
If a person thinks about the same thing for years, almost every day, at irregular hours, and that thing does not interfere with work, social life, love, or the practical continuation of living, then it cannot really be called a problem waiting to be solved. It has no earlier stage, and so it has no next stage either. It has no novelty. It just rotates forever on its own axis.
If I ever had the chance, I would want to ask Ms. Chang whether Xiao Zhu in her story was based on a real person. Can there really be someone in this world who could make a person like me feel that there is nothing she gives me that I do not want? There is so much garbage in this world. People are so wrong in the ways they treat one another. I often feel like that metaphor myself: an inbox flooded with spam.
Some time ago, while reading discussions online about suicide, I saw someone write, "I didn't die because I thought about what my mother would do if I did." I have attempted suicide more than once since childhood. My earliest attempt was when I was in kindergarten: I tried to stop breathing. At that age, I did not think of my mother at all. Not once. Not even for a moment.
For me, "stopping because I thought of my mother" is not proof of love. It is the opposite of love: terror. It adds another layer of weight on top of suicide itself. Does a mother, once one grows up, also become one more burden in life? I cannot carry a single ounce more than what is already there.
A few weeks ago I was reading Things in nature merely grow. I expected it to be crushing, but it ended up being the most relieved I have felt in a long time while reading, because genuine understanding does exist. Which is to say: dignity really does exist.
If one day I leave too, I only hope people will believe that I left after deciding, "Today is a day when it is possible to go." My mother has nothing to do with it, from beginning to end. Even love has nothing to do with it. Maybe it is only that there has been too much terror. Too much terror, too much garbage. it’s not worth such suffering.