Th1rteen R3asons Why

“No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue. Yet, we push it just the same.”

-Hannah Baker

Jay Asher, Th1rteen R3asons Why

LET US STOP KILLING PEOPLE WHO SHOW US THE WAY TO LOVE

In another world, I would commend my 12-year old self for coming to terms with her sexuality. I would honor the person she wanted to be. I would not, as in this world, look at her in the mirror with frustration and disgust because I’ve been told that only those who are mentally unstable end up becoming gay.

In another world, I would come out to my parents with so much pride, they would treat it as a milestone in personal growth. They would take credit for who I turned out to be, and for who I choose to love. They would not, as in this world, think of how inadequate or unfortunate they are to have a daughter who does not see love the way they do.

In another world, I would have a partner who’d be proud to hold my hand in public. We’d be so affectionate while other people look on in admiration and appreciation of our love. We would not, as in this world, feel ashamed for wanting to touch, to kiss, to feel – because people think it’s a disgrace, and we should know better than to flaunt our immorality.

In another world, I would not have to deal with constantly being wrong just because I’m different. I would not apologize for who I am, and I will not push the most undesirable parts of myself to the deepest, darkest corners of my being. The colors of my soul will not be the dirty little secret that holds me down.

In another world, I will wear my sexuality like a badge of honor and there will be no threat of being ridiculed, taunted, or silenced. They will acknowledge my courage. They will accept me for me. They will be inspired. There will be so much love. There will be so much freedom. There will be so much pride.

In this world, there are days when it seems easier to abandon all hopes for a kinder tomorrow. Days when all I could remember is the pain of a 12-year old girl who felt like she let herself down, because who she is, is not who she’s supposed to be. What I dream of, will remain anchored in another world, because all I am is someone who learned to love herself in secret, in her own quietly proud way.

It would have been so much easier to live in that other world, where being who you are is empowering, and acceptance would be the natural response for staying true to your soul. Ideally, in another world exists absolute happiness and liberty to be me – whoever I want to be. But it is in this world where I have discovered courage beyond compare. This world has strengthened my faith in the uncertainty of my parents ever seeing me the way I want to be seen. This brutal world taught me to love myself – no more pretending, no more wishing I were “normal” – and to power through the pain of being the only one to see how beautiful I really am. This world showed me, time and again, how to forgive those who shut me out and gave up on me, simply because they didn’t know what to make of me.

This is ground zero: the source of my ultimate breakdown, but also the birthplace of people courageous enough to break through it. People who yearn for nothing but the freedom to be, and the freedom to love. People who give me hope.

Funny how the world is so similar to who I used to be. Frustrated, confused, and a little judgemental. How convenient it would be to just conform to normalcy, but this right here, is me doing right by myself. The world will surely fight this, like I did when I was twelve. But like me, it will understand, and heal, and eventually make all the pieces fit. Best believe I’ll be here to help it out when it’s ready.

Because like the acceptance I long for, I too must accept the reality that the world I’m in, is still struggling to grasp who I am. As I myself went through several hurricanes to figure out who I was, I must once again brave it out until the world comprehends that here is where I belong. Like the way I trusted the goodness of my being, I too must trust that other people will eventually see me as someone who wants to live pretty much the way they do.

I will take a stand for this world the way I did for myself, hoping that someday, it will also stand alongside me – prouder than I’ve ever imagined. I know I dream of another world, but I also can’t help rooting for the most epic rainbow. That, where this world powers through itself – for me, you and everyone we know.

—

Submitted by Yna Bote

“Hearing hearing”. Drawing by Daehyun Kim

A LETTER EVERYONE SHOULD WRITE TO THEIR 20 YEAR OLD SELVES

Dear 20,

I know you’re terrified, homeless and broke, dependent on the courtesy of strangers. You’re probably hiding in a public bathroom as we speak, gasping for air like a fish thrown out of water, heart beating out of control, questioning your sanity and why you can’t take the bus on some days or even leave your dorm room on others. It’s been five years already, and I’m sure that you’re wondering if we’ve done well, if we’ve found love, stability and fortune, if we’ve found success. I’m sorry to disappoint you baby girl, but we’ve lost it all. Or rather, given it all up. But I need you to trust me when I tell you that it was all done by choice. You’ve cut the strings with seamless precision. You’ve done it because you couldn’t afford losing yourself, so you lost everything else instead, and I’m proud of you for doing that. When I look at all the people crushed under the weight of things that are no longer helping them flourish, all in the name of righteousness or logic, I can see that we’ve made the right choice.

You, my love, have been reborn, and this time you will decide what to grow into.

It still hurts a little, the pain you’ve accumulated over the past five years, but I thank you for realising that it’s not yours to carry anymore. Yesterday I revisited the cabinet where it has all been archived, neatly sorted into categories; remorse, self-loathing, anxiety, doubt, fear. I gazed at all of them triumphantly; they are no longer part of you, part of us. One day you will forget where they are, and all those empty spaces where they used to dwell will be filled with luscious gardens. You’re a fertile ground kid, are you aware of that yet? Of all the beauty that can grow inside of you? Beauty that was never recognised, that was dismissed, abused, misused and discarded. Do you know that it was all done to you in fear? No? You’ll see. Five years time is closer than you think, just blink twice and meet me at the debris of this fortress we’ve been building.

Rejoice in its destruction and dance naked by my side around the fire that we have set to it. They will hear our intoxicated laughs and they will know that all their efforts to break us were in vein. We’re invincible.

But above all, I want you to know that you are loved. And if you stand still, listen to the silence of your mind and peer into the darkness of nothingness, you will feel it. Flowing harmoniously through your extremities is eternity, the all and the nothing, and that is where you come from and to where you shall return. And it loves you, unconditionally, so embrace it, embrace this nothingness because at the center of all things is void. Do not fear it and to not seek to fill it, people who are always seeking get trapped by the pursuit. So seek not and it will all come to you at the right moment. Envision it, call for it, work for it, but do not run after it. Trust me little one, after all I am older and therefore wiser.

Finally, and this is very important, there is nothing fucking wrong with you.

So stop chewing your lips bloody trying to find answers because there are none. There is you, there is what you keep, what you shed off and what you replace it with, no right and no wrong. Love yourself, with everything you have to offer. Be an open vessel and love will flow into you.

Oh, how I wish I could peer into your autumn eyes and kiss your lips, stroke you hair and take you out for a drink. I have so much to tell you. But for now, happy 25th birthday kiddo, can’t wait till we speak again.

Love, 25

—

Submitted to ArtParasites by Tania Shoukair

Portrait by Erik Jones

Have a look to Erik Jones´ colorful portraits of young women hidden behind geometrical forms as if they are lost in structures they never wanted to wear…

 

Margo Roth Spiegelman (Papertowns, 2015)

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, 2015

Their Hurt is Not Your Decision to Make by Nikita Gill

Deciding how hurt someone is allowed to be with your behaviour towards them is the emotional equivalent of

1. drowning someone and deciding how loud they are allowed to scream

2. setting someone on fire and deciding how much of a mess their ashes are allowed to make

3. stabbing someone and deciding how much they are allowed to bleed.

You do not get to destroy someone and decide how ruined they are allowed to feel.

Take Your Time To Heal by Nikita Gill

You are calling yourself
worthless and weak again
because you feel like
you are taking too long to heal
too long to be ‘normal’ again
and it makes me ache inside
to watch you tear yourself
down this way.

Because you are neither
worthless nor weak.

What about all the tremendous wars
you have been fighting within yourself
whilst the rest of the world sleeps?

What about the battle cries that echo
in your mind from fighting fearsome demons
made of pain and damage and destruction?

What about all the heartache
you have survived,
that you have pulled yourself through?

You are stronger, stronger
than anyone gives you credit for.
Stronger than even you know.

So your survival is different,
your survival demands more
to heal your pain.

Healing has never been a straight road, love.
It contains the steepest mountains and valleys
and the deepest of oceans.

Repeat after me:

Healing is not horizontal
and I am allowed to take my time.

Healing is not horizontal
and I am allowed to take my time.

Healing is not horizontal
and I am allowed to take my time.

Read This If There’s Someone You Can’t Forgive by Heidi Priebe

I hate every cliché that exists about forgiveness.

I know every adage, every piece of advice, every regularly endorsed opinion on the topic because I’ve scoured my way through the literature. I’ve read every blog post about letting go of anger. I’ve written down Buddha quotes and stuck them on post-its to my wall. I know that no part of it is simple. I know the adages are tired. I know the gap between “Deciding to forgive” and actually feeling peace can seem entirely unbridgeable. I know.

Forgiveness is a vast, un-traversable land for those of us who crave justice. The very thought of letting someone walk away scot-free from what they’ve done makes us sick. We don’t want to simply wipe our hands clean. We want to transfer the blood onto to theirs. We want to see the scores evened and the playing field leveled. We want them to bear the weight of what they’ve done, not us.

Forgiveness seems like the ultimate betrayal of yourself. You don’t want to give up the fight for justice after what has happened to you. The anger is burning inside you and pumping toxicity throughout your system. You know that, but you can’t let it go. The anger is as inseparable a part of you as your heart or mind or lungs. I know the feeling. I know the second heartbeat that is fury.

But here’s the thing about anger: it’s an instrumental emotion. We stay angry because we want justice. Because we think it’s useful. Because we assume that the angrier we are, the more change we will be capable of incurring. Anger doesn’t realize that the past is over and the damage has been done. It tells you that vengeance will fix things. It’s on the pursuit of justice.

Except the justice we want isn’t always realistic. Staying angry is like continually picking the scab off a cut because you think that if you keep the wound open, you won’t get a scar. It’s thinking that someday, the person who wronged you can come give you stitches with such incredible precision that you’ll never know the cut was once there. The truth about anger is that it’s nothing more than the refusal to heal, because you’re scared to. Because you’re afraid of who you’ll be once your wounds close up and you have to go on living in your new, unfamiliar skin. You want your old skin back. And so anger tells you to keep that wound bleeding.

When you’re seething, forgiveness seems impossible. We want to be capable of it, because intellectually we know it’s the healthiest choice to make. We want the peace forgiveness offers. We want the release. We want the madness in our brains to quiet down, and yet we cannot find a way to get there.

Because here’s what they all fail to tell you about forgiveness: It’s not going to fix anything. It’s not an eraser that will wipe away the pain of what’s happened to you. It does not undo the pain that you’ve been living with and grant you immediate peace. Finding peace is a long, uphill battle. Forgiveness is just what you take to stay hydrated along the way.

Forgiveness means giving up hope for a different past. It means knowing that the past is over, the dust has settled and the destruction left in its wake can never be reconstructed to resemble what it was. It’s accepting that there’s no magic solution to the damage that’s been caused. It’s the realization that as unfair as the hurricane was, you still have to live in its city of ruins. And no amount of anger is going to reconstruct that city. You have to do it yourself.

Forgiveness means accepting responsibility – not for causing the destruction, but for cleaning it up. It’s the decision that restoring your own peace is finally a bigger priority than disrupting someone else’s.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean you have to make amends with who hurt you. It doesn’t mean befriending them, sympathizing with them or validating what they have done to you. It just means accepting that they’ve left a mark on you. And that for better or for worse, that mark is now your burden to bear. It means you’re done waiting for the person who broke you to come put you back together. It’s the decision to heal your own wounds, regardless of which marks they’re going to leave on your skin. It’s the decision to move forward with scars.

Forgiveness isn’t about letting injustice reign. It’s about creating your own justice, your own karma and your own destiny. It’s about getting back onto your feet and deciding that the rest of your life isn’t going to be miserable because of what happened to you. It means walking bravely into the future, with every scar and callous you’ve incurred along the way. Forgiveness means saying that you’re not going to let what happened to you define you any longer.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you are giving up all of your power. Forgiveness means you’re finally ready to take it back.