Apr 09, 2020
Leaving My Near-Death Experience on the Dance Floor
They said I was traumatized, and that my fragile mental state would have to indefinitely play catchup with my rapidly healing body.
They said I was traumatized, and that my fragile mental state would have to indefinitely play catchup with my rapidly healing body.
After I left my family’s religion, I was, for better or worse, searching for a blueprint, a model I could trust, which felt familiar enough to be safe, yet bold enough to be revolutionary.
Though I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I somehow knew that both relief and release were no longer optional. They were necessities.
I see a wall as tantamount to rejection: to create a physical barrier is to reject the possibility of familiarity.
Yet, my same racial mutability also poses a threat: “How can you identify a ‘them’ if it can pass for an ‘us’?”
Each performance provided a hit of adrenal love. I lived on it. I survived off of it. Until, that is, that moment in the bathroom when I was thirteen.
I’ve read that trauma disrupts time. That violent events are recorded differently in the brain.
I recall a 2016 headline that warned, ‘Orangutans face complete extinction within ten years.’ Nash will be thirteen in 2026.
I posed the question to her, earnestly, seriously: If given the choice, would she rather gain weight or would she rather die?
Maybe my dreams were trying to tell me something. Maybe I had what I liked to call, jokingly, “the ElGenaidi Gift.”
As the plane began to taxi, the first line of the comic Riri Williams: Ironheart #1 danced in my mind: “I was never meant to fly.”
If I could save her, I would. I needed to feel that it was in my power to save her, to save something. I didn’t need her to be uncomplicated. I didn’t need a good dog. I needed her.
I’ve published articles on examining the archive’s margins and gaps to recover women’s stories, but that won’t help me understand that girl who left her family when she could no longer live in shame.
"Juice" had the type of lyrics that forced me out of my solitude, whether I wanted to be out of it or not.
Most paanwalas sell loose cigarettes. I don’t smoke often, but when I do, I buy one or two. I never buy them from Muchhad.
That first time I heard it, the music was so catchy and the words were so ridiculous that I threw my head back and laughed. I opened the curtains that had been closed for a month.
To this day, I can’t tell you the names of my extended family in Taiwan—but I can tell you their astrological signs.
Sharing clothes feels like sharing a secret, the same way being someone’s child does.
It goes like this: sit with the thought, don’t move your fingers, arms, legs, let it enter you, let it stay, let it leave.
On some level, we all know: Everyone who is etched into our being will one day vanish.
