Happy birthday, love.

I can feel things wanting to speak themselves within me, and so I have quieted down to try and listen to them. Sometimes we have to really focus to remember or figure out again how to speak our own language. Sometimes that language changes. The poet Nayyirah Waheed (who I’ve been reading a lot of recently) says, “as an artist, i do not always enjoy the questions, ‘what were you thinking when you wrote this. what was the inspiration behind this.’ […] sometimes, i want to say, without sarcasm, ‘i do not know what my soul was thinking when i wrote that poem, i was too busy listening.” So this writing is a listening.

This birthday marks about one year since I left an abusive relationship.

It also marks about 10 years from the day I left my abusive childhood home after nearly dying from an overdose. That year, I began one sort of process of getting free. Last year, after leaving my ex, I began another.
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I have been reflecting a lot on this past year and how far I’ve come. This time last year, I was at the end of my rope with an abusive relationship. I felt ways I had not felt since I was a child growing up in an abusive home. In the months and days before my birthday, I often told my ex, “I wish I didn’t exist. I want to die.” I felt so much pain that I remember even breathing felt physically painful, like there was something heavy and barbed sitting on my chest, piercing my lungs, weighing on every breath. I even scratched at my wrists because I just wanted to feel something other than what I was feeling. Many of you do not know this, but I cut my arms in high school while living in an abusive house for similar reasons.

I am telling all of this for several reasons. One is because I think it is important to take the boxes out of the attic, open them up, hold these things up, and look at them from time to time. This is one of the ways we get free. I think it is important to bear witness to our own pain and trauma. This is not how I spend most of my days — in the attic — because the point of visiting the attic is so you can make sure you remember how to leave it, and to make sure you really know how to shut the door. But birthdays are a coming-back-around time — back around to the sun, back around to the start point of your journey. And so I am reflecting, taking stock, and honoring the paths I have traveled.
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Gabriel García Márquez writes in El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera — one of my favorite books), Los seres humanos no nacen para siempre el día en que sus madres los alumbran, sino que la vida los obliga a parirse a si mismos una y otra vez. Human beings are not born once and for all the day their mothers give birth to them, but life forces them to give birth to themselves over and over again.

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This is what I know: I am a child of abuse. The history of abuse and trauma that runs in my family birthed me just as much as my mother did; through her, it raised me just as much as she did; it runs through my veins as much as her blood does. To separate that history from her is impossible, and it is a part of her, too.

10 years ago, on my birthday, my family gave me a small amount of money as a gift because they could tell there was nothing I wanted anymore. All I wanted was to not live with my abusive parents, and since I knew that would not happen, all I wanted was to escape somehow. My parents gave me the money and told me not to spend it on drugs. I spent it on drugs. Two weeks later, I overdosed and ended up in the emergency room. After I woke up, my parents formally kicked me out of their house.

I didn’t really want to die, but I didn’t want to live either. I didn’t know what it meant to want to live because I didn’t know what it meant to own my own life — only how to survive.

It has only been in the past year — since I recognized with a jolt that my last relationship was abusive — that I traced the roots of my relationship with my ex and ended up at my mother and father. One of the ways any kind of abuse works — whether it is personal, as in family, or structural, as in colonialism — and if we are honest, the personal and the structural are always related — is that it convinces us it does not exist. Sometimes this is because it is not safe to be fully honest with ourselves while we are in the midst of living through abuse — to watch with open eyes the fist coming down upon our faces (whether literal or figurative), which we may have no shelter from. Sometimes the only way we can protect ourselves is with a shutting of our eyes before the blows we are sustaining. Abuse takes advantage of and manipulates this protective turning away, using it for cover, to remain unspeakable and unchallenged.

It is only once we are safe and have been safe for some time that we can touch again the honesty within our center.

Having been pushed to the extreme of abuse once again in my life, I have been able, finally, to speak the truths of my younger self from their hidden places. To understand the language of my younger self that still clangs and whispers inside of me. To revisit those years of trauma and to say to myself, over and over, with tears of sadness and joy in my heart for both my suffering and my survival —
I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
You are not alone. You may not know it, but you are not alone.
The descendants that are your future selves and all your descendants — all those who, in the words of the artist Cherry Galette, hold your name in their mouths with love — are with you.
We love you.
You are not alone.
You survive.
In the end.
You survive.

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A few months ago, I wrote:
Do you remember feeling like it would never end?
Do you remember feeling like you would never get out?
Sometimes I wonder if I really did.
Sometimes I cannot believe I survived
Sometimes I wonder if I really died and left my body somewhere around 17
and I am dreaming my freedom.
Sometimes my freedom doesn’t feel free
or like I pull the strings.
Some days I walk in a daze because it doesn’t feel real
I feel
like my life is on loan to me
like I don’t really own me.
I listen to the insides of me,
To them clashing and crashing angrily,
thrashing like me at punk shows
where the hitting of my body against another reminds me that I have.
a body.
and that it is mine.
and that this is all I know for sure.
so I will give it to myself as hard as I can.
And I have to jump up and down just to feel the weight of my feet hitting the ground
to ground me
til I’ve found me.
On nights like this I sit on the bathroom floor and cry,
clutching a handkerchief at the funeral of my 8-year-old self
my 9-year-old-self
my 10-year-old self.
The children who prayed for death before they’d barely been alive.

I listen and listen and try to remember my mother tongue
And on the days that I can, I write
And on the days that I can’t, I run.
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Sometimes it is confusing living in the same body that laid on a hospital bed drugged and unconscious 10 years ago. Sometimes it is confusing containing all these years of me within myself. Writing this feels at once like a eulogy and a reclaiming and also like not quite either but something in between and above both. I know that I contain the past years of myself within me, that I would not be who I am uniquely now without them, and yet they feel like wholly separate people outside of me within their own right. I think about the past persons I have been as though I could look behind me and see them standing at physical points on a timeline.

And I feel that some of them did not survive, that there are some of me who have been waiting to be laid to rest. Maybe those of me who trusted easily or were able to sense danger without their instincts clouded. There are those of me that have been waiting to be seen, to be cradled and loved and laid down. Waiting until I could be ready to do that for them.
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I believe I am free from my abusive history and I also believe that freedom from abuse is an action, a constant struggle. I hold both of those contradictory statements as absolute truths within myself simultaneously. Incidentally, I think the same can be said about any of us and the struggle to live in this world — we are all free, and also, freedom from various oppressions is a lifelong job.

My life’s work as I see it — my personal work as me, as a person in the never-ending struggle to become an ever better and happier version of myself — is to be freer and freer. To transcend the patterns of generational trauma that I was born of. I say transcend and not escape because these experiences and this history make up part of the fabric of who I am. It is not a question of escape, but of growing beyond. Nayyirah Waheed also writes, “mothers are humans. who sometimes give birth to their pain. instead of children.” Because of this, I don’t think my mother will ever be able to see the daughter she actually gave birth to and who that person has become. And my journey towards freedom is to not birth that pain, and instead birth life — for the moment, my own.

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Being a child of abuse means being rootless. (For those of you who have wondered, this is why I have never considered moving back to New York since I left 10 years ago). It is in turns lonely and liberating. I still talk to my family often, but the best way I have found to love them is from a distance. They are the people I feel least connected to in the world.

Instead, I have grown deep roots of home and of love within myself. I have grown them in other people. I am wanted by me; I am here for me. And when I forget that I look to the family I have created for myself, to eyes that hold reflections of the best versions of me. Not the least flawed versions, but the most whole ones, the ones fully seen and loved. And they anchor me again.

Recently, one of my dearest friends gifted me a tarot reading, and one of the cards the reader pulled was “The Hermit.” In this reader’s deck, the card depicts an old woman holding a lantern, but the light in the lantern seems to come from her heart. The reader explained to me, “I see this card as meaning you can light the entire forest with your heart.” And on my lowest days, these days, I still believe that about myself. There are victories within myself that I can’t describe to you except to tell you things like that. There are other shifts and changes in me that must be witnessed and not written about. And in truth, I am the one witness to all that has been won and lost.
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Growth is never comfortable; sometimes it hurts, sometimes it feels weird and prickly. Even though my ex was abusive, the idea of leaving him felt like my heart was being torn out through my throat. He was my companion. Losing him meant losing not just my abuser, but also the person who rubbed my toe whenever I stubbed it, the person I made the center of my family since I often feel I have none, and who gladly shared his own family with me, the person who brought me juice at work on his good days. The person I opened the tenderest parts of myself to. It is not my fault he chose to wound them.

He felt like a part of me. Carrying pain and abuse felt like another appendage of my body, something that a deep part of me remembered and knew. It was something familiar, something I knew how to do. Something I had not yet looked at and begun to unlearn.

In the months after we broke up, I felt like I was blindly staggering through life and all I could do was keep going. I began to really talk about it. I saw a counselor. Every day it felt like the ground beneath me shifted. Every day I uncovered some new truth about his treatment of me, some piece I had closed my eyes to in my quest to feel loved. Because while I was with him, facing the reality that I had willingly walked back through the door of my childhood home would have been too devastating. Imagine what it feels like to wake up every day not certain of what might be different. To realize you spent a year and a half loving someone you did not know except in the instinctive way that their trauma fit itself into your own, like a perfect lock and key. To realize that the person who told you they loved you raped you.

But the thing about the truth is that it is a rock, and it will not go away. You will get nauseous and you will throw up and you will hold onto it to steady yourself, and you will get well again and see with clear eyes where you are. And with your stomach empty of the poison you have been fed. You start again.

To me, the opposite of abuse is truth and honesty. This is what I learned after leaving my childhood home, where walls constantly shifted. In the morning my mother raged, flipped tables at me, called me names. In the evening she cooed to me and forced me to cuddle in bed with her. She talked about her own suffering and told me I did not know what pain was. This is speaking a language of trauma and not using the words we mean to say things that are exactly what they look and sound like. My mother loves me through the broken pieces of her heart, which bend and refract light. This is why I am direct, why I am straightforward and try to speak things straight from the places they come from. This is the foundation of the home I started building 10 years ago after leaving my mother’s house, how I began to get free and how I first experienced, slowly, the sensation of belonging only to myself. How I began building a home in me where love could live. A home I could always find my way back to, no matter what.

A year after leaving my ex, I have come back home. I read a poem by Rupi Kaur: “welcome back. you have been gone such a long time.” I cried because it was true and because I was finally home again and because unlike the me who left my parents’ home on a stretcher, I now have a home to return to.
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I am arriving at this year as someone who thinks — what a privilege to be exactly who I am in this world. Through the days of depression, the days of the daily grind, the days of joy, the first days of spring and the days of first dates and the days of not enough sleep and the days of feeling stuck and everything in between.
I am who I was a year ago, who I was 10 years ago, but (and) freer.
I hold those of me close to me and I lay them down, with love, with respect, with admiration for all they saw, all they weathered, all they bore witness to, all they are allowing me to become.

To my past, future, and present selves:

You are loved.
You are home.
You are free.
And next year, you will be even freer.

Happy birthday.