Death Wish

January 18, 2023

The easiest way for me to recall memories to words is through composing a letter. Those that know me well know that I’ve always had a death wish. Not the kind that you want to be granted when your time finally comes, but the raw, unbridled anger that you’re still here when you’ve tried everything to will your existence away. 

I have spent over a year trying to come up with a way to address the person I was, to pay homage to the pain that crippled me and ultimately, fueled my growth. I cry as I write these words now. I am still healing to this day, and I fervently remind myself that it isn’t linear. 

We are often told, as anxious people, to not think too much. We are often told, as depressed people, to think about happy things. We are often told, as bipolar people, to hold on until the next wave hits. We are often told, as schizophrenic people, to drown out the voices. 

To this day, I have yet to figure out a way to drown out the voices with the waves crashing over me. But today, just for this moment, I will not think too much. I will just tell you about life now and what happened with the time that has passed. Maybe you will understand why I chose to stay. 

To my 19 going on 20 year old self: 

I am turning 24 next Monday. I spent my childhood wishing to have a birthday that mattered. One that validated my existence and made me truly feel like turning a year older was a milestone and not a burden. 

YOU don’t matter on your birthday. Your mother, who birthed you, does. Your existence wouldn’t mean a thing without a vessel, the womb, to bring you into the world. This is what I was always told, but you know that already.

Now that I am older, I have a lot more ownership over this one day of the year. I can choose to be remembered, to be celebrated, to be loved. I can choose to be surrounded by people or utterly alone. I have had it both ways, and the day will pass all the same. 

I have written about my 20th birthday, mostly recounting the details of that day, where I was, what I did, how everything went about. I remember how much you were dying. I remember when the clock struck 12, marking the first minutes of January 23, 2019. You were all alone, counting streetlights, one after another after another after another on a seemingly never-ending road. 

You did not choose to live that morning. Rather, you were forced to because the car was not heading toward you to end your life, no matter how much you changed your trajectory to be in its way. The guy inside just wanted to make sure you were okay. That’s all you ever wanted. You just wanted someone to ask if you were okay all those years, but when they did, you didn’t think they really understood. 

So when he asked you if you were okay, you brushed him off and said yes, desperately trying to look okay. That’s how you always were. You were always “just okay,” and you never let anyone in, even when they came knocking. Then you sat on the curb by yourself until the sun had risen over the concrete storefronts of Rowland Heights. You always say you’ve never watched a sunrise, which isn’t technically untrue. You just didn’t notice it in your suffering that dawn. 

I wonder how much you missed when you were trying to stay afloat. Because for you, even if your body endeavored, you did not. Your life ended that day, when the car drove away, and I took your place. 

Thinking about you that day makes my soul shrivel to the size it once was. You couldn’t keep going, and your light fizzled out with the lamp posts you counted that night along the never-ending road.

I still have not quite found the right descriptive words for that day. Committing suicide sounds awfully heavy. I tried to walk in front of a car that didn’t intend to hit me. For someone that likes to have control as much as I do, I have always wondered. I could have done anything else. Taken all my pills at once, hung myself, thrown my body off a tower. Did I really want to die?

I think I was just ready to give up living. After death was a gamble I was willing to take in that moment in exchange for my lifeline. 

Since I was already slowly driven to madness, I stopped taking my medication altogether. All the pill bottles lined up on my desk began to collect dust. They laughed at me, glowing iridescent orange, like flames, like candles dancing, when I tossed and turned, trying to find sleep despite the nightmares sure to visit if my eyes closed. 

I am unsure what kept me going that year. Likely the delusion telling me that I had to at least pretend to give my second chance a real shot. I desperately searched for love to replace the one I had lost. Maybe you knew this subconsciously, but you tried to make up for your self-hatred by finding others to validate your reason for being alive. 

When you grew up, Baba and Mama were unable to give you that, nor were you equipped with the knowledge that it had to come from the spring flowing internally. No, the drought in your soul narrowed your perspective, and all you wanted, all you thought you needed, was someone to love you with their whole being to make you feel worthy of life. 

That is so much pressure to bestow onto someone else. But you spent your life giving your love away and never saving any for yourself, so how could you have known?

People give you the love that you give yourself. How can you tell yourself that your body is a temple when you desecrate it daily?

The greatest sacrifice I ever made to my temple was to allow someone else to conquer it without my consent.

He told me he probably couldn’t take me home that night because he was planning on drinking. We went over to his friends’ apartment, and I thought I could drink more than I actually could, and after several poorly-spaced shots, I was staggering around, not entirely functional. 

I said I wanted to go home, so we headed back to his apartment. I made a beeline for the bathroom and when I was done, I collapsed onto the nearest flat surface. 

My mind was so murky, I knew I wasn’t thinking straight anymore. All of a sudden, at some point in the night, I felt him climb on top of me. He was touching me, my face, my skin, my hair, going lower and lower. He was moving his hands all over me, reaching underneath my clothes. I couldn’t move. I could barely speak. I couldn’t even say no. I just lay there, dead weight, empty, unable to do anything. When he finished, he said, “Wow, you barely moved. Didn’t realize how gone you were tonight. I thought I was fucking a dead fish.”

I told my friends the day after that I fell asleep on his couch. I couldn’t look them in the eyes and admit the truth. That I felt dirty, so absolutely completely filthy. Less than human. 

I didn’t want my body anymore. Not that I ever did, but this time, I wanted to fling it into a landfill.

There was an inexplicable itch crawling underneath my skin and when I picked at it, I started to scab. Sometimes, I dreamed about it but the remnants would linger, playing behind my eyelids as I went about my day. I could hear his ragged breath hot against my ear, him pushing his body against mine, and me shriveling with shame. The hardest part was that no one knew because I could barely admit what happened to myself. 

In my excruciating silence, I turned inward and ripped myself to shreds. When I couldn’t stop the panic mounting inside me, I dug my nails into my forearms to anchor me to the ground. I pinched the flyaway skin, nails sinking deeper into my bloodstream. I paced my breathing with the scratching of my nails, willing my heartbeat to slow even just a little bit. And when that wasn’t enough anymore, I sliced open my own skin. I figured that I was tainted already. What difference did a few cuts on my arms make if they stopped the panic attacks from driving me crazy?

I was losing control. 

With time, the little lines that crisscrossed my wrist stretched across my entire arm. After a while, they daggered both arms, angry wounds burrowing closer to bone. But that didn’t matter because any time I was in a small space, I wanted to scream. The walls were narrowing and I couldn’t breathe, the dead air smothering me. My skull would throb, thoughts running away with my heartbeats. I couldn’t take it, I couldn’t, I had to get out, but where could I go? Everywhere I turned was a dead end. I just wanted to disappear. 

The days passed like water, and I flowed with them, blind to actual time. Every time I ran my fingers along my arms, I felt the cuts, bumpy and raised like Braille. My nights stretched into a tear-stained, sleepless vacuum. The shadows held me as I wept, and they talked to me about my day. They listened to me while my shoulders heaved, staying beside my bed every night to stitch together the fresh fault lines chipping away my skin whenever day broke. 

Despite the hole inside me, I clung onto my work. I’m sure people noticed and just said nothing. I’m glad they kept silent. I would’ve been too embarrassed to admit anything. I remember going to work and watching the blood slowly drip down my arm, fresh from just an hour ago, daring me to draw attention to myself. I remember pulling my sleeve down, hanging my head low, pretending nothing was there.

Everything was normal, everything was okay. I was staying afloat. 

“I was playing with a cat,” the words would spill out without me thinking, “They’re nasty when they get too excited, huh?”

The anxiety manifested into full-blown paranoia one day. I began to worry when the wounds became patterns. My right arm became a barbed wire fence. This was also when the voices in my head began to sound real. They began to sound like different people, talking in each ear, telling me to add to the barbed wire, to kill myself for real this time. If I stared at the wall too long, it would start to give way, and I’d be thrown into another dimension. The ground would roll under me, and I’d have to catch myself from falling. 

At this point, I was fully convinced I was living in a fever dream, or at least the next life. 

This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. This isn’t me. 

This has been my mantra, my grounding phrase in the last four years. Even after I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, with cyclothymia, and even when my diagnosis became schizoaffective disorder bipolar type, these were the words that defined me. The episodes didn’t define me. I am a different person than who I am when the symptoms begin to take control of my life. 

You know, I’ve written to my 16-year-old self, but I could never bring myself to write to you. I think it’s because if I did, I felt I had to acknowledge you were real, and that meant everything I did to salvage myself was real too. 

Life truly didn’t have much physical meaning to me until I started diving into pharmaceuticals. As an in-vivo scientist, I work with animals, specifically rodents and now monkeys. I had been introduced to the idea of reincarnation through Mama’s Buddhist temple, but that didn’t mean much for a long time. 

The more time I work with animals, the more I realize that they are kinder than many humans I know, including myself. They groom each other, share food and water, and play with each other to pass the day. For years, I knew there was a ghost haunting whatever vivarium I worked in, a ghost that culminated all the spirits that passed in my hands. But the more animals I worked with, the more time I would spend trying to understand their mannerisms and emotions. I would stare into a rat’s red, red eyes and wonder if he knew what was next. I would see excitement, love, fear, acceptance, and I vowed that their lives would not be in vain, for whatever purpose they died for. 

I valued these animals’ lives more than my own. Why would I spend time making sure a rat had food and water when I couldn’t even do the same for myself? I tried to feel what they felt, to better understand all the feelings inside me I tried so hard to ignore. I thought to myself, if there is a ghost haunting whatever vivarium I’m in, is there a ghost haunting me?

Little did I know, YOU are my ghost. 

You were not brave enough to venture out in the light because your scars gaped across your body. When we talked, we didn’t ever open our mouths. We traded thoughts instead, back-and-forth lightning that left me breathless. Whether it was through the voices or in my dreams, you told me that our ghosts are an intrinsic part of our being; ghosts are intertwined in our fabric and they make sure that we aren’t forgotten, in the present or after we are gone. You ran away because you were scared that I couldn’t live with myself anymore. I couldn’t, and that’s why I lost you. 

The thing about ghosts is that even though you can see through them, they give you a chance to look at yourself from your own eyes. You have clear, gossamer skin and your arms mirror mine. Because of a recent relapse, my legs have criss-cross lines over them, too, but that’s okay. We learn with time. 

Your lips tilt upward to the left and I can still see a light smattering of freckles underneath your right eye. Your legs are disproportionately longer than your torso, and your feet are lopsided, too. When you cry, your tears trace your cheekbones and your hair will cover your face. But when I see you, no matter how ugly I think you are, I can’t bring myself to look away because I AM YOU. 

The day of my 20th birthday, I was in Rowland Heights, at a branch of my mother’s temple, preparing for a special coming of age ceremony. I don’t remember much of this ceremony because my mother had forced me to go, I was sleep-deprived and disappointed to still be alive. Even though I was surrounded by people, I felt bereft. I felt abandoned. 

As with all big services at our temple, I was able to participate in spiritual communion after with a spiritual guide. For someone who doesn’t practice as devoutly as my mother, I expected my spiritual message to be fairly generic, as it usually was. According to my mother, your spiritual message will be more direct and specific once you have deepened your spiritual connection to the Eight Paths of Enlightenment. 

Little did I know, this was my first spiritual message as a new person. I had forgotten about this particular communion as I had suppressed it with all my vague memories of 2019. In fact, I actively tried to forget it. 

The guide’s words now ring in my mind. 

You are a light. You are a bright, beautiful never-ending light, and it is not time for you to go out quite yet. It is not your time. Your light must continue to flicker. 

I had to stifle the tears. I pushed them away, because how could they be true? HOW COULD THEY BE? 

When I just tried to kill myself, not even hours ago? What the fuck did this spiritual guide know, HOW could THEY POSSIBLY KNOW the pain, the suffering, the misery, the sadness I felt in me when those words were passed to me?

On the ride home, I felt so much hollow anger. I felt indignation. Once again, someone had failed to understand me, and they were just feeding me words to get me through the day. And as the year passed and bled into further years, I suppressed this memory and many others in my despair. 

Next week, I live to see myself turn 24 years old. In my life today, I am surrounded by people much older than I, who have lived so much more life than I. Truly, I admire them, and I always told myself that because I haven’t lived as long as they, I didn’t deserve to hurt as much as I did. 

This is not true. 

In the four years I have spent picking myself up from your shadow, I have had to find a new meaning for my birthday every year. From countless therapy sessions to self-medication sessions to just figuring it out, it’s hard to say what has worked. 

I wished that by the end of this letter, I could tell you some grand revelation, some meaning of life I was able to piece together, but I haven’t quite been able to do that. From all the people I’ve talked to, nobody has been able to tell me much either. Maybe I just need more time or more experiences to give me a better idea, but I really don’t have an answer. 

I have shed tears in the whole three hours I’ve spent typing this out. I have never cried this much in any piece I’ve published here, not even the ones that took me several days to write, and I truly wonder why this one coaxed so many feelings out of me. I think because every year on my birthday in the last four years, I’ve asked myself, Am I in a better place than I was in four years ago?

I cannot say I’ve consistently been in a better headspace than that morning in Rowland Heights, but in the last four years, I have not had to spend a birthday alone. There has always been someone there, thinking of me, yearly on the anniversary of my suicide attempt. I suppose a death wish can’t get any more damned than that.

Even now, I often think of death. I think I understand a little more than you did; I’m better acquainted with the voices, hallucinations, and mood swings than you were, so they are more normal to me. This year, I decided to take the week of our birthday off. I don’t have many plans for the week, except to see where the time takes me and spend time with people that care about me. 

On the day of our birthday, I have therapy at noon. I am going to tell my therapist how I feel about my birthday and the years before that led to my feelings. I am also going to tell her that finally, for all the years, and all the people that have tried to celebrate this milestone with me, it is my turn. 

Ella, my beautiful, beloved 20 year old self, it is almost our birthday. Whether you are a ghost, spirit, part of me and my soul, it is going to be the one day of the year next Monday that we can call our own. On that day, other than myself, I am going to remember you the most. I will let myself drink and cry and celebrate all the embarrassing, ugly emotions we always hated. 

I will toast to the days I spent all waking hours in bed, unable to move. I will raise a glass to surviving a body I didn’t want. I will kiss someone for loving me when I couldn’t. I will hug a friend that has seen me through the cutting, the drinking, and everything in between. I will trip and let someone catch me for once when I fall. 

Lastly, I will invite you back into my life and let every word, feeling, and ill will wash over my entire, worn out body. For one day, the waves will wash free the tethers anchoring me to this dimension. 

And for one day, I will let them. 

Happy birthday, darling. We are 24, and we are still here. 

Yours, 

Jan