Tiya's open letter
Dear Mental Health,
“Fuck you. You’re stupid. You’re crazy. You’re a horrible person. You are hated. You are pointless. You don’t know what you are doing. You are not who you think you are. You are not trustworthy. You are not deserving. You can’t do anything. Lost cause. Black heart. Too bad, ur bad. You are a coward. You are weak. You would not be missed. I wish you didn’t exist.” - my brain to myself
“I WISH U DIDN’T EXIST”, now my latest single, was just a phrase I had written in my notebook last year. I didn’t know what it meant to me at the time. Who did I wish didn’t exist? I’m not a hateful person, it left my brain pondering. I would never wish that upon anyone. After sitting with those words for weeks, I finally sat down with my guitar and wrote them into a song. Deceivingly about a toxic romantic relationship, I still couldn’t quite figure out what it meant to me. Only later would I realize, the toxic relationship I was fictionally narrating was not fictional at all. It was about my relationship with myself. Maybe, I wish I didn’t exist. I had detached and gently personified these feelings of self-hatred into a lyric that my head was not ready to come to terms with yet. I am still contemplating the reasons why I feel this way sometimes so, I am appreciative of your patience as I attempt to explain my conclusion thus far.
Anxiety has been a term I’ve known for a long time but not until recently did I start to dissect what it meant to me and my own mental health. I used to think to myself, “I cope”, “I’m mental healthy”, “I don’t have any mental health issues”, “Look at me, high functioning”, deeply denying and repressing feelings that hurt too much to admit. Once I admitted to myself that I was not okay, I would fall apart. If I didn’t acknowledge my hurt, my trauma, it would simply not exist. The flood gates came pouring open in 2020, like many others, and everything I thought I knew about myself and my life unraveled into a pile of sickeningly colored rainbow puzzle pieces I had no idea how to put back together (or even what the picture was in the first place). Through isolation, I was forced to start to reconcile with these feelings I had locked away. The otherness I felt being the only black kid in my class at school growing up, not to mention the complexities of being a modest middle class, white passing black-mixed kid in an extremely affluent, predominantly white neighborhood. The underlying body image issues developed over years of professional dance training programs through my teens. Standing in front of a mirror for six hours a day, all the girls skinny, not a kink in their hair, and white. The confusion around the fluidity I feel in my queerness and gender identity. The online ridicule through years of sharing my art, my heart on my sleeve, only to be brought to tears by trolls. I didn’t realize how broken I felt until I was lying in these pieces. In the haze of it all, I wrote three songs.
“Chamomile Tea”, a song about my anxiety. Trying desperately to hold myself together in the name of helping the others in my life that deal with mental health issues. “Hydrogen Peroxide”, another song in the guise of a break-up ballad, about missing a version of myself I used to genuinely love. Finally, “I WISH U DIDN’T EXIST”. I speak about two versions of myself that “I wish didn’t exist” in the song. The first is the dictator. The phrase “bad self-talk” feels oversimplified. More like a never-ending inner monologue playing on repeat of the hauntingly cold phrases I exemplified at the top of this page. The second version of myself is my potential. The potential (completely unattainable) perfect, ideal version of myself. The impossible standard I hold myself to whether that be fueled by the beauty industry, commercial success, a yearning for conventionalism, not being so obsessive or awkward, or social media comparison culture.
I used to be convinced I loved myself. I think I love myself how you might love a first romantic partner. When you fall in love with that first person who happens to treat you like shit but you justify it because “you’re in love” and don’t know any better. You have nothing to compare it to so, you don’t even realize you are being treated poorly. I’ve only ever been myself. How was I supposed to know that it is unhealthy, not normal that my inner monologue treats me like garbage. Accosting my self-worth at any moment my energy is too weak to combat it. Years of rejection, reviews, external opinions, comparisons, corrections of my body, my skin tone, my artistic ability, my creativity, my talent, my femininity, my soul, all seeping into my subconscious. These critiques, both positive and negative, have contorted themselves in the depths of my psyche. Unconsciously developing into a monster that is far worse than any twisted thing I could imagine being under my bed as a kid. She’s gorgeous, super human, an angel from the outside and she despises my short comings with the fire of a thousand hells. She gets very loud. Screaming at me from the inside until I can feel the panic attack arising. My head throbs in excruciatingly lethargic pulses. My chest clenches. I suddenly can’t breathe (she mocks me for that as well, “Why don’t you just breathe like a normal person, you idiot?!”) The world begins to spin around me. Vision blurred. Noise jumbled. My shoulders glued to my ears. I try to form words. Ask for help. Explain to whoever happens to be around me at the time that I am not okay. I would say my tongue ties itself in knots but it’s more like it just forgets how to even create words, let alone sentences. I feel the urge to run. Run far away, as to not overstimulate myself further. To not embarrass myself, especially if I’m in public.
Even as I write this now, I feel frivolous. Why am I divulging the parts I most despise in myself publicly? Nobody could ever feel like I do. No one will relate to this. I am alone. Isolated. Lonely she says. You, reading this while sipping coffee on your sofa or scrolling before bed, are judging me as harshly as I judge myself. That is a frightening thought. Why expose myself like this when it hurts? What right do I have to speak on this topic? I consciously seek to remind myself, no matter what your trauma is, it is a trauma. You are valid in your emotions. You are important. We need to continue this conversation and tear down stigmas and barriers that make us feel like we can’t heal together. I guess that might be the point. Although it is painful to share these things, I sit here typing tearing my heart open, black blood pouring out so that these feelings might live and breathe outside of me for a moment. Let them live with less power through these words. Maybe seeing them as just that, mere words, might help you recognize that you’re not alone. I imagine TIYAWORLD being a place where we can share and dump all our shit, anything we are struggling with, in a huge pile. Then light it up, play some music, and dance around it as it burns. In the golden red flames that spark, I can see my pain in flashes of living color. The ashes still smudged against my skin; a proud scar, an invitation of solidarity to anyone who feels the same way. Existing together is better than existing alone, or the most tragic of all, to cease.
-Tiya