Chapter 4: On the Frustrating Pitfalls of Healing - Who Is Wellness For?

As I said in the beginning of the book, healing is fucking excruciating. The ups and downs of the mental turmoil—all the sick spaces your memory unveils—then the tragedy of finally having to face this trapped grief that lingers in balmy childhood passages that are long gone. It’s an interior excavation that will deplete and exhaust you. Oftentimes I have felt incapable of continuing on this path, one where I have complete transparency over myself at all times, which means facing those dark corners when they emerge. While I trust and harness my own intuition so that I can be cognizant of the signs, of the intuition that we have been dissuaded from, the most difficult part of this journey, I’ve found, is the loneliness of self-exploration, of mooring the dark unbridled waters. When I started really committing to this path, it meant an acceptance of everything that was required, basically a complete soul activation to liberate myself from all the systems of oppression that bind me, that bind us, as a society. And how they all intersect in real time, in the now, affecting our livelihood in the current moment.

Piepzna-Samarasinha tells us that “survivorhood is a part of disability justice,” meaning survivorship must be understood in its complexity, as a disability, as something that thwarts and impedes your life, giving you an inordinate number of hurdles. Survivors of extreme trauma are not often seen for the invisible disabilities our bodies can carry. I’ve noticed—especially with folks who have had brutal lives—that there’s often a part of them that wants to be dictated by that pain. Even if they don’t want to identify with it, their whole personality becomes a reaction to what they can’t articulate fully. Then, inversely, for folks like me, people who hid from their reality for so long, the pain lingered boldly like a bleeding ink spot wherever I went, but I got good at looking away from it. Memory is complicated—it’s both reliable and unreliable with such resoluteness, with such searing clarity—but trauma itself, when you get to the bottom of it, doesn’t lie. It’s like a bright, pulsing, probing orb. In one way or another, it’s calling out to you, and one way or another, it will find you because it’s so desperate to be heard. Through the radical act of listening (finally) to myself, I’ve begun to uncover all the things I was hiding from myself, but I’ve also started to understand how trauma is passed down until someone in the family decides to change the course of history by deciding to confront it.

When we talk about trauma, how often do we think of the mental work it takes to actually process such things? So many of us forget, refuse to acknowledge, or take it out on others because it’s hard work that oftentimes requires returning to sites of trauma. I have been obsessed with the word abreaction ever since I learned of its conception; to me, in my layperson’s terminology, it’s about reliving trauma to release it. For me, that has meant going back and reminding my child self, baby Fa, that I’m OK. That I’m safe. It has meant using EMDR therapy^* rewriting neural pathways, which I’ve also committed to with the use of sacred plant medicines to go to the memory, to see it, let it pass through me, to feel the energy clear. This is some of the mental work that is required when you are healing.

I keep saying language matters, but what you do with that language also matters. In a climate of the wellness industrial complex, there is an obsession with the right language. At times, looking around, it feels as though more people are invested in sounding aware than actually doing any of the work required to get the results some of us blatantly claim we’re working toward. It was during my last sit with the sacred medicine Grandmother ayahuasca^* that I realized we are all just patterns, narratives stitched together and presented to the world as “who we are,” when the very idea to arrive somewhere permanently, into a version of yourself you just accept, is anti-evolutionary. In a conversation with Indian writer Arundhati Roy, American writer Naomi Klein said, “Too often it’s been ‘how can we change without changing?’” Shouldn’t we want to shift, to change, to be better? Don’t we need more people who are committed to being their best selves at all times? Isn’t that what “doing the work” is ultimately? What I’m talking about here requires mental commitment.

When I moved to New York, I was absolutely shocked and consumed by the capitalism of the city. Something that has always disconcerted me about Americans is their lack of compromise. It’s something that as a non-American I have found quite confronting. American culture is predicated on a mythology of its greatness, of its (white) supremacy, encouraging individualism, divide, distrust, and an extreme solipsistic obsession with self, which is something that in a globalized context has become a part of the reach and perpetuation of capitalism. In The End of Imagination, Roy reminds us about the abuses of the American empire: “We know that while, legally and constitutionally, speech may be free, the space in which that freedom can be exercised has been snatched from us and auctioned to the highest bidder.”^[1]

I had my political awakening in high school, as I mentioned, but my adult awakening happened during the Ferguson riots in 2014. The murder of young boys Trayvon Martin (seventeen), Tamir Rice (twelve), and Michael Brown (eighteen) felt devastating to hold. Even though it wasn’t a new phenomenon—the murder of Black and brown youth at the hands of those who are supposed to protect them (in this instance, the police and the neighborhood watch, both entities that supposedly exist to serve and protect)—in my adult life, it was the first experience I had of understanding that if anti-Blackness was to end, white supremacy would have to be confronted. Be it the neighborhood watch, be it outside a bodega, or in a car with your wife and baby daughter in the back seat—in order for this carnage to be stopped, we would have to fight for justice and face the system head-on. I’ve repeatedly thought of how Philando Castille’s daughter will heal from witnessing her father’s murder at the hands of the police. What does she do to block out the sound of the gunshots? Of her mother declaring, after her father has been shot five times, “Please don’t tell me he’s dead.” Don’t we owe both of them a healthy life after betraying them both so badly? Don’t we owe more to the children whose lives were stolen from them? This isn’t fate. It’s state-backed violence. The mental work in confronting racism (in the world and in yourself) is a mental labor I doubt (sadly) most white people really delve into. But it’s that kind of working of the mind that we need now. This is what it means to fight for justice; it’s mental work first that is necessary if we want to make true, impactful change.

As someone who has worked toward justice for most of my life through organizing, through self work, through my professional work, I’ve learned that anti-Blackness is always present and pervasive in the context of white supremacy. This country does not have a healthy track record. It was built on stolen, and thus free, labor. If you look at the formation of this nation and don’t feel deeply upset by it, challenge that. Is it that you have a hard time humanizing others? If you’ve accepted the country’s past sins as historical absolutes, challenge that. Because this country doesn’t look like democracy, or fairness, or justness to many. In actuality, it looks like exploitation and greed that’s been snatched and auctioned to the highest bidder. What happens to a society that can’t face itself? It suffers, and it remains unwell.

“The American Way of Life is simply not sustainable. Because it doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America,” Roy reminds us. The analogy of trauma and America is a perfect explanation of what happened during the Trump presidency. The rise of the extreme fascistic right wing (a global movement) is occurring because white people feel threatened. En masse, they, perhaps without fully realizing or understanding why, are losing what they have (stolen) to immigrants, Black people, Muslims, Jews, and all the rest of us who are vilified. But what they don’t (can’t or won’t) accept is that what they had was never theirs to begin with. We can only be suppressed for so long. As the saying goes, you tried to bury us, but you planted seeds. The United States, with its history of war or attacking, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan—to name a few—needs to begin the reconciliation it takes to heal.^[2] That’s another part about doing the work—you really have to do it, you can’t just skip over the actualizing parts. It says a lot about a society that complies as it’s being lied to in the face. I think of this Alice Walker quote: “People who think nonviolence is easy don’t realize that it’s a spiritual discipline that requires a great deal of strength, growth and purging of the self that one can overcome almost any obstacle for the good of all without being concerned about one’s own welfare.” In the face of such unending inequality, it’s remarkable that things haven’t totally collapsed. Much like wellness, it’s important for us to finally acknowledge that white supremacy is a disease that must be uprooted, but by doing so it needs to be declared and diagnosed.

*  *  *

Since the age of about four, my body has been revolting in one way or another—yet the medical world very rarely gave me true understanding of the language of my body. It took decades before I understood that leaky gut syndrome is one of those very real conditions that medical experts routinely dismiss. I always felt that there was something lost in translation about my sickness, creating further confusion because it was being abstracted by Western medicine. I’ve never felt understood by the healthcare system—my needs were always too obscure, almost like I was speaking in strange, mysterious tongues.

Because my nourishment was depleted—my mother too busy with her illness; my father too busy trying to raise two kids and navigate his wife’s temerity—I accepted that I was flawed. Naturally, as I watched the world around me not pay attention to my needs, I began to dismiss them as well. I didn’t think I had a body; all I felt was that I was a giant blob of confusion. This was around the time I started to grow disillusioned with my gender as well. I felt unappealing, and I was putting on weight. I now know there was nothing wrong with that, but back then I was bullied or teased by my family for being “the fattest one,” which in South Asian families (at least now) is code for “undesirable.” I didn’t feel like a girl, I felt like an alien. Desire was outside of me. Around me, I was surrounded by white people and the occasional East Asian who also felt completely out of my league. I didn’t have nice accessories from Morning Glory, the cool Asian stationery store—I had shitty cheap things from Kmart. With no frame of reference on how to be, I became obsessed with being Japanese. Karen Watanabe was a foreign exchange student who was my temporary best friend. I, too, wanted to be glamorous, I wanted to be liked. The irony is that East Asians are often incredibly racist to South Asians, so again, I was confused—othered. Against this backdrop, I became more and more confusing to myself. What space could I occupy? Who could I emulate? The more this happened, the uglier I became to myself. This created a cycle of abstraction. Over time I couldn’t recognize who I was anymore because I had no mirrors, so the easiest thing to accept was that I wasn’t worth living, that my very life was purposeless, so I had to find some source of purpose, some source of life.

*  *  *

In “The Crane Wife,” CJ Hauser writes, “I had arrived in my thirties believing that to need things from others made you weak. I think this is true for lots of people but I think it is especially true for women. When men desire things they are ‘passionate.’ When they feel they have not received something they need they are ‘deprived,’ or even ‘emasculated,’ and given permission for all sorts of behavior. But when a woman needs she is needy. She is meant to contain within her own self everything necessary to be happy. That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it.”^[3] I used to think it was romantic that I wanted to give everything, that this made me a good partner and thus more deserving of love. I wanted to be an easy, chill partner—someone to settle down with. The opposite of my mother. In fact, caustic women, women with immense needs, would often trigger latent anger in me. Demanding women, blunt, mean women I found upsetting and incorrigible. I knew myself to be callous, crude if I wanted to be—but I controlled those parts of myself. I saw the incapacity to be kind as a weakness. All of this is the working of the mind. Stopping patterns, tracking narratives about the self or others, and rewiring yourself to believe in your worthiness—these are mental acts that require determination of spirit.

I once read that intuition requires understanding that when something is emotional it’s a feeling, as opposed to a knowing. That was a major turning point in my participation in the journey of my mind, of recognizing that I had more power and will than I had first determined by listening to my own intuition. When we teach children they are too emotional, we also teach them that they are deceptive to themselves. It’s the same thing as gaslighting, forcing someone to distrust their own beliefs and knowing in favor of someone else’s. This has happened with every romantic partner I’ve had—I’m gaslit to not trust myself and my own feelings and intuition. A lot of my life has consisted of people telling me I’m wrong to feel, think, or believe the way I do.

How do you form a backbone when you’ve never had one? How do you create the foundation in your spine to support your interior organs so you don’t collapse every time you hit a bump in the road? That’s been something I’ve been thinking about recently, how the very foundation of my being has been rotting since birth. How my family’s legacy, and their brokenness from a civil war and partition completely divorced them from their sense of purpose. I’ve never really thought my parents liked themselves—both of them are insecure and suffer from variants of mental illness. Yet both of them have felt obliged to dictate the paths of my sister and me. My sister was the first one to hear the call of the spirits, and whatever she did, she stirred something awake in me as well. The big gaps in between where I have no memory are the moments of time in my life where I forced myself to forget how to be me and took on the role of being somebody else. I would say this happened from the first moment of abuse, until about the age of twenty-nine. Up to that point I lived in the shadows of myself. It’s as if the hands of my conditioning had pulled me apart, going deep into the fabric of my skin, puppeteering me into life. So much of my existence has been for others that returning to myself felt too uncomfortable. Turning the car around takes precision, a precision that I lacked. Yet I also knew if I didn’t, I’d die on the path ahead of me. So, at a certain point I had to start with the mind. I had to start healing this place first.

*  *  *

My mother showed me that the world was mean. She could turn light to dark in a matter of mere hysteric moments. Her stare still haunts me. Her judgmental gape, eyes crudely narrow. It is not an exaggeration to say that the moments of tenderness she and I have shared in my thirty-two years can be counted on one hand, while there are so many moments of trauma, moments that pulse like open wounds. But the closer I look at them, the less they hurt. It’s a funny thing, healing—the wildest realization is that it works.

These days I also remember the moments of laughter. How her dimples round her face, how her eyes grow small like a cat as she laughs and laughs and laughs. Oh God, what I’d do to make her laugh. How every ache would stop as she gullied her cheeks, fluffy like clouds, and how beautiful she was when she felt loved. I did it to save her, I wanted to give her my life. I let her win, I let her hurt me and touch me inappropriately. I always felt like I was being lusted after by her. My body was never her daughter’s body, it was always just hers, and thus an extension of a body she never had herself. One of the last times I saw her, I went downstairs to eat breakfast. I was wearing an oversized T-shirt an old friend had given me. I had worn this shirt so many times and had learned to always cover myself underneath it so as not to be too alluring. It was an uncomfortable reality, being sexually preyed upon by a parent. But I was gaining more agency in myself, and maybe this is what had started to infuriate my mother. I now lived so far from her that her control was barely felt. I had too much freedom, and she had to show me who had more power. That morning, before going downstairs, I had debated putting on underwear, but I was also beginning to understand that my body was in fact my own. So, I went downstairs and entered the kitchen. Everything happened so fast. One moment I walked in and the next moment my mother had lifted my shirt to reveal my entire naked body. She stared at it, then me, and spat out, “Loja lage nah?” which translates to “Aren’t you ashamed?” This is not just physical (and sexual) humiliation, it’s mental as well. It took me a long time to understand that.

I wasn’t sure what I should be ashamed about, so it was just easier to get small, so small so she couldn’t see me. This is where the brain comes in. We all carry our PTSD, trauma, in such intricate and idiosyncratic ways. Through time, I’ve begun to piece things together—because I was sexually exploited, I felt unsafe and turned against my own body. I knew that I felt detached, disembodied, but I never thought about the effects of trauma on my mind, or that maybe my mind was even more affected, and my body was just the evidence. It’s as if I felt my real self was too threatening, so I hid, because who would accept me for the person I truly knew myself to be? That disgusting person I knew myself to be.

The cycle of keeping myself small and battered became the norm. In a society where survivors, let alone child survivors, are not protected, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a lot of us have a hard time accepting parts of ourselves that were taken against our own will, and that many of us live in those dark rooms, those dark memories, incapable of knowing how to move forward. It is a hard reality to swallow, so it’s easier to forget. But then you are expected to live your life, never speaking out loud about all the ways in which you have been compromised, so, in moments where that anguish does come out, you’re seen as crazy because you can’t hide it. Then you begin to pathologize yourself as crazy, because clearly you’re messy and embarrassing and everyone can see it and so you enter yet another loop on the hamster wheel of shame. You let others dictate how you feel about yourself until one day you realize you’re the only one who can stand up for what you know is your truth—you have to declare what has been done to you. You have to forgive yourself. This is the arduousness of healing the mind.

I could never have fathomed, when I started this specific journey eight years ago, that I’d uncover a plethora of secrets and energetics trapped in my body, but once I made a commitment to myself through therapy, all the rest began to make sense. I’ve noticed that the more I like myself, the more I gain peace for what I’ve seen and felt. I forgive myself and I forgive my mother, my family, for all of it. This is part of the work to heal—it means ultimate liberation from all the things that give you definition, that feed the trauma, and letting go. But all of this has to come from yourself—it has to come from a sense of will. Sometimes that will mean understanding that this feeling of clarity might shift and hurt may return. Nothing is stagnant, and everything is a cycle; another curve on the spiral. To accept the rise and fall of healing takes immense courage. It takes immense endurance.

*  *  *

By my mid- to late twenties, I realized people might act like they cared, but it was important to examine the actions behind their words. There was, again, a pattern. No coincidence, the moment my life finally felt like it was shifting in the right direction, my personal relationships threatened to destroy me. Through time, I’ve noticed that people like to project things onto me, and because I’m porous, I take it on. It was as if I was attracting people to treat me the way my mother always had. Cajoling, castigating, always at the whim of others. It’s no surprise that the people who knew me most intimately also knew my trauma, and they then knew how to hurt me with it.

Shine less was what my mother told me my whole life. I know this was her own trauma, too, of always being too bright and having to learn how to fold herself into a tiny little pocket square to not be in the way. My mother is beautiful, one of the most beautiful women I have ever known. She was always told that she looked like the Bengali actress Sharmila Tagore, big adoring eyes, a sweet smile. My mother was an impeccable learner—the best cook, gardener, clothes maker, entertainer, and the shiny thing at a party, burning so miraculously. But behind closed doors she was austere and mean, overwrought with criticality, brimming with a hardness that she took with her everywhere. My life was hijacked by my mother—my happiness, brightness had to be given to her to hold up. In Care Work, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes, “I am very fast—in comprehension, in knowing what you’re feeling, in knowing something is wrong. I have superpowers: I know what you’re feeling before you feel it. I’ve been praised for it all my life. . . . And I have internalized that it is my job and my worth, the thing I am skilled at doing, the thing that was my value when I was not seen as worthy of protection.”^[4] Choosing myself over my mother has been a slow, unraveling lesson that I’m still currently processing. It often felt difficult to accept that I had to have such a boundary that she could never infiltrate my mind or compassion again. I moved all the way from Sydney, Australia, to New York City as a young person because I needed to believe she’d never find me again and all contact would be initiated by me, because a good day could turn bad in mere seconds when I was in conversation with her. It’s as if I was always fighting for my life.

Most people will fail you with their incapacity to understand how childhood or familial abuse cripples you internally. I didn’t think I had agency over my life because I was never allowed to have it. I felt as if my life was happening to me, not that I had the capacity to shift and change it. Naturally driven, I had the cognizance to escape a shattering home when I was barely just a young adult, but the real shit—the life force, sovereignty of self shit—I lacked. I felt completely docile, too frozen in fear to self-actualize. Instead of acknowledging that part about me, I pretended for much of my life that I was fine and that because I had survived my life, I was stronger for it. The more I drifted in this alternative version of myself, the more something—I felt, and knew—was deeply, eerily wrong.

In the past I’ve seemed to be attracted to people I could hand my power over to. I enjoyed being criticized, I liked being told I could be better. I liked putting people on imaginary pedestals, making myself believe I needed to serve them and gain their acceptance. I wanted both platonic and love relationships to have this kind of nature, because for me, even platonic relationships bordered on romance. I didn’t know what a boundary was, or how one could help or aid me.

Eventually I realized, no matter how hard I worked, that this would not make up for the giant void that I felt in my life. I realized I had to slow down, and that I had to listen to my needs and prioritize myself. I didn’t even know what that meant, but I knew I had to find a way to make my life work for me. That’s a huge thing to utter as a survivor. Nobody tells you to do this when you come from familial abuse, otherwise how would the abuse metabolize? Everyone partakes in it, and so things are far more complicated than they seem. Not a lot of people can sit with the sadness of being betrayed by a parent, and the loneliness it feels to never want to engage with them ever again. I feel sad for abandoning my mother, and I feel like a bad person, despite knowing the decisions I took to safeguard myself from her are also the reasons I’m still alive. But, for years, I told myself I was selfish because I got to escape. The fact that I get this life, this freedom, while my sister still cares for my mother is painful. As a Bangladeshi, filial piety keeps us from straying, but what it does more than anything is it obstruct the self and create a dangerous alliance with codependency.

Finding camaraderie with my sister and my father has helped me to understand that my mother is a result of so much agony, and so, in many ways, we all mourn who my mother was in her lightness. I saw her in all her incarnations. What a sacred transaction to have with another human being. She’s just a hurt person, and she has every right to be. When I remember that, she’s no longer my mother. I can forgive her again and again. Or, at least, I can understand a universe where that forgiveness exists.

*  *  *

When I started safeguarding my own mental health, many of those in my periphery failed to respond with support. As I began to create boundaries, I was often met with resentment. But the more I examined the company of people I kept, the more I began to imagine what a world looked like where I was in equal loving relationships. It’s been beautiful to understand that I am allowed to feel, yet every day I still have to remind myself how to be soft. I’m also beginning to realize that I can ask for that from others, as well.

Healing is an everyday practice that requires personal resolve and diligence. The mind is such a deep and cavernous space, but our liberation from our struggle, from pain, relies on reworking, reweaving, and reimagining what it looks like to feel safe and at ease with oneself. If I wasn’t on this journey, I wouldn’t believe it was possible. It’s weary and dark navigating and forming new neural pathways as you relinquish yourself from the bind of trauma and victimization. I’m beginning to see and understand that I can have the life that I want. I just have to take myself there slowly, gently, patiently. With all the love I never received yet had inside of me for all these years. As Maté writes, “When we have been prevented from learning how to say no our bodies may end up saying it for us.”^[5] My body said no a long time ago—I’m finally learning how to catch up and tell her, I’m here. I’m listening. Doing this work starts with training the mind. That’s when something miraculous appears. For me, it’s been sourcing self-respect where there formerly was none. The self-respect that’s arrived from understanding everything I’ve been through has brought me to this great place of self-affirmation.

Footnotes

* EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) is a form of psychotherapy used to heal trauma and negative emotions caused by distressing memories whereby the patient is asked to recall those memories while simultaneously following the finger movements of the therapist with only their eyes. This is believed to help remap the areas of the brain that associate certain memories and thoughts with harm.

* Ayahuasca is a psychoactive sacred plant medicine found in the basin of the Amazon. It’s taken ceremonially as a means to heal, with the help of Shamanic practices. Evidence of ayahuasca use has been dated back to one thousand years ago.