part 1

today’s newsletter is titled after one of my favorite songs as of late, and the song i’m listening to as i write this now: “yesterday” by noname. it’s the first song on noname’s debut mixtape, telefone—which is a perfect collection of music, by the way—and talks about the chicago-born artist’s late grandmother, growing up, and realizing what’s important in life. for the past few days, “yesterday” has been on loop for me. i’m humming the song under my breath at work, while driving between jobs, and in the shower. there’s just something about it. you know how there are friends you can go months without talking to, but when you eventually do reconnect, you click just fine? (or, dare i say, click perfectly?) “yesterday” feels a bit like that. i get overwhelmed when listening to it, sometimes, because noname’s tone is so powerful to me. she is jaded, and reflective, and content, and conscious. this particularly shines through at the end of the first verse, when she raps the following:

me missing brother mike, like, something heavy

me heart just wasn’t ready, i wish i was a kid again

copying this line over, i am reminded of noname’s annotation on her song “paradise,” where she said:

don’t we all miss childhood? i know i do.

i’ve been thinking a lot lately about childhood. my childhood in particular, i guess, but also youth as a whole. i’ve said before that i could talk about the concept of 青春 for hours on end, but the truth is i probably can’t. i simply lack the vocabulary and nuance and experience to do so. it’s important to me, but i couldn’t tell you why. i can’t explain why, and i can’t explain what exactly the blue springtime of our youth entails in the first place. there are a lot of things like that for me, especially when it comes to japanese. i wonder if i’ll ever feel truly comfortable talking about said things or if i’ll always feel a bit hesitant to do so, even if i do become fluent in japanese one day. another worry: by the time i have the vocabulary and command of japanese language to properly describe and understand 青春、my own youth will have become a distant memory. the kind of thing that goes muzzy unless you squint.

i’m in the thick of it right now, my 青春。my father often makes it a point to tell me so. he thinks i’m working too much, that i should be enjoying my summer home from college more, but this might be a pretense because he really just wants me at the house to entertain the random japanese high school girl he has volunteered our family to host in about two weeks. when i say random, i really do mean random. i don’t know how my father knows this girl’s family, and i don’t know anything about the girl herself, other than her name. her presence will be a good opportunity for me to practice my casual speaking with someone around my age, yes, but if i leave for work at eleven am and get back at eleven pm several days a week, i can’t imagine we’ll have much time for talking. my mother and sister are frustrated that my father invited this girl to our home against their wishes. but he does this kind of thing a lot.

the other day my manager at one of my jobs asked me whether my father and i are close and i tilted my head to the side in hesitation so far that i craned my neck. we’re not not close, i explained, especially since i’ve been trying harder to speak japanese over the last few years. but we aren’t good friends. my father helps me with my japanese homework every once in a while. we watch anime together. we eat dinner together when he remembers to cook for the both of us.

we argue, too, now and then. my father loves golfing. this interest started when i was a small child and has only spiraled into an obsession over the years, and he is now a member at an egregiously expensive, predominantly white golf country club. none of my immediate family really likes golfing, me least of all. i haven’t gone since i was a sophomore in high school, and that was because it was Mandatory Family Time. my sister was on our high school’s golf team because she could be, and apparently she told my dad she’d go with him sometime over the next two weeks. naturally, this resulted in my father asking me this morning to come with them. naturally, i said no. naturally, he accused me of being ungrateful for this opportunity to spend time with him and further my golf skills (which will be very beneficial for my career, he insists).

i was a bit caught off guard by our quarrel. i guess i kind of thought my father had given up on getting me to golf, or at least eased up on it after i started taking a very strong interest in japanese—the other thing he pushes his kids about. but writing that now feels stupid. why would me speaking japanese, a cultural phenomenon for my own good, absolve me of having to play golf, my father’s one interest? trying speak japanese with my japanese father should be a given; it’s the bare minimum for a dual citizen japanese american daughter. but i am not the daughter my father wants me to be. i haven’t been for a long time.

content warning / childhood sexual abuse

my stomach is growling but i’d like to keep writing. back to childhood. in my last newsletter from a little over two weeks ago, i mentioned that my therapist assigned me a final task to process my trauma: writing a letter to my younger self. i am proud to say i have not started on this letter, let alone thought about that. (i like the way that last sentence sounds, with letter and let alone right next to each other.) i know i should. i know i really should. but i’ve been busy with work, and self-studying japanese—which i actually have started, thank you very much—and also, maybe a part of me worries that i’m going to write the letter to my younger self, and i’m going to read it to the empty chair, and i’m not going to be all better. again, a silly anxiety, because of course writing a letter to little hatsuna will not erase my wounds beneath wounds! that is not how healing works, after all; it is a non-linear, often life-long process for people with my kind of history. but what am i supposed to do with myself after i’ve been thoroughly therapized and the scars still ache?

content warning / spoilers for the end of bojack horseman

there’s a line from bojack horseman (—god, i’m so sorry that i always mention that godforsaken show; the screenwriting is just lovely and it’s a piece of media that has embedded itself into my mind, just like icarly and your lie in april and victorious… and, and, and; my roommates are used to my media references, which range from incredibly obscure to very common pop culture knowledge, but my three consistent newsletter readers might not be—) in which princess carolyn confesses her potential, hidden anxieties about her wedding, saying:

well, i guess i’m afraid of losing some part of myself. i’m afraid that if i let someone else take care of me that i’m not really me anymore. i’m afraid of getting too comfortable—you know, going soft. i’m afraid that this could be the best thing that ever happened to me, and if it doesn’t make me as happy as i’m supposed to be, that means i’m a lost cause.

and obviously getting married to someone awesome after resigning yourself to a life without a consistent, faithful love is very different from “completing” therapy for childhood sexual abuse, but i do see some parallels. i do still resonate with her words, and her story. i will admit it: i’m afraid that if this doesn’t make me as happy as i’m supposed to be, then that means i’m a lost cause.

i have survived years of abuse, but now i have to deal with the aftermath of this surviving. chanel miller, author of know my name, once wrote that she doesn’t mind the term of “victim,” so long as it is not the only term used to describe her. i feel the same way. i am a victim. (immediately after typing that word, i tried to say the entire sentence aloud. i couldn’t do it. so i guess i can’t faithfully write what i wanted to write next: “i have no qualms with that label.”)

this entire newsletter has just become a diary entry stuffed to the brim with media references, but i have another one that i just have to include. when i go to sleep, i often shuffle a playlist of youtube videos on this app called musi. and while the following video has since gone out of my rotation, i do still listen to it often when i’m not trying to hit the hay. the video is “draw my life” by anna akana. and, oh my god, i’m pretty sure it got deleted because i can’t play it on musi anymore and it doesn’t show up on youtube! nice :[ i feel a bit strange referencing this video now knowing that it’s been deleted, but i’ll just be pulling one line that, taken out of context, doesn’t really reveal anything about akana’s personal life, so maybe it’s okay. it goes like this:

my life, really, is a before and after picture of this moment. it defines me whether i want it to or not. it’s what’s made me who i am today.

i feel this way about my abuse. not the abuse itself, because that spanned several years, but that spring day earlier this year when i fully acknowledged that it happened. after that, nothing has been the same. and nothing ever will be.

part 2

i took a break from writing for about an hour and half to get free slurpees from 7-Eleven with my older sister and to mail a package to a twitter mutual who has gradually become a pretty good friend of mine over the years. we don’t talk all that much off of twitter, but we have each other’s numbers, and i like to think we’re there for each other. (love you, zero dearie.) i couldn’t mail the package through the self-service kiosk because the address provided didn’t show up, so i instead had to go up to the counter and ask for help. i started by telling the older woman working, “hi, i am a nineteen-year-old, and this is one of my first times trying to mail a package on my own.” this approach can really go one of two ways: the employee is kind, or they belittle you. luckily, this woman was the former, and she helped me secure a decent shipping fee. i thought about how amazing it is that we can just… ship things to people across the country. isn’t that lovely?

content warning / death, grief

running errands with my older sister was good. it’s something i was trying especially hard to carve out time for, because four years ago today, one of her close friends, x, died. there’s nothing really exceptional about x’s death. it’s the same old story—the one we all know—just with different names and faces: teenagers are driving, teenagers make a reckless decision on the road, teenagers get in a collision, teenagers don’t make it out alive. x was in the passenger seat; he died on impact. his friend in the driver’s seat was rushed to the hospital, where he died a few days later. the other car came out unscathed.

i still remember the memorial for them. it was impossibly crowded and a bit too stuffy, even though my hands were cold the whole time. the best friend and chosen brother of x spoke about halfway through, and the sorrow in his voice still haunts me to this day. “when i was in middle school,” he began, “x lived with us for a while because he had family problems. i had terrible nightmares at that time. every night he heard me cry, x would climb into my bed and hold me until i stopped shaking and woke up.” a pause. “and i keep waiting for you to come and wake me from this bad dream, x. i keep waiting. i’m begging you.” his voice faltered as he finished. his white button-up was too big on his wiry frame.

x’s chosen father spoke after his son. he used to coach x in basketball, and remarked that as a child, after x would make a basket, he’d put his arms out in a t and walk off the small victory as if soaring through the sky. “i always wondered whether he was imitating a bird or a plane,” x’s chosen father said. “but i know, now, that x wasn’t a bird or plane. he was an angel.”

and he kind of was. maybe it’s different when someone everyone really dislikes passes away, but x was popular, and kind, and he was kind even though he’d gone through shit, which my sister says is the best of kind. i remember her writing in a piece about him that she couldn’t have been kind if the world had been as hard on her as it was on him.

one of my sister’s best friends, y, died a little less than a year ago. we still don’t know if it was suicide. it took y dying for me to realize that when referring to x, i shouldn’t dub him as “my sister’s best friend,” because he was more removed from her than y was. y really was one of my sister’s best friends though. y was among the top five, maybe seven people she’s ever been closest with. y was also kind, even though he’d gone through shit.

my sister has been handling today well. while i was driving, she told that about a year before x died, one of x’s friends actually died, and he asked her if she thought it would ever get easier—this living without him. at the time, my sister said, “probably not.” she still believes in that. “life doesn’t become easier,” she admitted to me, gazing out the window. “it just becomes different.”

for a long time, i held a lot of guilt-ridden grief in regard to x and y. i felt that because it wasn’t my friends who’d died, i didn’t have a right to mourn them or feel sad at all. i know better now. i know that secondary grief is a very real thing, and that being the primary support system for someone who is grieving—particularly someone with a severe mood disorder who is grieving—is taxing. my sister knows this too. we talked about it, a while back, for the first time. i guess the conversation was bound to happen sooner or later, considering i directed a short film about this facet of our relationship. she told me she’ll never watch it. and i believe her.

x died when he was 18, just freshly out of high school. y died at 20; he was going into his junior year of university. i am in between their ages now, heading into my sophomore year. of college

x was a year older than my sister, and she had heavy anxiety about growing older than him. but now she is 21—three years older than him—and he is still 18 and cold and dead in the ground. and now i am older than him too. my sister says she still doesn’t know how to cope with it. i don’t know either. maybe no one does.

i will be as old as y next year, and the year after that, i will be older than him. people die and there’s nothing we can do about it. life goes on and there’s nothing we can do about it.

from sonya’s monologue at the end of anton chekhov’s 1898 play, uncle vanya:

what can we do? we must live our lives.

and, you know, maybe i’ll put the rest of the monologue here as a conclusion to this newsletter. i wanted to write more, but this will have to do for now. thanks to everyone who got through this entire monstrosity; i know it was a lot, and a bit all over the place.

yes, we shall live, uncle vanya. we shall live through the long procession of days before us, and through the long nights; we shall patiently bear the trials that fate imposes on us; we shall work for others without rest, both now and when we are old; and when our last hour comes, we shall meet it humbly. and there, beyond the grave, we shall say to him that we suffered, that we wept, that life was hard. and god will have pity on us. 

ah, then, dear, dear uncle, you and i shall see that bright, beautiful, dream-like life before us; we shall rejoice and look back upon our sorrow here with tender smiles on our faces, and we shall rest. i have faith, uncle, fervent, passionate faith. 

we shall hear the angels. we shall see heaven shining like a jewel. we shall see all evil and all our pain sink away in the great compassion that shall enfold the world. our life will be as peaceful and tender and sweet as a caress. i have faith; i have faith. we shall rest! we shall rest!

we shall rest!

and this is where i leave you.