Short stories about reflecting on repair and preservation in relationships
I wrote an email to a teacher. I was excited about an upcoming project, one about cultural identity. I had never the had space before to explore these topics so I felt strongly about understanding what it meant for me and that I’d been feeling quite alienated lately-- so strangely Indo. I drank some beers when I wrote the email while listening to music. As I wrote, I tried to describe the rock I needed to move in order to dive deep into myself and the subject. It was very vulnerable and related to issues I didn’t quite fully comprehend, but still attached to finding a sense of self. I re-read the email a few times and was happy to send it.
I anticipated an embrace or an enlightening conversation to follow, like a peer to another peer. Maybe even some guidance or wisdom. I got an email about setting up a meeting, which I then missed because back then I did that sort of thing out of depression. After a meet-up for the program, she confronted me outside the institution’s building. She started awkwardly. Her attitufde towards me started to come off like she had an icky feeling towards me, a cringe about what I wrote. “I don’t really know what you want me to do...” she said. “I don’t know what I can do for you. I think you really need an example of a strong woman in your life. I really think you need to go find that.” The words echoed in me for a while. I just remember pretending to understand and I smiled.
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From that moment I searched for that strong woman, although I didn’t neccesarily feel weak inside in that moment. I actually felt quite strong in sending that email. After that confrontation I felt deep loss, one you get from feeling entirely misunderstood and unwanted.
I searched for this woman in books, in the people around me, there were essences in her here and there. In Audre Lorde, in Pamela Pattynama, in my friends, in passing conversations that were deep yet ambiguous, and also in music. It was really in that unwantedness did I accept my own weaknesses, it was in experiencing a community that struggled as I did-- did those same weaknesses unmask as a controlling narrative that was uncaring of who it swallowed .
The confrontation made me think I was naive, that what I did was foolish and young. That maybe I even asked for something she couldn’t give me or didn’t want to. Looking back, it was naive but it was also brave and true. It was just not the right person for it.
From the eyes of my mother as if our conciousnesses live simaltaneous, parallel but one. The same emotions I witnessed as a kid are deep within my relationships with my partner, friends, the cold streets and the people around me. But there are moments that bring about a nostalgia about her, when the cold air hits, a sign that the first days of fall lurk behind trees. The wind turning crispy and sun shining strikingly thru puffy white clouds, I await eagerly for the first leaf to drop. Fall was our time.
Sometimes I see from the eyes of my father, getting flashbacks after flashbacks. I remember those times in Canada. I often forget that I’ve chosen to follow a similar path like he did, to study and work somewhere far away from home. I get flashbacks and it’s like I’m there, his eyes are my eyes and we are moving through the same actions, the same situations, feeling perhaps the same despair. Of course he was always a much harder worker than me, I get tired much faster and give in to burnouts without much negotiation. It makes me wonder how he managed all those years with a family of four. He told me he got really sick with th eshingles once when we were in in Madison. Overloaded with studying for exams, parenting, earning money, grading thesises while writing his own. Last December, I got really sick during an unreasonably stressful project month. I went to the doctors three times, each diagnosing me with the general flu but I knew they were wrong. The spells were harsher than any flu I’d ever had and it wasn’t until I started coughing blood did the doctor take me serious. It turned out to be a lung infection. I was relieved, not because I finally got the right pills to fight the infection but because I got get off my feet for a few weeks. I did feel guilty though--that my collaborators, who were also on the brink of sickness, had to pick up the extra work.
I get deluded about where I am, by my Americanish accent and other internationally “neutral” accents that surround me, by insitutional environments, by the work I am doing, by an underground European night life. I have to remind myself that there is that extra burden to carry, constantly having to answer “Why is it worth keeping me here in the Netherlands?”. Besides for my friendships, I don’t know. If the answer isn’t good enough then I’m gone, it’s not up to me or my friends or my employers or the art scene or some curator. Sometimes I like to imagine myself getting to the giving up moment. There is unimaginable relief and anxiety. Sometimes home comes back to my dreams, in images of roads I would routinely take with my motorbike. Sometimes I dream of my family gathering in joy and in sadness, dreams of going to my favorite warungs, roads that take up the whole night to drive on.
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My fear, my dream
My fear, my dream
I fear to dream
My fear, my dream
My fear, my dream
I fear to dream that can fear can dream
My fear dreams that fear sleeps,
And dreams to eat dreams.
I fear I dream to fear to dream
If fear could dream my fear to dream
(A poem I wrote in 2019)
Asked me whether I thought women were better off in today’s society. The context of this question, I guess, was compared to “back when”. I told him “No, the question is too conclusive”. I told him that things are different over time and place and these were my honest thoughts. He began to interrogate me for my facts with phrases like, “Where is your research from?” or “I’ve done my research...”, something that continued to chant through this heated discussion from his side. I told him it’s part of my work, it’s part of my lived experience and that I felt it was a generic question that doesn’t really answer to anything. He responded, “Well we don’t know anyone who’s beating their wives.” The comment was pretty shocking and uninformed as domestic violence cases aren’t always documented or reported while femicide rates in the Netherlands have staggeringly stayed relatively the same or even increased between 2018 to 2022. Sources can be found here, here and here.
I found these website after this moment but I already knew this because of the general media I consume and discourses I engage.
I honestly didn’t know how to respond, I didn’t even know if we were talking about the quality of life or any other definition of what “better” meant. In my mind, modernity does not mean better, but I could only assume his ideas circulate the notion that modernity=better times or even equality. I opposed his DV comment by saying that we’re in a privileged social bubble and that isn’t an accurate depiction of DV in the Netherlands in general. His response was “We’re not in the same position.” I try to explain to him that we’re part of in an international community in the Netherlands doing creative things, we have the same friends etc. After I pointed out these intersections his responses were that of: “I’ve only been here for four years.” or “We’re not the same, we’re not from the same worlds.” In retrospect I made the mistake of trying to settle a difference or dispute. The argument was so deeply rooted in ego. In his deflections, he continued to demand “legitimate” research, asin statistic and numbers-- that being synonomous with quantitive information. In that moment, all qualitive work was apparentlt no conclusive enough, emotional labour was not conclusive enough, nor was literally being a woman in the 21st century.
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These difficult situations force me to rethink my relationships, rethink my approach and rethink my friend circle. However, words such as “REPAIR” come to mind-- some relationships I’m not prepared to walk away from yet. How can we repair a rip, a rupture caused by a dissonance, misguidance or different positionings. What situations call for repair? I see frequently in the Instagram therapy spheres, preservational tactics such as boundaries that circulate from discourses about self-love or trauma. What if that isn’t enough? I want to challenge myself by asking: Is their room for repair? I think that boundaries are good mechanisms to give space and time for possible repair, but for me, they’re not tools for healing. Sometimes I even wonder if setting boundaries drives me into more seclusion, deeper individuation than the collective belonging I actually long for. My friend and I now have a safe-word, not so we can avoid these discussions, but to give space for when our ideologies or frameworks or even egos are clouding, and further give oppurtunity to reassess. I am doing this because I feel like I can measure his heart and kindness. I don’t think the things he said reflect his actual values and I think we have space to one day open up about that discussion again to see where it all was coming from. There is a famous quote circulating around by James Baldwin. I circulated the internet because Taylor Swift was friends with Trump-supported, Brittany Mahomes. It divided Twitter into several narratives: 1 being “You can have a neutral stance on friendship despite having polarising values, in social, political, economical, philosphical and so on. But again, is that enough and where is the line?
The quote from James Baldwin goes “...we can disagreee and still love for each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist”.