Rainbow Pie

Since junior high school, I have had the intention of writing my autobiography. I thought that everyone’s life story is a book, and if I didn’t end up with something that could be published, at least I could still write about my life. It wasn’t until high school that I actually started writing, but now it’s hard to find the manuscripts I had at the time. I was so emotionally aware of my life that for a while I thought I was Dostoevsky’s ‘insulted and damaged man’. It is not unusual to have this victim mentality and I am now convinced that I have complex PTSD and that my primary caregiver has been very deficient in responding to my emotions, yet I am now telling myself that I am trying to appreciate what I have.
I fear that my life goes on and despite the threat of suicidal thoughts, I cannot find the right time to put pen to paper because of unstable self-esteem and identity, because of toxic shame and superhuman ego, and my opinion of me swings high and low like a rollercoaster. I fear that these thoughts cloud my judgement. I am also acutely aware that my memory has been largely interfered with, that anti-psychotic drugs and psychedelic have acted on me, and that memory does not represent objective truth, but at least it is my truth. What matters is not what happened, but the interpretation of events. I prefer to write this book as part of the fulfilment of my intellectual aspirations, but also as a practice of narrative therapy. I am therefore determined not to seek objectivity, but rather to pursue a positioned intervention.
My aim is to find myself. To find out why I am alive, to speak to the ghosts and shadows within me, to speak to the death instinct. No matter how much medication I take, no matter how many friends I have supporting me, whether I am in China or not, I have understood that suicidal thoughts will not leave me. This inner emptiness and the temptation to be meaningless and to cancel myself out, while it certainly needs to be stubbornly fought and rejected, also needs to be faced with compassion and care. My parents did not appear to me as loving figures much of the time, and I could only see partial examples of loving in some films, literature and in my imagination. I understood that the death instinct was part of my inner being and, apart from talking to it with cognitive behavioural therapy, I was willing to use acceptance commitment therapy to be the boat and bridge between life and death in the face of such solid abuses, such an enduring presence as my life instinct.
I want to find out the value of my persistence and why. Do I believe in the existence of truth and beauty? Do I believe that justice can be achieved? And if so, how can it be achieved. If none of this makes sense, how can I live? Is there any merciful way to die? Why do I try to love when the world and myself are so imperfect.
There is something deliberate in my approach to writing, apart from being as honest as possible. I want to deliberately focus on the trauma, my instinctive reaction to it, my psychological resilience, my complex emotions. I want to show the bloody reality to God and question why He wasn’t there. I am amazed that I have survived, not only survived, but have more resources than ever before.
I also had to do my best to express a sense of gratitude. Why am I not the political dissident in prison, the refugee shipwrecked in the Mediterranean, the deceased who succeeded in committing suicide, who died in a ridiculous car accident or a bizarre plane crash, why did 1989 June 4th happen to me just as I was beginning to prepare for independent thought and not before or after, why am I not the woman born in Iran or with a North Korean passport. I had to deliberately guide myself to imagine the suffering of life, even though I understood that I had already accumulated a certain thickness of life, even though I understood that my life was much bumpier and more dramatic than many middle-class children’s, I had to deliberately guide myself to imagine a situation that was much more tragic than the present, and I understood that if I lost the emotion of gratitude, it would be difficult for me to live.
So I went into this book with a distinct purpose, and that was to live.