True Love: Weekly Reflections on a Personal Project
Tuesday Reflections on my journey towards a computational model of dissociative amnesia
Week of May 19th through 25th
I started this week thinking about how fun science is and about the value of all the “amateur” scientists out there!
We often think of science as something done by people with three degrees in a high powered lab. I wasn’t even sure how I would do my own project because I didn’t know how I would get an MRI machine or EEG. But with passion and a love for science you can do anything.
I encourage everyone to watch this video but it’s something I wish all kids could see. I would have felt so inspired:
There are so many ways to do good science from home now. You can get insect at home. You can do computational modeling for free for so many different subjects. You can get little electrical kits.
I’ve been dying to start playing with electricity and learning all about it. I want to get more into coding. I want to make little machines. I’ve been dying to get one of these little kits to start learning:
Feeling useful and like your work has value builds passion.
It was so fun and motivation building to make little videos and keep a journal of my science experiment — all the parts that excited me, that were interesting, or that evoked some kind of emotion in me. I highly recommend it for any little ones or amateur scientists like me. I’ve already been looking forward to do science experiments with my future kids — watching tadpoles grow, seeing what makes our plants thrive, and playing with robot kits. I think it’ll be just as interesting for me!
Science is so fun!!!
It reminds me of boddhisatvas and how they arte rhere to teach you a lesson. The biggest challenge in Christianity is to not judge others. Sometimes I think God can use us as a challenge for each other in sticking true to those words. Everybody’s spiritual journey is unique and it’s not up to us to meddle. We never know how God is leading us wnd why. Sometimes He can send us down a unique way for a unique reason and our only task is not to judge.
Ive been trying to work on being challenging. I was a very appeasing child. I wanted to be what other people needed me to be. I steuggled with saying “no”. I steuggled with doing things that I wanted to do. My sister was the ppposite. She wore what she wanted. She went out if she wanted to go out. Going through my spiritual journey, God has given me many pushes to be challenging. Ive been invited to break lots of rules - some of the rules the most hardcore Christians have. The rules of White supremacy. The programming of hopelessness we sell survivors. I won’t lie, it’s been probably my biggest struggle. It’s hard to disrupt people. It’s hard to be confronting.
Being challenging is not a bad thing because it’s an opportunity to help other people learn.
I’ve really struggled talking about the medical mysogyny I dealt with because I feel guilty. I don’t want people to feel “implicated” or I think “maybe they didn’t know any better” or “they used what they had at the time”. And first of all, Thats not necessarily true. And second of all, if you don’t talk about it, future scientists don’t learn about potential pitfalls. They don’t learn the kind of reflection they should do or the questions they should ask themselves. And at the end of the day, Thats my truth. That’s how I was impacted by a narrative. It doesn’t make people evil or villains. It just means everyone should learn. Thats the great thing about Buddhism too. Their mistakes can have power and impact on the future. Nothing is wasted. Everything can be used, even if it’s not perfect.
I feel bad talking about my university, particularly as we’ve had our first run of female presidents. I did not to into university wanting to be angry. I went in wanting to love it for love. It has made me feel grief to be angry. But i also think that the foundation has gotten quite questionable. Fixing issues on a deeper level is useful in the future. You cause less suffering. It does nothing to push complaints aside and ignore the suffering being caused. It just makes more issues come up later. Imagine if I kept writing code and getting a bad output. Does it do anything to keep ignoring problems and keep running the code again expecting a new result? Not really. Sometimes confronting an issue instead of running away from it can make you run better long term.
When I had trouble challenging others, I also had trouble being challenged. Other people telling me ways i could do better or be better caused me immense internal distress. I felt angry on the inside or intense guilt because I wanted people to like me. Both lessons happened at once. I learned to say no more and be more truthful and I learned to take criticism as a learning opportunity.
At the time of my abuse, I was a massive people pleaser. It’s not something I like to think too much because sometimes it leads to a lot of self blame. But thats the honest truth. It made it hard to defend myself. But it also made it harder to y take a strong, active stance when it came to how other people were struggling within this dynamic. I was harmed the worst but it doesn’t make anyone else’s pain less important. It’s funny how the ways you hurt others reflex back to you too. Karma, huh?
It was incredibly scarring to have everyone leave for many different reasons. But the deepest, which I look back on my 18 year self on with a lot of compassion now that I’m older, is that I always wanted to be good. I always wanted to be loved. I didn’t want to hurt people, to the point where I ironically didnt say things that needed to be said, things that would reduce harm for everyone if I was just more forward. Having everyone dislike me and see me as harmful was the exact opposite of what I tried to shield myself from. Ironically, Thats probably the best thing that ever happened to me. It disrupted my identity as a “liked person” profoundly. It forced me to find new ways to see myself that actually meant something. It forced me to assert my own will and protect myself more. It pointed out my deepest shadow to me.
Just because I learned that at first doesn’t mean that it wasn’t still a challenge for me for a long time afterwards. It was a practice I had to intentionally engage in for a long time. I patched things up with my friends later, which I’m grateful for, but it doesn’t mean that we didn’t still have tension because of that issue. It didn’t mean people liked me perfectly right away. I still felt guilty and ashamed around them that I had not stood up for them when it was important and when it was useful. I still bumped into issues and lingering resentment. Sometimes I feel very upset about them but because I had had that moment of rupture and was able to challenge myself through it, I was better at actually dealing with the situation.
When you don’t learn how to take responsibility for the problems that you create and the ways that you cause suffering in others, you can become become like the people that you don’t like. The people that abused me never took accountability. They always avoided responsibility. They often twisted words and feelings. They weren’t good at listening at all. That was always in the back of my mind as an example of who I could be if I didn’t navigate circumstances with patience and honesty.
Especially because I was so sensitive from that incident, I often felt extremely guilty or I felt a little mental spiral when I would bump into these resentment because I wanted everything to be okay with the people I cared about. I did want things to be back to normal and sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes, things took time and sometimes the resentments were productive windows into how to love other people better. Over time, I felt better at actually listening and changing my behaviour. I didn’t feel like I should just push people’s complaints back onto them and that helped me grow. I gave people more space to feel frustrated or upset or for our relationship to take a while to heal, rather than barreling through so that I could feel okay.
On the other hand, having to confront myself so deeply gave me better awareness of who I was and because of that, I actually loved myself for the first time versus just being a version of me that I needed to be. That was because I loved myself for the dark parts of myself too that I had to face rather than run away from. If you’re running away from a part of you, you don’t love yourself in your entirety. I had more patience with myself. I took more time to actually understand why I was hurting. I started to be able to suss out also when it was important to be loyal to myself as well. I was not just a horrible person. I also went through a lot of pain pain and suffering in the situation. I was only 18. I didn’t have the awareness of the world yet or how to navigate it that I could have post-trauma when I had already been through it and was going to therapy for years. I wasn’t the most well-read person. I wasn’t a highly spiritual person. I was just a kid who wasn’t always the best at really knowing how to move forward. I matured and I got to understand myself. Sometimes I did need to give myself grace because of the fact that I had navigated abuse, and I needed to remind myself that abuse also changed the way that I was able to handle a situation like that. It didn’t mean that other people had to forgive me right away, and it didn’t change the responsibility I had or the hurt I caused. But I could learn to forgive myself, instead of what I did at first which was target all of that anger and self hatred onto myself, hurt myself, and and feel this sort of intense self hatred and anger towards myself for what I did. Even other people weren’t there yet, I could be the one to take care of myself and attend to my needs because it wasn’t their responsibility. It didn’t mean I didn’t deserve it. Because I had a stronger inner-knowing, it got easier to see when people were being unfair or when it I was being pushed around or not listened to. I could come at it from that place of inner knowing that I was taking accountability for the things that mattered, but that also I couldn’t just be but that also I deserve grace and I deserve kindness because of what I went through alone as well. I also deserved to be defended by someone, even if that someone was me.
That initial force to confront myself became a crack in my inner psyche that spiralled in the best possible way after. I never stopped looking inwards with courage and curiosity. I never stopped avoiding responsibility within myself. I grew deeper and I knew myself better. I started to love myself for the important parts of me and know myself, which became some of my biggest and most important ideas in the following years. I was able to confront other places where I was causing suffering in the lives of others, such as through my White privilege. I didn’t feel the need to internalise the narrative that I had no stake in the matter and that I needed to protect myself by letting the harm fester. I already knew from my experience where that led. That became a source of strength, creativity, resilience and joy. It gave me a fresh perspective. It made me feel useful. It made me feel productive and that meant that even though I was being confrontational or challenging I actually felt like I had the potential to facilitate real healing. I could make people feel good for a real reason, not just because I was helping them avoid the parts of themselves that they didn’t want to face or would that that were causing harm for others. I learned that confronting your shadow will make you love yourself in the biggest and most creative way. I knew that it would make people feel stronger and more resilient, just like I did. Why would I shelter other people from what became my biggest happiness and success in life? How could I not pass that on and help other people feel the joy, courage, and cleansing I felt? That self reflectiveness became one of my most important and beloved qualities in my life that I would never take it for granted. It was a gift to be challenged.
People do bad things. Nobody is perfect everybody at some point in time is probably going to harm another person. Everybody is going to cause an issue. Rub somebody the wrong way or not live up to the standards that they set for themselves for moral morality and things like that that’s OK that’s part of being a human human being what’s important? Is that we learn to actually deal with the reason why we’re not suffering And listen take accountability and with genuine intent create steps forward that actually deal with the issue rather than just pretending to deal with the issue or dealing with an issue in a way that self-centred and that’s built around actually would just making people like you
There are a lot of times when people are going to say that they care or say that they’re gonna take steps forward for you but when push comes to shove, they don’t actually stand by that or they don’t actually do what needs to be done. The girl that I had issues with who perpetuated the cycle of abuse in our friendship, when confronted about what happened, said she would do anything to help me find justice. I still ended our friendship because my trust in what she said was too broken by that point. What I saw afterwards was that she didn’t stop being friends with this person until it became embarrassing and confronting through other circumstances, and when called to, she didn’t even speak at my trial. So really, nothing was done to help me find justice at all, not even the bare minimum which was to simply show up. People can feel when something is disingenuine or just said because you think they are the right or most appeasing words, but they are not followed by true actions.
An institution can say that they’re doing anything possible to fix the issue and that they’re implementing all of these different special steps while if you actually look under the surface and try to challenge them and question how deep they’re really going, they will push back or they will create surface level fixes to throw you off their scent. They create fixes that purposefully avoid the actual problem. Rather than firing people, rather than taking accountability, rather than taking a genuine foundational step forward and actually changing the culture, they can just create sort of special programs and lists that on the surface seem like they’re going to do something but don’t actually target the harm in the deepest possible way. They create steps which are ingenuine.
Sometimes people can say that they care about racism and make surface level moves, like claiming they are “colour blind”, but when they are actually challenged to confront themselves more deeply, they act in a way that is reactive or angry. They don’t care to get to the root of the suffering. They want to be liked and they want to protect their feelings.
I’m tired of a world where we treat mass sexual abuse scandals particularly as a bug in the code, an accident to throw hush money into and keep on going. I want to live in a world where I see people genuinely, from the bottom of their hearts, caring about sexual abuse. It’s not an accident or a blip. It’s something to reroot the entire system for, to pour love and real genuine feeling into. When people don’t seem to care from the bottom of their hearts about sexual abuse, particularly towards vulnerable groups like children and pregnant woman, it deeply calls to question for me who they are and what’s really going on under the surface. To care more about reputation than the an entire life of trauma for countless people… it says something. This goes from my university to the government. It’s not a moment for apologising, claiming to seek justice while turning around and doing nothing, like my ex-friend. It’s a moment to actually show what you are about and who you are inside. And sometimes what you end up seeing is that there’s something very disturbing and rotten going on deep down that you can’t just walk off and pretend didn’t happen. Sometimes it’s not a bug. Sometimes it seems that may have turned out to be the core of what the code was made to do. A lot of times people start to catch wind and the apologies come out. You always hope for the best and that maybe you saw wrong. But the pattern shows otherwise. It was like this for my friend. It’s been like this for the government. And I truly hope I’ll see that this was not the case for my alma mater in the long run. I hope they will reroot in the deepest of ways, just like I once had to do. I mentioned I’ve been sad to have this moment while we have a female president. But if anything, I hope this can be a beautiful chance for someone with a different relationship to retribution and a more personal stake to those who have been harmed in all of these circumstances do more and go deeper than we have seen before. Fingers crossed. Many intelligent women like her have gone to Columbia before and have left with passion to do beautiful things. It should be a safe space for people like us. I want to move past this and to have my pride rekindled one day.
I learned that real love for yourself and others is getting to the root of suffering and navigating it with compassion and intentionality. Running away from the root of suffering does not just harm other people. It also harms you. Avoiding responsibility or awareness is doubly harmful. Getting genuine, uncomfortable, and deeper was immediately incredibly painful and shifting my life a lot. But I very quickly started to reap the benefit, and over time, I started to see my biggest wins taking shape. It is innately rewarding in the long term to take accountability.
it’s weird. i don’t know if i’m getting older or i just healed and i’m processing better or what but this all used to feel like some weird magic trick i was doing, like something colorful and impossible and kind of twinged with this gut pulling sadness.
and now it feels like my real work that i’m doing.
something about living in finsbury park in a tiny little flat the size of a walk in closet, walking to my research assistant position, reading research articles on the train to pick up the kids i nannied… it felt musical and funny.
now i’m finishing a masters degree. i live in a house with my cat. i have a whole fridge to myself. i have a cushy job title that i don’t always feel like i live up to well enough but it’s mine. i’m writing about biases and h’s and things and i actually know what i’m talking about. that’s the crazy part.
these types of sentences are what i used to write in my notes app in hopeful desperation. i would write everything i had and everything i would soon have like i was writing a letter to myself. but the present i just wrote is more fantastical than anything i ever wrote back then. and it’s the fact that i’m writing it as a matter of fact that really gets me. there’s no wishful thinking. that’s just my normal life.
what would i write from here? it’s hard to even say. it just feels like my life is growing at unprecedented speed under my nose as i sit there worried about it, feeling inadequate, and doubting myself about what’s coming next. it’s been pretty hard to imagine where i’m flying off to after this.
i’ve been thinking about my high school recently. it was a funny place.
the thought process started with memories of my freshman year math teacher, who was re homed after chasing a kid with scissors as maybe a joke, maybe not, i don’t really know. she was an interesting character. she boiled eggs in class and would get kids chic fil a. she was replaced by a long term sub, a wiry african man whose unintentional catch phrase was “clap for friend”. he had us fill in our worksheets while he filled out job applications in the corner. unsurprisingly, lots of kids failed the math standardized tests that year, an effect which compounded into the next year. i really wish i had those math skills now.
our high school was set up with a lot of interesting quirks. it was a specialty school for low income inner city kids. it was majority black school and the first of its kind in the entire U.S.
instead of homeroom, we would go to morning meeting, in which we would sit in the auditorium and socialize while a lot of us are free breakfast downstairs. the other day i actually got a horrible craving for that sausage breakfast pizza cooked in a plastic bag that you can only get at public school. then, our school principal would give us a sort of morning message slash inspirational speech. usually,he would pick one of us at random to give the morning message. it was meant to sharpen our confidence in out public speaking. all of us in our four years stood up therein front of the school a few times at least. sometimes our principal took over or added something as well. our principal was a great speaker. he always had some sort of word of encouragement or little anecdote with a lesson to tell us in the morning. sometimes he ran a little over time of it was important and we got to start class late. it was a very personal touch for a school principal. you could tell he really cared about us and out education a lot. he know all 200 plus of us by name. i don’t think i’d ever be able to remember so many people. we’d then all have the chance to make any announcements we want. we’d line up at the front of the auditorium and wait out turn for the microphone. sometimes my little club would make an accoucement. there’d be d and d club. teachers would announce something of importance.
the other funny thing about my school was we didn’t have home room. we had families instead. one teacher would act as our parent for all four years and we would stay with them from freshman year all the way to senior year. once a week or so we would go to family. i started in the Williams family which became the Brooks family. our family heads would be the one to give out report cards. there was something so intimate about having your family head look over your report card. ms. brooks would make a little comment if you did well or if you needed to pick up the slack a little but it always come from a place of love and you could tell. i was an overachiever so i didn’t usually have an issue. sometimes we had parties but usually we just hung out.
the other thing we would do was our yearly harvest festival competition. every family had to come up with a dance and perform it in front of the whole school which was the bane of my existence because i was shy and i hated dancing back then. i usually tried to hold some kind of sign. i remember our sing one year being Brick House
did the Brooks family win one competition ? i don’t really remember but i would still say we had the best family. The Schultz family would probably say differently seeing as they won like EVERY COMPETITION…. but in my heart i will say we had the best family still. I think the Dice family or the Crone family was the other strong contender but i can’t fully remember now. there were two families that always knocked it out of the park with the most well choreographed dance, everyone on stage, props, everything. Afterwards, we would have a feast of thanksgiving food and head outside for festivities. it was a really fun yearly tradition.
our other special tradition was freshman camping trip. it was our rite of passage to spend a week in a tent, woken up by our history teacher banging pots and pans. there was a bit of beef between the two campsites we could get randomly placed in. one of them got a big head from being gross and stinky for a week because they got the real camping experience. at least, that’s what they said to make themselves feel better. the rest of us elegant, refined, more elevated individuals got showers. as you can tell, i was very happy to be in the second group. i already suffered enough the night a swarm of daddy long legs crawled in our tent and my friend and tent mate started screaming her head off late at night until me and my other friend were able to fix the situation. the trauma… i have a strong suspicion she was also the one to write the mysterious shrekmas story from my last reflection. i may be wrong but i have a strong feeling. it sounded a little too sophisticated for any fiction i would have written back then and she did often use her writing powers for evil.
a fun video someone from my high school made of old footage of our school
i actually teared up watching this. we may have dressed differently but this captured the feeling pretty much exactly. i’ve been missing my hometown like crazy. there’s honestly nothing like being a Richmond Public Schools student. i miss the smell sometimes, the posters, the shenanigans… it’s something you don’t appreciate until you get older. I’ve gone through many more prestigious school environments but it’s hard to recreate the feeling of home. if there’s one school i care to be a strong alumni presence for, it’s that one. the rest of my schools have plenty. Lots of bright future scientists and mathematicians to invest in at RPS!
Over the course of these reflections, I’ve expressed a lot of visions for my future. One day, I hope I can have the money to invest in making sure my fellow RPS kids learn how to code. It’s a skill that is widely applicable and has the potential to make sure you can make good money in the future! Python is easy, fun, and a great skill every RPS kid could have within a semester. Every RPS student knows that one kid in school who carried around a bag of cinnamon rolls, sodas, or even full plates of food to sell at lunch. Lots of entrepreneurs in the making who could one day make themselves a great website with their coding skills and then you would really be making big bucks. I’d also love to have some Black and Hispanic scientists and mathematicians showcase their skillsets and talk about their career path. It’s great to expose kids to a wider range of different STEM paths they may not have heard of. I had never heard of anything like computational modelling when I was younger. Who knows, maybe it would have piqued my interest! I was also one of the first students at RCHS to graduate with an AP Capstone diploma, which consisted of taking AP Seminar and AP Research. As you can see, those research skills followed me for life! Very worth my time. It’s a program very worth spreading for more RPS students and investing in for kids who are interested. Sometimes, you don't see right away how those challenges and extra time commitments you take on in high school will really pay off. Well, here’s living proof :)
Exposing myself for being kind of cringe in high school
A core Richmond kid memory
These Snapchat filters had us in a chokeholddd in high school
Galaxy Diner, another core Richmond memory
Ending with this magical presentation
Jesus was my friend on my hunt for the root cause of dissociative amnesia. He taught me to speak miracles into the world and have unshakeable faith that they would be delivered. Christianity gave me the kind of creative power and confidence that I needed to make something new appear in the world that didn’t before. When I felt like the world was crumbling around me and I couldn’t make it, I knew to trust in God. I knew to see my failures as perfect and divinely guided. Nothing was wasteful and everything was useful. Jesus also taught me that the oppressed were holy. He taught me how to spot false idols and how to handle the characters I was seeing around me — the Trumps and the Epsteins. I knew he believed in me amd he would guide me when I was lost. I knew I could do something impossible if I believed.
31 “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the [a]holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. 33 And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. 34 Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: 35 for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; 36 I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? 38 When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? 39 Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ 40 And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’
41 “Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: 42 for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; 43 I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’
44 “Then they also will answer [b]Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?’ 45 Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ 46 And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Matthew 25:31-46
“And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Matthew 19:24
Some of my favourite verses which have spoken volumes to me in our current political climate. The New Testament can be a radical book in its own right.
But the Buddha was my friend in my journey to see the illusions living inside me so I could see truth more clearly. He was my guide in my journey through accountability and my friend in understanding my place in an oppressive system. He taught me how to put my ego aside so I could listen. My journey as a Buddhist and as an abolitionist have been one and the same.
I read “How to Love” by Thich Nhat Hanh in 2020. I had lost all my friends, including somebody I loved a lot not just as a friend but as a first love.
All around me, the Black Lives Matter movement was flaring up in the midst of a pandemic. People were sharing a lot of resources. A friend shared an online library of texts, a big Google Drive of ebooks and scanned PDFs.
This is where I would find Noel Ignatiev’s essay a few years later when I was ready for it. But the drive wasn’t just about Black Liberation. It was about all liberation of every kind. One folder was simply labelled “radical love & compassion”. I was magnetised by this phrase.
In it was Thich Nhat Hanh’s “How To Love”, now called “True Love”.
I thought, if there’s one thing I think I need to learn, it’s that. The ugliest part of my relationship with this person i hurt ended in this fight. But we were not perfect before by any means. We danced around each other emotionally. We didn’t understand each other completely. We stepped on each other’s sensitivities. Because of our anxieties and hang ups, we never made it all the way to the end goal of feeling secure together. I thought love was about asking someone out and making them feel good. In reality, it was a lot harder than that. I, who did anything to appease anybody, wasn’t really as good at love as I thought I would be.
I got to reading. I downloaded the book to my e-reader and sat in the park. I read it pretty much in one go. It really opened my eyes.
There were phrases which surprised me. I didn’t know that love had so many moving pieces. These were some that really challenged my perception:
Loving someone doesn’t mean saying “yes” to whatever the other person wants. The basis of loving someone else is to know yourself and to know what you need. I know a woman who suffered very much because she couldn’t say “no.” From the time she was young, whenever a man asked her for something, she felt she had to say “yes” even when she didn’t want to. It’s important that loving another person doesn’t take priority over listening to yourself and knowing what you need.
This was an important lesson that I never learned and that I needed as a survivor. I needed to have compassion for myself and say what needed to be said. This was the first time saying “no” had been framed to me as love. I thought that it was hurting or being selfish.
Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.
This one really made me think. For the first time, I sat down and questioned if I really understood this person. How well did I really understand his suffering? Could I do it better? Thich Nhat Hanh didn’t say “If you don’t understand, you can’t love that well”. He said “you can’t love”. Maybe I couldn’t love how I thought I did even though this person made my heart race and I felt the desire to understand them.
This lesson grew for me when I went into my journey with White supremacy. How often did I really sit and listen? Did I glaze over what was being said to me? Was there a new angle I could navigate that would help me understand better?
The first element of true love is loving kindness. The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness. You can be the sunshine for another person. You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself. Learn how to practice mindfulness in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment. Then you have something to offer the other person.
That summer, I was spiralling in self-hate I didn’t know how to fix. These words changed my perception and called me to love myself for the first time. I realised that self-love also improved my love for other people. That had been severely lacking all year and because of that, I grew insecure and did things to make this person show me that he loved me, like running away or getting petulant. I was anxiously attached.
Later on in my journey with White supremacy, I also realised that I was deeply insecure and ashamed of my Whiteness. I didn’t love myself as much as I could. That wasn’t the fault of people trying to get their needs met. It was the fault of a culture that failed to teach me how to face guilt and anxiety in a healthy way. It taught me to deflect and run away so I could never love every part of me, even the difficult parts. I needed to learn to be stronger and face what I didn’t like about myself, in my romantic love journey, and my journey of loving my community.
The second element of true love is compassion. Compassion is the capacity to understand the suffering in oneself and in the other person. If you understand your own suffering, you can help him to understand his suffering. Understanding suffering brings compassion and relief. You can transform your own suffering and help transform the suffering of the other person with the practice of mindfulness and looking deeply.
In our year as friends, I had often seen this person in a lot of emotional pain. I loved him and I wanted to help but I didn’t really know how. He felt lost and I felt lost. I wanted to help him understand his suffering. But maybe I wasn’t very good at dealing with mine. I had been in a lot of pain too that I didn’t have the tools to manage and that made it difficult.
In my journey with White supremacy, I realised that maybe what I needed wasn’t just to learn more about other people. Maybe what I needed was to learn more about my condition. What did White mean? Why did it make me feel tangled up and twisted? Was it helpful to me or was it actually harming me in ways I didn't see? Why did that make it so hard to connect to communities I loved? I had to deal with my confusion and my condition so that I could better understand how to help instead of watching people suffer and feeling lost, just like I felt lost with him even though I loved him and wanted to help him feel better.
The fourth element of true love is equanimity. We can also call it inclusivesness or nondiscrimination. In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering. Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. What happens to your loved one happens to you. What happens to you happens to your loved one.
Over time, I learned that the suffering of communities of color was no less of my suffering. Because I was being encouraged to ignore and harm them, I also learned to ignore when people who looked like me did things to hurt me. White supremacy hurt me too. It made my identity confusing because its rules stretched to fit me but they weren’t really created with my complex ethnic reality in mind. It made it difficult to feel comfortable in my unique heritage and in my skin. I didn't just need to get invested in the problems of people I cared about because I loved them and I didn’t like the harm they were facing. I also needed to realise my stake. Their sadness made me sad and these same conditions hurt me personally in different ways. It made me realise just how important it was that I learned to let my ego go so I could really listen and understand.
Love is difficult. Love challenges you. It means facing your own ego all the time: the ways you don’t listen. The ways you put yourself first. The ways you stomp on other people’s feelings. What I learned in my personal journey with romance and race was that I could say I loved someone, I could have the desire to love someone, I could want more than anything for them to feel loved, but until I sat with my own ego and faced it with compassion, they would never truly feel or experience my love at all.
Sometimes us White individuals can struggle with that piece. We don’t really see why what we are doing is not enough. We tell people of color we love them. We come up with ways to say we don’t see their difference. And when they try to connect, feel listened to, or ask for more, we feel our ego is being attacked and we shut down. We don’t take the love further. I faced that issue in my relationship many times, on both sides. It takes time and practice to really love someone the best that you can. It’s a commitment. It’s a spiritual journey. People get into their spiritual journey and hear words like “compassion” and “faith” and “loving kindness” and think it’s all about good vibes and feeling nice. It’s quite the opposite. Those are some of the most challenging words I know. They’re harder than any neural network under the sun.
I don’t think people always understand survivors as well as they think they do either. It seems intuitive but until you’ve been through it or you’ve listened deeply, you can’t truly understand the depth of fearfulness, anger, and loneliness that builds inside of you.
I woke up on Thursday from a dream that these strange men came by and did this weird sort of touching hug to a friend and I in a gas station. When they went away, my friend told me to watch out, because with that hug, they had put a secret tiny camera on my back. I shook it off and felt a surge of anger and anxiety about if there were more on me. I went to seek them out around the corner. I was intending on fighting them. One man was there and gleefully up for the challenge, after a moment of surprise. He turns around and we get into this kind of cowboy-style low walk back to the gas pumps. By then, I’ve realised that I’ve made sort of a stupid mistake because he’s a man and he’s going to win. But I’ve determined to give it my all. At the pumps, he does the same movement and once again tries to put the camera on my back, reaching down to my feet. By some miracle, I grab him correctly and pull him up. I twist him and just start pounding at him non-stop with my fist and knees until he starts to get crushed and crumpled, like the bones were breaking inside of him. I couldn’t stop because I knew the minute I stopped, he’d get the upper hand again. The point of my dream attack was severe debilitation or death because the alternative was assault.
These are the things you wake up from that has you sitting with all those feelings first thing in the morning. The horrible, desperate fear. The feeling that you cannot escape, and the men are going to come back and do it again. The anger at the cruel, amused smirk on the man’s face because I came back to fight him and he knew he would win. The violence of my rage and need to protect myself. It’s a lot to deal with at 9 AM.
When I was near the end of my third year of college, I went out for a walk before I got started on my statistics assignment. Before this point in the semester, I actually had an A. I went for a walk, on a same street I always do. It was actually sort of a boujie street, always quiet. I never had an issue before of any kind. I had raging PTSD from surviving rape at this point in life. I had already been struggling to sleep, dealing with a lot of internal noise and madness, and having consistent nightmares like the ones I described. On my way back to my apartment, I saw a man standing on the street. My gut dipped. I got a bad feeling about him. I walked past him suspiciously. After I had already gotten a few paces past him, something in me told me to turn around. When I did, the man was right behind me with his lips pursed and on their way to my face. I reacted completely by instinct and shoved him away with my arm, screaming “Get the fuck away from me.” I pushed him on the street. He laughed and went about his way.
Meanwhile, what happened to me is that I went home with my mind racing. First, I was in a bit of shock and it didn’t fully hit me what to think or feel. I got to working on my statistics assignment and all the feelings hit me. I felt deeply triggered and afraid. I couldn’t sleep that night, or for the next few nights. I couldn’t get my assignment started. I didn’t even want to leave the house. I got really depressed, and then I was suicidal for a day or two. When that passed, I was behind on statistics. It was near the end of the semester. I tried and I tried but I couldn’t get myself to think about that nor any of my other classes that well. In the end, I had to get a special exception to drop out of statistics late. I just couldn’t catch up.
The worst thing about sexual violence as a woman is how likely you are to experience it again. It’s just “part of life”, or so we say. It’s embedded into how people speak to you, perceive you, and interact with you. It’s just another casual day in the life moment for people like that man. He didn’t look at me and think, maybe this young rape survivor is going to have her school year upended and her statistics grade will be ruined because of something so unnecessary and frightening that I’m going to do to entertain myself. He just did it. It’s terrifying and traumatic how you just can’t get away, no matter how hypervigilant you are.
Sometimes I think back to the girls I knew in high school and wonder how many of them came to know my same pain or even knew it before I did. I already know quite a few I can think of off the top of my head and those are just the girls I knew well. The sad part about my story is that it’s in no way special, regardless of how intense or painful it feels to me. It’s a statistical reality, like a factory line stamping us with no discernment or feeling as we walk through life. 1 in 4 women will be victims of sexual assault past 18, that’s the one we hear often. And here’s one we don’t hear as much: 1 in 5 Black women will be victims of rape at some point in their lifetime. That’s not just “typical” assault, like that attempted kiss on the street. That’s capital R rape. 1 in 4 Black girls will be sexually abused before the age of 18. 40-60% of Black women report being subjected to coercive sexual contact by age 18. Think of that weight. Think of that anger and fearfulness. Can’t “color-blind” our ways out of that one, can we?
On Thursday, I played with my model and tested my maybe mistake, maybe discovery. From the bottom of my heart, I’m not sure yet.
It’s been hard navigating this with minimal instruction. A lot of things in life right now — science, YouTube, writing — I’m just doing by pure feeling. It’s been an act of faith. I don’t know where it will lead yet.
As this project has started to feel more real and I’ve produced more numbers, I’ve really been sitting with the fact that what I did might have a tangible impact on somebody else’s treatment journey with their memory issues. I hope it can provide a more specific mechanism for disorders like Lewy body dementia with time and more research, if this is a relevant and useful finding. I’ve been smiling at the concept of someone getting their dad or grandma back one day.
Sometimes I feel funny talking about this project. If anybody could actually understand the level of mental pain i was in from this illness, they would see where I get this motivation from. It was like getting a thousand paper cuts all over my brain and body all the time. It’s not something I feel like I can even translate. It was like my experience was being constantly stuck through a paper shredder. My stress was that bad. It still feels like that sometimes. Like im driving down an extremely rocky road in a small, beat up car. It was not a life. It was a prison cell I could not be forced to stay in forever. I needed anything.
Sometimes I think being smart made it worse. Imagine being so smart you can learn two new subjects alone im a year and feeling like nothing you say is being believed. It was hell. I understood my mind and body intimately. I knew there had to be a way out that no one else had the urgency and intentionality to find. Imagine being in a desert dehydrated and someone pulls out a giant block of ice in a cooler to help you out. They’re just letting it drip drop by drop into a little cup while you’re standing there on fire. Sometimes they even close the cooler and tell you they’re not sure if water is what you really need right now based on their calculations and maybe you’re not really thirsty. Maybe it’s all psychological. It would be a waste spending time melting the ice cube for nothing when we’re not sure thirst is real. The people who haven’t walked through the desert aren’t thirsty so why would you be? That’s how I felt. I don’t need research in 15 years. I need it today. I need it right now.
I’ve often reflected on how the deepest spiritual journey is also a political journey and vice versa. All oppressions exist because of ego - wanting to put yourself first. Feel better than other people. Exert power over other people.
You hit a point in your spiritual journey when you realize that we are all interconnected and the struggle of others is something you have to tackle together if you want to take your journey all the way. You hit a point of mastery over your personal suffering and realize there is still a lot more left to go. If not, you’re on a selfish spiritual journey that goes against any type of religious text out there. Many spiritual “leaders” will try to sell you that your spiritual journey can make you a millionaire who can throw crystals on their forehead to feel relaxed and call it a day. You can ignore anyone’s struggling by saying you’re trying to “find your zen” and “protect your peace” and live in total isolation with the fruits of your labor. I’m sorry to break it to you, but that’s not a spiritual journey. That is a consumerism journey and interpersonal laziness. Spiritual journeys are hard and full of learning and parts of you to unpack. You do hit everyone else if not instantly, then at some point in time.
And you reach a point in your political journey when you realise that you won’t get any further without confronting yourself because the issue lies in you. It lies in your illusions about the world and the way you treat other people. Thats the root of oppression. I let my own oppression as a woman continue because I was disempowered. I didn’t see myself as worth listening to. I believed stories about what womanhood was. I learned this from Thich Nhat Hanh. I also learned this from Paulo Freire. I also learned this from Audre Lorde.
And I let the oppression of Black people in America persist because I put my ego first. Siddhatrhw Gautama told me that. Jesus told me that. Martin Luther King Jr. taught me that. And everyday people, just as worthy of being listened to as any author, told me that all the time. They’re the same journey in one.
I would rather be comfortable than listen and learn.
I used to wonder why a monk did more than a rich philanthropist when he just sat in a cave all day. I thought, just because one person changes, how fast will that reallt get anything done? Better to spend money and faster. I learned as I got older. I can’t change the behaviour of every white person in America. But if I’m aware, then I have the responsibility to be one less source of suffering the world. Buddhism impacted me profoundly. To me it wasn’t just “one more person”. To me it was my survival for the rest of life. Thats already a lot. I underestimated what “one person” meant in the grand scheme of things. Thats an entire universe. Thats one person free when there would have been none before. I saw this video of Malcolm X last week:
Going all the way at down into your soul is the only way to pull that knife out. You have to uproot it from the deepest place available to you.
I also learned that navigating my own oppression like it was mine alone was ego too. I could work my hardest as a white woman to make a society without rape. But until I listened to Black women and why their rape was happening, or listened to Middle Eastern women and why their rape was happening, I would never eradicate rape. I would pretend it stopped existing, like pretending your room is clean because you stuffed the dirty clothes in the closet. It’s not gone. You just can’t see it.
I could try to fight the justice system alone but why would I do that when other groups could work with me and struggle with me? Robert Hadden got 20 years in prison for over 500 sexual abuses (and would have probably gotten more if Columbia had done what they need to do). Donald Trump is a known pedophile and he is president of the country. Meanwhile, there are Black men in jail right now for the same amount of time or more for smoking weed, one assault and battery charge, or theft. If the justice system is not for me, and it’s not for you, seems we have a mutual enemy. Nondiscrimination, right? Your problems affect me and my problems affect you. The root of your suffering is the root of my suffering.
The police are extensively violent to African Americans. They also victim shame women and throw out their cases every single day. I can’t tackle my issue as best as I can without tackling yours too. It would be dishonest and ineffective.
I spent the rest of the weekend pulling the numbers from my pattern separation experiment. I’m getting ready to visit my mom in Rio de Janeiro in less than 2 weeks so I want to have my numbers ready to analyze.
I read about synaptic pruning recently, which is where your brain starts trimming unused connections to save space and energy. It filled me with a bit of existential dread and has been circling my brain. I don’t want to let go of any old part of me. I don’t want it to feel any less alive or important or special. I was noticing that effect at work on Monday night though. I was listening to one of my favorite bands from high school and to this day, Tokyo Police Club.
It brings back so many memories of Richmond, my hometown. Walks in my old neighborhood. Drives in the car. College and best friends I don’t speak to anymore. And it didn’t feel alive anymore. It felt like a stagnant and slightly unfamiliar picture that I loved deeply.
Some people stay in their hometown their whole life surrounded by roughly the same things. But in the last 5 years, I’ve had to slowly let go of everything familiar. My parents separated. My dad remarried. My mom moved to Brazil. We sold our childhood home. I went on a crazy, whirlwind trip to London, where I’ve lived for almost 3 years now. I’m a freaking neuroscientist??? What??? I think a lot of pruning has gone on in recent years. There’s a lot that’s just not very relevant to my life anymore. I went through a deep, intense transformation in every element of who I was, down to some really interesting places. It’s exciting but a little grief inducing. There’s a lot of parts of me that just aren’t really alive anymore and probably won’t ever be again in the same way. I miss them a lot. But I feel excited by who I am right now.
I don’t really know exactly who I am right now. I feel a little bit soft and in formation, like the top of a newborn baby’s head. It’s hard to know what to feel about it. I need new music. I don’t want new music. I love my old music differently now. I never want to forget how it felt to love it how I used to.
I’ve been watching this specific video since middle school :’)
There’s a phrase in Buddhism that I remind myself of every time I’m wondering why life feels so dark: “No mud, no lotus”. Lotus flowers are the symbol of enlightenment. They grow in the dense mud.
The Buddha didn’t reach enlightenment by being sheltered. He reached it by opening to his eyes to the dark suffering and corruption in the world around him.
Right now has been one of the muddiest times in recent history. Palestinian children are being brutally executed every single day by one of the most egotistical movements I have ever seen. We might have our first trillionaire soon, and he intentionally rigged our recent election in his favor. The Epstein files revealed the depth of corruption happening under the surface of our government — sexual abuse, torture, and pedophilia. Being a survivor in this political climate made a lotus of my life. I had to go deep into my inner mud until life turned fruitful.
All around me, I see people waking up to what has never been so obvious, which is that this system is not made for us. Luckily, this mud is the perfect condition to bloom a big field of lotus flowers. It’s time for many more of us to go inside and battle the root of oppression from the inside out. We often get stuck trying to heal cycles on the surface. But oppression begins within us and freeing ourselves and others in our minds first reflects in the outside world. I started seeing myself as someone worthy of being believed. Someone valuable. Someone intelligent. I saw myself as worthy of being protected, despite what the government said. And what emerged from me was science that freed me with the deepest essence of truth. I hope it will free more survivors one day.
I want to see a world filled with lotus flowers in the midst of this mud.
