Quarantine Diaries: Belonging & Loneliness

("Bedroom in Arles" #2 - Vincent Van Gogh, 1889)

CW/TW: mentions of rape, mental health, body traumas

          They say study/work from home, but now a house is forced to be a workplace, a classroom, a home, to be fun, purposeful, to be a trigger and shelter all at once... I don't live in my own home, like a mermaid drowning, I swim to survive. How do you work from home when a house is not a house but a swamp: where you cry yourself to sleep, when you stay up at night to feel, writing of questions and prayers never answered... We can call it self-reflection, but I know it to be self-destruction.

          I always say that home is where water flows, but it also shows true and vulnerable to my uncertainty with belonging. During a time where we are asked to stay "home", I couldn't help but wonder of how that means diversely across experiences and expressions. Those who have left their homes in search of betterment, those separated from homes by force, those in desperate search of refugee and shelter... in contrast with those who have multiple locations of "home", those who have intersectional and diverse roots of home, those who have a choice of "home"... Such privilege maybe, but many with chosen homes/families are only by a choice of survival. My homeland is Taiwan, my chosen family is in Tkaronto (Toronto), and my discourse of home is still wherever water flows. It is connected with my belief that the home to our humanity is tied through the source of life: water. (also as an Earth sign, water feels vital and essential to the fluidity and freedom of my breath)

          Yet the social politics of belonging, something I have been observing and reflecting on myself, really is also the art of feeling lonely, as well as the discourse of visibility - which all can also be layered with the politics of desirability, but that's for another day. I came to understand that such complications and conflicts manifest through the instability within the homebody (the self). As a survivor it is hard to believe in the poetics of my body being a temple, but I do believe that the body is holy in essence, glorious in all its flaws and imperfections. And still til this day, the violence in my mind always harms the body...

She sleeps where she was raped
Sheets washed but stained
Scents gone but memories stay
She turns and turns
She tucks herself in
She turns into a corner
She prays please to no one
She cries pleasing herself
She pleads praise for nothing
She whispers of love poems and
She writes for her eulogies where
She sleeps to escape -
Stairs and naps leading to traps
She wanders for safety
She wonders for sanity

Quarantine Diaries: Staying In & Alive

("Bedroom in Arles" #1 - Vincent Van Gogh, 1888)

CW/TW: mentions of suicidal grey ideation, mental health, interpersonal/collective trauma 

          Like a lifeless log on a cold beach rocking back and forth like a baby shaking from the waves urgency as it’s only motivation for movements... How can we not realize, that such panic is only a distraction: The virus is real, but the economy is not. 

          I thought I would be good at social distancing and staying inside as someone who routinely self-isolates due to one's mental illness, but how can one be good at something when they're not feeling good at all ? I've always said that sanity is a privilege, but how cynical is it to feel yourself becoming insane with only intervals of clarity. Such unsafe uncertainties with reality, I pray that submission is just survival and that salvation is only unfolding, slowly... They say public health and safety; I ask where, when, and for who ? Everyday my heart wonder and worry for who they have always and are still so ready to leave behind: undocumented folks, sex workers, working-class parents, folks experiencing homelessness, essential service and medical-care workers, elders/children/anyone chronically ill/with a compromised immune system, folks stuck in abusive households, folks incarcerated, refugees, as well as First Nations folks on reserves... etc. Colonial-capitalism shows itself with fragile systems of profit over people, and with such ignorant privilege that most only awake to injustice from a call of crisis.

          Like a wilting wallflower, with rotting soils and only watered desperately: a houseplant dreaming of a garden, a sick joke she's still learning to laugh at... Being suicidal makes me feel selfish, as there are people dying, risking their next breath, and here I daydream of me dying the next day. How unappreciated my breath must feel: unworthiness, a flower asking why she deserves to bloom. The worst phone calls are of those that go to voicemails, I don’t know what it is of me trapped in a basement room while the people I love are risking it all... Such privilege to breathe, such abundance to feel, and such complicity to even understand: They say stay home but what about those still searching ?

What we need more of is compassion

What we need more of is loving care

What we need more of is justice...

And yet my heart also aches for

Us privileged enough to self-quarantine but

Maybe not sane enough to

Survive... 

Some Community Resources:

Crowdsourcing Safety

COVID-19: Emergency Support Fund for Sex Workers

COVID-19 Black Emergency Support Fund

SCARBOROUGH FOOD SECURITY INITIATIVE

Undocumented Migrants COVID-19 Fund
MASKS FOR PINE RIDGE

Liberated Capital: A Decolonizing Wealth Fund