8/8/2021

Content warning: Trauma, anti-Blackness, suicide ideation

I feel awful

Is there a feeling worse than injustice?

Justice that you don’t think will ever be served

I don’t know who I am

16-year-old me did

I had everything figured out at 16

But everything crumbled because I started fearing I would never find friends

Never find a place I felt I could feel comfortable in

Because people like me who liked who I liked

Who were Black in Malaysia

Where could I feel comfortable?

And then I found a place

At 17

Right after high school

I found a place I figured I liked, more or less

With people who were like me, more or less

They were people who backed me when I pointed out racism

When I pointed out anti-Blackness

Of course, some of those people were anti-Black themselves

I wasn’t surprised. I knew that that’s how things were

I would always have to be alert

I turned 18

I was halfway through that year of my life

Sad

Happier than before, though

Still trying to build myself back up from the ground because a lot of me had been stripped away due to the anxiety of being who I was and what I believed in

But I was getting somewhere

I really was getting somewhere

If only someone had told me

That I didn’t at all know just how sad I could become

I had no idea

How bad it could get

And then the space that I was in

Turned against me

Knives pointed at me

All because I stood up for my people

My culture

All because of that

People went to lengths to lie about me

To make me look like a terrible person

Went to lengths to defend an anti-Black person and anti-Blackness in general

And beat me down

And drag me through the streets

Like I was a ragdoll

I was 18

And I started believing that I was a terrible person

Because surely if so many people are this angry at me, surely I’ve done something wrong

Surely this couldn’t have come out of nowhere

This extreme passion to tear up everything in me, to manipulate everything there was about me, to make other people hate me

There had to be a reason, no? Was life so unfair that someone could go through all of this undeserving of absolutely any of it? Could have their life ruined out of entirely nowhere?

When I thought about it, I realized this wasn’t the first time this had happened to me

It was just on a much larger scale

Now, my mind clearer

I know that that is what happens to people like me

And people like me just have to deal with it, don't we? We are just destined to have people out to get us. We could do everything right. We could always mind our business. Be kind to everyone we encounter. And, completely out of our control, those people will seek to end our joy. To take an axe to our support system. What an awful f***ing destiny.

And it all happened from within the space that I was in

They were my friends

They had been my friends

These terrible people

These anti-Black people

I NEVER DID ANYTHING TO THEM.

I WAS NEVER ANYTHING BUT KIND TO THEM.

I was unkind when they were unkind to my people. Or other people.

And now my life has become a before-and-after

Before and after I was 18-and-a-half

Those people

I had to cut them off

Some of them cut me off

As if I was the bad guy

As if I wasn’t the victim

And some pretended they wanted to help me

But it was all just talk

It was talk

These were my friends

I cut off even more of my friends as months passed

Now my heart is stone

Because I cut people off easily (‘easily’ depends on the angle you look at it from. Maybe an undebatable description is ‘suddenly’)

And I don’t want to attach myself to anybody for fear of them being like those people

And those people?

They’re doing fine

Thousands of followers

They’re popular

Lots of supporters

My support was taken from me

Stolen from me

Ripped from my hands

And even as I type this

There is so much more I want to say

Because the emotions and thoughts and feelings and memories about this

Are so, so many

So, so many

But I don’t want to talk about it all

Because the rage in my chest and the pain it causes me

Both physical and emotional pain

Talking about this all in all of that detail would make me feel all of that pain

But there are so many injustices that happened to me

And I want everyone who has caused that pain to suffer

I want to be who I am

Truthfully, I’m not who I want to be

I wish I was 16 again

17 even

I want to be who I am

I have exactly a month left of my teenage years right now

When will I regain what was stolen from me?

My confidence, my personality, who I was, who I am?

It’s terrible that that is the question that I ask more often

Because the question that I really want the answer to: When will justice be served to the people who made me suffer?

I am not confident that that will have an answer

So the people who made me suffer are happy

And I am not

They were my friends.

They were my friends.

I do not care about people who are not of my community, not of my group, doing that to me.

They were my friends.

And the rest were people of my community.

And then, 3 months or so after they made me suffer

They started saying that the lives of my people mattered

YOU TOOK MY LIFE FROM ME.

You took it from me.

You do not think that our lives matter.

You took my life.

I write this as if they made me suffer only when I was 18-and-a-half

Some people kept actively harassing me beyond that

For months

It went on

Their friends, the bystanders

Those are who I hate more

I don’t hate the trolls like that

I hate the people who don’t brand themselves as trolls

Regardless of if they were my friends or not

Who just stood there

Either standing there or actively supporting what I went through

There are activists that are helping to change the world and the fate of their country

And it is fact, that what they’re doing is helping

But a lot of them are terrible people

Awful people

Anti-Black

Maybe I could go to protests

Maybe I could also help

But why would I surround myself with so many potentially anti-Black people?

The people who either were or would have been bystanders as I suffered?

I will not march alongside these people

I won’t.

I will march for justice

And for myself

But I will not march alongside them.

I feel awful

I have felt awful for the past year and a half of my life

For some reason, I feel like it’s just getting worse

I cry every two weeks, at least

Every time I take a shower

I think of it

I replay scenes in my head, I act out what I wish I had done, how I wish I had reacted

Because if I had reacted differently, maybe then I would have gotten more support. Because people seeing me done worse than wrong in front of their eyes obviously wasn’t enough for them to support me.

Every time I don’t distract myself

I think of it

I cannot sit in solitude

In peace

Because I think of it

I keep crying, I keep feeling angry, I keep hating, I keep feeling that if I weren’t alive I wouldn’t feel and wouldn’t have to deal with anything and that would be amazing, that would be so much better

They call this healing. Part of the process

I would heal easier if I was given justice

It is that simple

That simple.

And there is so much more I want to say

There is so much more evil that I want to make known to the world

The evil that happened to me

But I do not want to relive what happened

My chest cannot take the fire of anger anymore

My head cannot take the pain

All I want to say is

I will not march alongside them

Clarifications:

1. The phrases describing physical violence like "Knives pointed at me" and "drag me through the streets" are metaphorical.

2. I am talking about the queer and/or activist community in Malaysia.