Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

I know many people survive, but I also think people glorify resilience a little too much, forgetting that the fragile ones simply die as the world walks on over their bones.

They say terrible things are done in darkness, but terrible things are also done in a light too blinding for anyone else to look at directly.

People can do such spectacular things if you forget to tell them it's impossible. I want them to try.

What is love if not a shield thrown up around you when you are too injured to throw it up yourself?

There is something bright and brilliant in me. It doesn't make me feel special. It makes me terribly alone.

People want to be the ones drawing the lines, building the boxes, making the names. Maybe because stories live inside all those structures, and if you're the one controlling the stories, then you're the one in power. So they get really angry when you name yourself, especially if you're the type of thing they were expecting to name.

I learn that I will disappoint others with my lack of wellness, of capacity, of ability to explain to them the intricacies of what the fuck is happening with my flesh that renders me unable to perform the way I used to. I forgive myself for letting people go, because I am trying to hold on to myself.

The spell is clear: face your work. [...] What happens after you make the work is uncertain, but one thing is guaranteed: If you don't make the work, nothing will happen. Discipline is just a series of choices. With the spell, we can understand that each choice is carving out a future, finding our way out of the desert. Trust me, it's glorious on the other side.

How many times have we tried to stand up fully only for them to tell us that we're being violent for just trying to be whole, that our attempted wholeness was hurting them? They've lied to us for such a long time. And I think when we've been taught to be afraid of ourselves in such ways, we absorb some of our teachers' fear.

It is a different kind of power to be able to anoint yourself instead of kneeling for someone else to do it.

...if just this terrified you - the tip of a feather - how am I supposed to open up entire wings?

You told me that one of the reasons you couldn't be with me was that you were afraid of my relationship with death, of the responsibility of keeping me alive. I found that incredibly insulting. No one asked you to keep me alive. No one asked you to be a ventilator, a pair of hands desperate against my sternum, a series of gasping breaths into a slack mouth. You're not qualified. No one is qualified. I am not a person who thinks that anyone is coming to save me except myself. I have been dying my whole life, don't you understand, flirting with death, bargaining, stalling, shifting strategies to stay alive. I am the person who is best at keeping myself alive, there is no singular love responsible for me, there is no one who knows me deeper, you would make a useless life jacket. You will never be better at it than I am. All I wanted was someone for the loneliness, someone to hold my hand and sit in the dark with me.

...how aggressive we have to be with our wellness in order to survive...

I am not going to die. I choose to be alive; I choose to let everything else go. It continues to be hard and heartbreaking, as sacrifices always are, but I spent so much of my life afraid of unfurling, afraid of all the things other people feared in me. There are only a few decades left before I go home; I don't want to waste them being folded. I am choosing the new life. I don't know what it's going to look like, other than brilliant perhaps to the point of excruciation, but I intend to wake up every morning and find out.

It wasn't my first mutilation, but it was one of my best.

I wasn't worried about failing, because if I failed my life would be just the same as it already was, so there was nothing to be scared of. If I succeeded, however, everything would change, and that was terrifying.

If you release the idea of the essential self, throw it naked into the surf and let the sea carry it away, then everything changes. Without it, masks take on a new expanse of possibility. They can conceal, yes, but as the magician says, they can also clarify what is true - in precisely the same way a story can tell you something better than stark facts ever could.

Sometimes, you remember me better than I remember myself. I think that's important in a friendship - to hold reflections of people for them, be a mirror when they start fading in their own eyes.

I talked to Alex who has had to live with the possibility of losing me for almost a decade now, and they are terrified. But they tell me they’re not the one who has to live with it. So they can’t say anything, they can’t really tell me to stay. I appreciate that because so many people tell me to stay without knowing what they’re asking, the kind of pain that they’re willing me to just continue being in, and they can’t imagine that this pain has been there since I was little, since before I can remember, always and constant, and my whole life is a calculated distraction to try and get away from it.

My therapist told me that when people think about power, they think about the choices that power will give them: options, resources, things like that. What they don't often think about are the consequences of power. The things you lose, the things you sacrifice, the costs[...] No one has patience for hearing about the consequences unless they're experiencing them as well; otherwise all they can see are the choices. As in, life must be sweet where you are! That's one of the more insidious ways this kind of power isolates you from other people: it's like they become blind to what's actually happening with you, replacing it with an illusion they created, their imaginations of what your life is like, which is really a fantasy of how they think their life would be if they had what you have.

They need you to think they are more powerful than you, because that is literally the only thing making them more powerful than you. You dispense the anointing oil, you are the power.

It's been like this for as long as I can remember- every once in a while, there comes a time where I have to step into a ring and fight Death. It's a recurring appointment, with no pattern and no proxies. You can't fight it for me, you can only watch from outside the ropes and I know that is a terrifying place to stand, helpless and with futile hands. I know that, every time, it looks like I'm going to lose[...] Death is friendly, casual with its grin. It is patient, it knows that no matter how many fights we have, it will win the last one. Each time, I fight for my life. Each time, it fights for sport, out of habit, for destiny. I have been alive more than thirty years; I am undefeated in this ring. I wish you could see that about me[...] I wish you could see the tenacity I have, the iron jaw locked onto life, the fact that Death has never won, that I am a champion in one of the most brutal games anyone could be playing.

It is a one-way trip, my love, you cannot undo being born, you cannot undo the body. There is no rush. It's okay for it to be slow; you only think it's slow because it's flesh. A few decades are nothing, they laugh. There's no need to destroy the body; the body is already destroying itself, the body is already dying. I take comfort in that. I am already being destroyed, I am already dying and going home, and I have work to do.

I am so fucking glad that I lived long enough to feel the world that I built for myself; I'm grateful for the work I did when I didn't feel like living, because it has wrapped me in this life now.

It's never too late- that's a human lie of time, there is no late, there is mostly now, because now is so flexible, I find. You can change a whole life, a whole world, inside of a now.

I think a lot of what love is, is just telling the truth.

Remembering is the death of mercy.

I got tired of playing with men who had cruelty just a slip behind their eyes.

I often feel like a trophy to my parents, a shiny little prodigy who gets shamed and chastised when I step out of line—a whip of violences cracked into the air to force me back into compliance. Threaten my doctors, try to get me committed, out me, tell me I’m going to get AIDS, call me weak and a coward, tell me I’m sick in the head, then pull me close when I recoil too much, or when they’re lonely, or when there is power, money, and shine on the table. Perhaps this is ungracious. I’ve been asked to be more empathetic, more lenient with them.