Originally published by Writing Co-Lab
My husband, Quincy, and my favorite horror movie is not a horror movie. It’s 2023’s Past Lives – that movie where a married playwright’s childhood love comes back as a hot-as-hell man later in life. “It’s my worst nightmare,” Q says.
The movie in itself is revolutionary – the usual American framework is flipped where the hot guy is not her white husband but this Korean man. And they stare at each other longingly while walking through scenic New York spots reminiscing about what once was. I assure my husband there is no hot Asian man in my past to come back, but whenever the movie is on he is like, “ak!”
This year we had a different kind of visitor from a past life – my mania returned. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in my twenties and that decade subsequently became consumed by four hospitalizations, a lot of meds, and trying to figure out care. It was a different time. Back then I felt like I was in the shadows trying to cope. At 29, by the time I met Q, I was mostly back on my feet. A few years later, I wrote about the mental hospital I went to two years before I met him – “my last hospital.” I approached bipolar disorder as something I had outgrown.
Its return made me realize among many things it’s a false narrative not only to make my mental health experiences “a thing of the past,” but to assign time to them at all. A couple well-meaning people have given me advice like do this or do that so that there is no “next time.”
Instead of doing this or that, I’ve realized the best measure to take now is just to live. Even that is a luxury afforded to the few.
A few days after the first Trump inauguration, I went to an event at The Strand. My friend from grad school Tenzin Dickie was launching her anthology Old Demons, New Deities – the first English language anthology of Tibetian fiction. During the Q &A someone rose up, I think the first to raise a hand, and tabled any discussion of the book simply asking for advice for “what we should do now?” I couldn’t imagine having to field these questions simply because you are… Tibetian. “Remember history,” Dickie simply said. I was struck by the simplicity of the phrase. And how this might have been an impossible answer for the question-asker.
For the next few months, as Q and I watched the improbable become reality time and again, as we marched in protests and attended demonstrations, as we signed letters and postcards and petitions to our representatives, as months turned into years, I always tucked away what Dickie said, “remember history.” Now more than ever, it seems important.
Remember history I think as I pass by the well-kept Columbia University lawn. Where the Gaza solidarity encampment once was and then forcibly removed. Its perfect green and green and green feeling like erasure. Landscape befitting Trump’s threat to deport student protestors.
Remember history as my friend loses her job, working in a DEI department for a company that so proudly stated a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion four short years ago.
Remember history as a co-worker is fired for teaching it.
Remember history as the DOE announces it will no longer investigate charges that banning books by schools and libraries violate civil rights laws.
Remember history as public health data disappears from websites as Trump rolls back protections of transgender people.
Remember history as a victim of the Eaton fire, Kimberley Kelley, put it in a CBS News interview, “My biggest fear is not gentrification but colonization.”
Remember history as forty-six Democrats from the House and 12 from the Senate joined their Republican colleagues to vote in favor of imprisoning undocumented immigrants at the Guantánamo Naval Base.
Remember history as going on two administrations deny Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
Now recovered from my mania, I find myself sometimes idealizing the past, that middle period of my 30s where I met and fell in love with Quincy and lowered my meds and had not a single manic episode. This time is also marked by Trump and Covid and all the chaos that ensues from the election of a narcissist who runs the country like an episode of reality TV. Idealizing it is an erasure unto itself. A too-perfect past. A past without memory really. That’s the scariest thing.
Writing activity
Write down 3 memories. A few short sentences each. This time this…
Pick one and:
1-Free write about it
2- Write on the same memory, but rewrite it using a constraint: “I’m going to write in questions” or “I’m going to write about the meal we always cooked together” or “I’m just writing the relationship by describing this room in the house”
See what happens to that memory when you shift from 1 to 2 – sometimes when giving a memory a space of play, we conjure more of it.