I have to say, I am fucking angry at the state of the world.
People of plenty, why are you polluting the oceans, consuming resources like crazy, acting as if you own the shit you were lucky enough to be born to? Why do you take what is not yours, produce as if your value is tied to your company’s stock price, exploit people and nature? You are not special. Think for your fucking self, don’t fuel this shitty economy of haves and have-nots, don’t make your family richer at the expense of ruining the earth for everyone. Where is your compassion, your deep looking, your energy? Look outside of yourself for just a moment, see how the shit you’re producing only fuels more greed, separation, and hatred. What the fuck do you think you’re living for? A bigger house and the illusion of happiness? Fight! For true independence, aliveness, freedom. Take care of the earth, take care of each other, stop thinking you’re special because you were born to money or power or whiteness. I don’t give a fuck about what makes you special, why you “deserve” what you have, how you white person didn’t “grow up in privilege”, how you “worked for everything you have”. You didn’t, I don’t believe it, and I hate you for clinging to the story that helps you sleep at night. How can you sleep well when outside your house people are huddled in tents? How can you sleep at all when the police walk by in early morning to issue citations to the homeless, the very people who fought in our pointless wars, who taught your children? What the fuck, people of privilege? I am ashamed to look at you, for in you I see my own ignorance and resistance. I hate you. I hate myself.
People in poverty, why are you acting like victims, like it's the duty of the rich to pull you up and provide for you? Who the fuck do you think you are, to dwell in historic wrongs to explain why you are still poor, still in debt, still living the life of a slave? Why do you blame others for the shitty life you have? Stand the fuck up and fight for your life to be better than it is. Stop throwing garbage outside your front door. Stop using drugs to avoid your own sorrow. Stop electing politicians who don’t give a fuck about you. Fight back, use weapons that are not laughable rockets shot from tiny launchers. Fight back with full power, show that you are worthy of being taken seriously. Why the fuck do you continue to play the role of loser? I hate you. I hate what you are doing to your children, telling them that you are refugees even though you’ve lived in the same fucking house all of your life. No, you’re not a fucking refugee, you are a people so in love with your own story of victimization that you refuse to stand up, because to stand up is to destroy the image you have of your ancestors as strong, it is to stop blaming others for your own misery. You are fucking responsible for your own life. Stand up! Step away from the shadow of victimhood and fight for what you truly want. I have no more pity for you, I refuse to give you money or time for free. Somebody needs to tell you to pay for your fucking electricity and rice, the UN needs to stop giving you handouts so you starve until you fight back.
You too, Daniel, dear brother. Our parents should stop giving you money so that you can face your own shame. Stand the fuck up, stop using your excuses of anxiety to explain why, in six years, you haven’t had the balls to apply for and get one job, not one our father gave you but one you fought for yourself. You’re going to three therapy appointments per week, taking anti-anxiety medication, letting it be okay that after graduating from college you’ve sat at home playing video games. Stop talking in therapy about your life and start living! What the fuck!
Dear Melanie, what are you afraid of? You want to fuck two men, why the fuck not? Don’t lie to them or to yourself, and don’t turn away from stepping into power, from demanding what it is you want. Don’t turn away from vulnerability and cower down like a receiver waiting for the other to approach. No, step into who you are. You are a predator, out for the hunt, ready to tear things apart, people and structures and hearts. A lioness hunting, moving with the awareness of her grace, the power in her limbs, the love of the chase. Fucking choose to be vulnerable, to not know, to risk being alone instead of half-alive. Date John if you want, if safety and settling is a condition for happiness. But don’t deny your hunger for being taken, panting with the heat of being ravished by the strength of the other. To be with another person free from obligation and burden, to be wildly free to explore places, ideas, build projects, companies, to actualize dreams. To have another person not just on the ground or at home cheering, but to have them in the fight alongside you, bringing fire and life. Don’t deny the yearning for this possibility too, in your vagina, in your hips, sweeping through your entire body. Safety without risk is not enough for this body. My body needs exchange of fire, meeting power with power, anger and resistance and fight, chaos and destruction. Fuck everything being perfect and happy. My life needs sex, play, wordplay, foreplay, destructive play. My body and life is grounds for experimentation.
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I hate you Leo. I hate your smug certainty that you know what is best, that you can challenge and throw away hundreds of years of Buddhist study, that you show such disrespect for Thich Nhat Hanh and for the fucking practice. If you disagree with it so much, why do you claim it on your fucking website like a prize for the fallen who have come to you. What the fuck does it mean to be serving people “who are not done”? I hate your fucking exceptionalism and how you pretend that you don’t have to take care of the earth, of other people, that your own fucking goodwill will magically do the work. That’s a fucking veil of ignorance that you willingly step into to justify your consumerist behaviors based in your own greed, you can’t tell yourself no to stop fucking with other people, taking more than you need. You and people like you are the reason the world is going to shit. Yes sure, the earth will still be around when I’m gone. When the rest of humanity is gone too, the earth will renew, will fucking celebrate to not have the burden of humankind left to contend with. We don’t take what we need, we take what we want without consideration for what’s left for others. That is completely fucked up. I hate having to step into these sessions and try out your stupid experiments, I have no clue if you’ve done this before. Did you just come up with this theory on hate at home as a balm to healing your own life? Have you gone to your father to tell him how he’s fucked with you? Or your mom? What about your family? What about your co-founders at Buffer? I do not want to be your little experiment, this is my fucking life. You better know what the fuck you’re doing. You got so lucky with your consumer tech company, so lucky that you’re now sitting in Austria “never having to work again”. Fuck you. I wish you were poor and without anything to try if this bullshit philosophy works for you. I wish you were homeless so you could really tell me that you still wanted to live on the street. Really, truly, not just the story that people of privilege tell themselves to get on with their day. If I was homeless, I would fucking loathe it. I would fight to the bone using everything I had to get myself off of the street. And then the police would arrest me or someone would steal my things, or rape me, or spit on me, and slowly break my spirit. Maybe then I’d just sit there like a person who’s lost their soul waiting for the conditions that created their state to save them. Maybe I’d think it was enough.
And while we’re at it, I hate these percentages too. Who are you to tell me I’m 80-90% there? You’re 80-90% there. The other 10-20% is love and balance and not taking more than you need. I wish I could step into your apartment with a bat and break everything. Break the windows, throw everything onto the floor, throw your furniture onto the street. Your fucking blog talks about watching 3d porn, online videos, not wanting to offer any meditation. Who the fuck do you think you are? It’s captivating and honest and real, and touches me more than any of this other crap these days. Fuck you for touching my heart and making me question this shit life. Fuck you.
Fuck you for fighting back, for saying no to my request to take a one month break, fuck you for continuing to say bullshit stories about me being your best most powerful client. Stop trying for a second to “collect” me or save me or unleash my power, why the fuck did I ever trust a man-child to coach me into the next decade of my life? You know what you are, Leo, you like to play and experiment with others to see your own intuition. You get off on the vulnerability of other people, you like having your billionaire clients so you can tell me about them, you write in your emails of your “successful tech founder” clients who are “just normal people” struggling with the same things everyone else is. Why the fuck are you always selling? It disgusts me. I hate you, I hate your pride, your arrogance, the way that others seem to like it, I hate you. And you scare the shit out of me. I want to fight you and then when I destroy everything, to have you fucking submit to me and do exactly what I want.
You want me to start enjoying this hate, Leo? Okay, I’m enjoying now, you’ve gotten my attention, I’m actually super turned on by this hate. There’s energy and aliveness here, I just want to destroy everything.
I’ve seen people like you in the bdsm dungeons, turned on by taking whatever they want. You take people because you can. Because they’re drawn to your power. You know what? I don’t give a fuck about who you are, what you’ve done, where you live, what you study. I wish I could light your car on fire and send it into the danube. Can you stop thinking with your pride, your dick, your ego, can you start living with more consideration, compassion? Who the fuck are you? Were you simply pretending for the last six months to be someone else? I’m glad you’ve fucking removed whatever layer was preventing this real shit, what the fuck was that? Was that you that created the golden corner in your apartment? Was that you that declared to me my own capability of being loved? I hate your fucking faces, what’s real, what’s not. I just want to hit you until you break, until you do exactly as I say. Because this is dangerous, unsafe, the path of harm, walking on fire, like cutting myself with broken glass. Fuck you for taking me here. Fuck you for unleashing this rampage inside of me. This is not going to be the same, I’m not going to take your fucking shit anymore or idolize you. No, you’re just a fucking normal human with no superpowers lost and fucking confused. I do not give a shit about who you think you are.
You are nothing like Thich Nhat Hanh. You should go back to the monastery and fucking practice this time, instead of letting your ego drive you into criticizing everything. You think it’s not working for the monastics? You suddenly have some certainty that you’re right and they’re wrong? Thay came of age during the Vietnam War when people from my country destroyed and raped people that look like me. One or two of his students lit themselves on fire in nonviolent protest in the streets. Thay rescued boat people, forgave sea pirates, started a school for social service, rebuilt villages month after month even as the Americans terrorized and bombed the countryside. That war is emblematic of everything that fucking sucks about colonialism and privilege, you grow up thinking that you’re somehow better than the natives in Vietnam, and then you think you have a right to their land and their people. Thay survived that and created this beautiful community of peace, in the face of exile, war, white terrorism. They call white terrorism “defending democracy”. What the fuck is that? So who the fuck do you think you are? You came of age as a what, 18 or 19 year old starting your first company in Silicon Valley? You created a company to send tweets tomorrow. What the fuck is that. Who cares. What gives you the right to question Thay? The way out is through, if there is anything left after I destroy everything. I burn the farmer’s crops, kill the people, rape the women, what’s left?
Even better, I burn the crops, kill the people, rape the men, take their guns. I storm wall street and kill everyone inside the stock exchange. Fuck facebook, fuck twitter, fuck ipos that mint billionaires and exploit people. Fuck a society that runs on venture capital money, on borrowing money you don’t have to build something that makes me sick, fuck the bubble of engineers working on the next big app to save me. Fuck inflated egos that run on inflated salaries, fuck the finance bros who get off on lbos or dcfs or whatever the fuck model they’re running to tell them to buy, fuck the power structure that reinforces the disparity between rich and poor, fuck my private equity boss strategizing on how to become more rich, fuck private schools, fuck the way that money drives everything. Fuck the oakland school district which spends $500 more per student in white areas than black ones. Fuck the people making those decisions who get to sleep every night thinking they’re doing a remotely good job. Fuck the whole system that makes what I do so fucking valued, fuck engineers who think that because they can setup a server or put a website online they can destroy neighborhoods. Why the fuck do we need you facebook? What good are you actually doing?
I want to destroy all of the oil in the world so that the oil barons are shitting in their pants. I want to take down the economies of saudi arabia, iran, kuwait, destroy wealth created by exploiting the earth. You know why the trees don’t fight, Leo? Because they don’t fight. They are fucking planted in the earth, there is no way for them to avoid the brutality of the human hand. Your argument is complete bullshit. We are polluting the water, driving climate change with transcontinental flights, extraction, eating whatever the fuck we want. You don’t want me to fight for the earth? Maybe in Austria your house won’t flood due to the rising of the ocean, maybe your money will be safe, maybe you’ll get to keep fucking your 3 girlfriends and drive your lamborgini, but you live in a fucking bubble, because that’s not going to happen for everyone. Wake the fuck up.
You want me to get mad? Yes now I’m fucking mad. I want to destroy you and everything you stand for, I want to destroy people like you. You all need to wake up to the reality that you are benefiting from existing structures of racism, colonialism, extraction, you need to wake up to the fact that you were born a cis hetero white man in a country of privilege, that this privilege gives you a fucking responsibility. And all you’re doing is coaching other people of privilege on how to make more money, be more powerful. Who the fuck is going to care? Why does it matter? You could do anything and this is it. What the fuck.
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To my dear friend Lisa. You are the most fragile self-centered person I know and you use me and other people with compassion to stroke your own ego, to protect yourself from facing the fear that your family doesn’t love you, you don’t belong there. Grow the fuck up and deal with your own shit rather than identifying with the palestinians across the border who really have lost things. You’re living in Ein Karem in the middle of paradise, huddled up with the trees, crying that you are lost, that your school is taking advantage of you, that your company is becoming obsolete. Take responsibility for yourself, stop masterbating to the idea of “saving” Palestinians. Do you practice? You pretend that you’re peaceful, you initiate peace circles with Israeli and Palestinian women, you go to sulha, you do the right things. But I’ve seen your rage unbridled lash out at me, fuck you for placing the burden of your sorrow on me, fuck you for your anger, for your helplessness. I hate that you have made Palestinians living in refugee camps your family. Go live there in their misery if that’s what you want, but you know what, I think you get off on the fact that you get to go home to a beautiful loft nested in the forest, I think you like the power imbalance, the fact that they keep seeing you because you bring their money, gifts, offers of jobs. You enable their victimhood and they feed your ego, which you can’t take care of by yourself because you can’t face the fact that you don’t belong to your fucking family. What the fuck. I am not spending another second listening to your stories about our adventures through Paris and Plum Village twice, I’m not pretending that I give a fuck about michel and pascale in france, no. I remember those times and they are not the joyful memories you think they are. You yelled at me in red candle hall or whatever the fuck it’s called, ignored me for days, refused to include me, your fucking hostility scared the shit out of me, and I don’t even like going to plum village with you anymore. What the fuck, why can’t you be quiet during quiet hours, why can’t you stop going to wake up events, you’re fucking sixty years old, you don’t get to go to wake up. You are not a young person. You take up space in a place not designed for you. You are nothing. Grow the fuck up, inhabit the adult world, and stop clinging to the victimhood of others to make yourself feel better. You are pathetic and I hate you.
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To Scott, the first man I truly loved and wanted to fuck most of the time. I fucking hate you. I wish you would have told me when we started dating that you were a complete pussy at heart and wouldn’t fight me, that you would back down from difficulty when I needed you to stand up and step into discomfort. I wish I would have known how much you would run away when things got challenging before we fell in love. I spent the next two years of my life wondering if I would ever love anybody again. You broke me. You loved me and accepted me, you accepted that I wanted to break up with you, you were fine with me fucking other people, you stood up like a man then, you were fine with me dating women, fucking men at play parties, you never pushed back. When I came into your bed at 1am you were always there waiting to be fucked. And then I asked you to start looking more into your own fucking white male privilege, I asked you why your engineering team had no women, why a woman was your office manager. You begged off saying that you tried to hire one woman but she went to Google instead. You fucked me as a release from the stress of your company, you used me to be more productive at work. That is so fucked up, I hate you for using our time together as a burst of light, of rest that helped you be even more ruthless in your job, that’s fucking stupid and childish. When Trump got elected and I was devastated, you didn’t call. You were dealing with some trivial bullshit at your company with your investors and said that I should have understood that you were busy too. No, you don’t get a free pass to ignore my suffering because your company needed you. I don’t give a fuck about your company or how much money it’s worth or how much money you’re making, where your office is located, who your investors are, how high your IQ is. I can’t believe I entered a fantasy world where I saw you as someone who could meet me, who could enter suffering and face it without turning away, who could immerse in darkness as much as he could inhabit light. You suffocated me in your need for our happiness. Fuck you. And on that note I don’t buy your story about you being manic-depressive, I don’t think it’s true, you were always manic. Always on a high, always wanting more. You never let yourself touch the depressive, it was too scary for you, you were always running away from the darkness. You couldn’t meet me in mine because you were too much of a fucking coward. I hate you.
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And to John, the man that I’m talking to now, who I’m interested in fucking if we ever leave this quarantine. John, the most gentle, calm person I’ve met in a while. What the fuck? Why are you so fucking boring? You turned away an offer to work in Tokyo for two years knowing you’re interested in exploring because your employer gave you a raise, probably more stock options, an opportunity to co-author a prestigious paper. What the fuck, I wonder if you have the balls to fuck me or if you’re just going to do exactly what I want when I ask. I wonder if I’m going to have to tell you how to fuck or if I’m going to be too bored by the time it’s done that I will never want to return. I know there’s something there, some depression of the past or some darkness you won’t speak to, I know it because I feel it waiting on the side, in your silence, in your selfish listening. Turn to it, touch it, befriend it, because there is no way you can meet me in my wild abandon if you haven’t even learned to be in your own darkness. I am too fucking much for you, are you man enough to step up to fight me? I dread imagining a future together because I see the waste that is dating another engineer, this time not a genius but a phd, twiddling our fingers over intellectual bullshit while there is shit to do. I dread going home to Sunnyvale or Mountain View or whatever city is closest to the lab, dulling my emotions and adventure for safety and certainty. Fuck that. Stand the fuck up, step out from the ego stroking and security that is your job, imagine something new, and come join me. Otherwise you’re just going to be licking my clit the whole time we’re together. Fuck you.
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And on that note Leo, what do you know about love? Planting trees with my father is one of the most healing things I’ve done, excepting this long rant of anger and hate. It’s comfortable and safe, I finally see my dad able to initiate conversations with me, he can knock on my bedroom door to ask if I want dinner, he can ask me questions about visiting my grandparents. Sure he’s a fucking pansy who meets his pain and emotional distress with silence, that’s how he’s been cultured and taught, it’s his own form of strength, to grin and bear it in silence. I don’t agree with it, I hate the silence, I hate knowing that leaving Pleasanton is severing ties with my father while I’m away, I hate that the silence holds blame, blame that I am somehow destroying the relationship. I hate that my mother has a running thread with the three of us but that he never messages or acknowledges what he receives on it, he gets to enjoy the comfort of knowing I’m safe but never gives me the safety of his response. It’s incredibly selfish and fucked up. But I also don’t want to rupture this tiny tree of trust that is just developing roots. Leo, are you so fucked up that you want me to destroy this tiny beautiful thing?
To my dad. Yes, I am angry with you, dad, I hate that you hide behind mom as your emotional protection, that you use her to communicate with me because you find it too painful. I hate that you love your mom more than you love nana and grandpa (mom’s parents), I hate that you complain about their dogs and my uncle and yet still give them thousands of dollars a year to get by. I hate that you think the best solution to the unspoken problems in our family is silence, that you can will away the problems by not showing up for them. I hate that you’re letting mom deal with the challenge of her parents, that you’re not going to do the backbreaking work of getting my uncle into his wheelchair for dialysis three times per week. I don’t give a fuck if it’s disgusting or you hate Uncle Eric. How could you let my tiny fragile mother do the lifting of a 300-pound man? What the fuck, dad? You hide behind your money to give you power, you feel like you’re doing enough by forgiving rent from folks living in your San Francisco apartments if they “ask you nicely enough”, you get off on the power you have to decide if people continue to have a place to live. That’s fucked up.
I hate that you enable Daniel to live at your house without addressing the root causes of his anxiety with him, I hate that you leave the job to therapists and anxiety meds, why the fuck don’t you stop enabling him? You’ve written in your 2017 letter that you feel bad when you consider that you’re an enabler, and that you don’t know what to do to help. Okay, I understand that, but fuck the guilt trip you tried to place on me when I said I was done trying to help, that Daniel needs to stand up on his own. You say that you will never stop trying to help him. I am helping him by not helping, he needs to grow a pair and step into the world without you dragging him. You gave him $200k to do what? Now when I speak to him he sees that money as his own. He spends your money to buy takeout, get boba, talk to girls, buy computers, play video games, do nothing. He needs to be broken, not rescued with money. Because when you’re broken you finally can stand the fuck up. But here you are, continuing to stand by in silence hoping that someone other than you will solve this problem. You shower daniel with whatever the opposite of silence is. Fine, but don’t tell me that you’re not playing favorites. That’s a fucking lie. You deal with my brother by papering over his shit with money, by pretending that it’s okay he doesn’t have a job or any direction at age 28, you deal with my ambition and wildness with silence. That is completely and utterly fucked, and I hate you for doing it. Honestly, I’m so fucking tired of your cowardice. You're his dad. Your fucking job is to teach him to stand the fuck up. Fuck unconditional love, no this is about helping a grown child step into the shoes of a man. Would your dad have let you laze around at home playing video games and hiding in a virtual world? No, your dad made you work for free at a fucking liquor store so that you could grow a fucking pair of balls and find your way in the world. You grew up, dad, you grew up angry to take what the world had, you stepped into power, you worked for yourself, you’re a fucking hero. Yay for you to break free of the poverty of new Chinese immigrants, yay for you to own property in San Francisco, yay for your mental math skills and dominance in the options market. Thanks to you I got to grow up in fucking abundance, you didn’t let me get a paying job in high school, you wanted to bear all the sacrifice so I could play in the fucking bubble of privilege. Fuck this bubble, I’m tired of seeing the world as one big happy family, that is not true, and I have woken the fuck up.
You told me once in 2018 that you disapproved of my moving in Palestine, and then without warning you cut off all communication. What the fuck dad, at least own up to the fact that you’re a fucking coward, that you’re choosing in your cowardice to not engage, your favorite strategy for pain. Why did you leave it to mom to break that news to me? Fine, you’re a coward, you don’t want me to be abroad, even though it’s a fucking stupid argument. You’re worried for my safety? You’re scared shitless? Well here I am, back from the fucking third world, where the people until recently treated me like family, where unlike you they still ask how I am, even though I’m back in fucking privilege central. What the fuck. I like Palestine because it feels more real than this land of plenty, the suffering is there, you can see it. At least the refugees in the camp wear their suffering on their clothes, in their face. You fucking hide it away and money allows you to avoid it. I hate that you and people like you use money to avoid discomfort at all costs. Auntie Carolyn and Uncle Herb took care of your own fucking brother in Los Angeles as he died from cancer. All you did was send money for a caretaker. Don’t pretend that this wasn’t the biggest act of cowardice ever. You hate blood, you hate hospitals, you hate death because you’re so afraid of dying that you can’t face it for others. I hate how ashamed I feel when I go down to LA and see how your sister’s family is facing the tragedy of yin yin growing old, how they are with her daily to remind her to wear a jacket and eat, that you’re up here getting to dabble in caretaking at your leisure. You think that money is how you get to contribute. You are so fucking wrong.
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And finally we come back to myself. Fuck you, Melanie. I hate that you’re such a coward that you will fucking destroy anyone but your father, that you can’t seem to find the courage that was in your heart back in 2017 when you called him out for his fucked up logic around money and Daniel, where you somehow had the balls to ask about the possibility of childhood abuse by your grandfather. I know, that trial of writing, waiting, and therapy seems to have killed some part of you, some daring and alive part of you that demands truth and decency above all else, that wants to see your brother stand up on his own, that is angry and not ashamed of that anger, that asks for what she needs. That was some brave shit you did back in 2017, dear one. It broke me, the pain of those sessions. It broke me into pieces, worried that I was breaking my family.
And again, the time in Japan with your family, of having Daniel explode in rage at you at the train station. All you wanted to do was to stop running, not rush, when your fucking brother who doesn’t have any control over his emotions decides to yell at you for your desire to control. No, fuck you Daniel, fuck your anger, fuck my parents inability to deal, fuck their rationale that their two adult children just need to work it out. That’s bullshit that Daniel’s rage, him calling me a fucking bitch, is somehow comparable with my need to control, that’s bullshit that allows them to avoid the problem. Somehow avoidance is the name of the game in this family, isn’t it? And taking the train alone, realizing that you are completely alone in the world, fuck your family, fuck commitment to dealing with their shit. You shut down the part of yourself that cares about being real with them, you just don’t want to cause any problems, you’re afraid to be the troublemaker again in the household, just when things are finally settling down. But you know what? The problem of your dad’s silence is gone only because you’ve returned from Palestine without any clear intention to return, not because it’s solved. When I leave in August or whenever the fuck I go back, if I decide to enter the land of misery again, will things break? Clearly the problem is there under the right conditions. Are you such a fucking coward melanie that you don’t want to address the root of the problem? It’s ironic, your dad’s cowardice and inability to meet pain is at the root of his silence, and your own cowardice is preventing the healing. Fuck.
Melanie, where is the wild girl who declared after just one month that you were moving to Palestine, fuck everyone else? Where is the person writing this essay? Are you such a Plum Village addict that you’re unable to truly face pain, that you use spiritual practice to avoid doing the hard shit? Thich Nhat Hanh says meet your enemies with love. Sister Chan Duc says to give my father space to develop trust in our relationship. Is this an act of cowardice or courage, waiting, knowing that my father may never be able to receive? Is it enough to simply let it be, let my anger simmer on this paper, or must it be released to my father aloud? Fuck you Melanie, for your hesitation, your fear. Don’t run away to Mariposa to drown your sorrows about your dad, that better not be a fucking escape. You cannot go to Mariposa to hide from the pain of fucking San Francisco, the homeless people outside of Mission Pie, outside of the subway stations, outside of my office on the Embarcadero. If you let it, Mariposa will dull the pain and render you incapable of meeting it. Mariposa is a safe and cozy home, but you need to remember the wild and alive energy pulsing through you right now, there isn’t an option to back away from this piece of you. To do that is to die. I might as well kill myself right now if I allow the practice to dull my sensitivity to my own desire. So I want to fuck multiple people, I want to destroy things. Fine, let it all be known because it’s still there even when I pretend it’s gone.
Melanie, do not retreat into silence like your father, don’t follow the path that you hate. Do not preach or write commentary on Buddhist text like Thay, don’t do it unless every ounce of your being is singing with the rightness and purpose of it, don’t do it for fortune or praise. Fuck, don’t do anything for praise. I’m done waiting for little old ladies not quite finished with their peace activism to write me long emails of hope after I send a message out. I’m tired of being so tied to what people say about me that I dull my senses, I dull my exposure to life. I’ve told myself that the only places I feel safe and happy are in sangha, with others that practice. I hate Leo because he doesn’t fall in line with the practice, he fights back, and yet this person seems to be the only one who’s truly met me in my power, my fury, my destructive rage, I hate it and that’s the only thing I really need. To be met in this rage with more rage. How else will I see what’s truly real? How else can I pass through the darkness into true healing and light? Until I can touch into the demons that are so clearly there, I will just be another person lost in ignorance, looking to Thay to save me from the darkness I refuse to meet.
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One more person. To my teacher, Joann. Fuck your attachment to your own suffering. I don’t fucking care that your parents survived the pograms in eastern europe only to watch the rest of the jews be destroyed in the holocaust. I’m fucking tired of the narrative of victimhood that you and so many other jews carry with you, fucking deal with your own trauma. You’re a therapist and so skilled at meeting other people in their trauma, why the fuck don’t you do your healing magic on yourself? Every time I articulate a need, something I want to buy for delight, pleasure, comfort, I hate your default response, which is one of judgment and moralizing. How the fuck will I ever grow if you’re constantly limiting me to your stature, one of scarcity, fear of belonging, one where I need to “make do with less” so I learn how to deal with discomfort? What the fuck is this masochism so common in the buddhist practice? Why should I be in discomfort for the sake of discomfort? That’s something people in privilege say to get off on their privilege. No, I refuse to place myself into discomfort to “develop resiliency”. Who the fuck cares? I’ll develop resiliency in my obstinance, how about that? I have to deal with all of you anyways constantly preaching to me about how I can be more loving, more kind, act on behalf of the earth, blah blah blah. I hate veganism, I hate the constriction of not drinking, ever, in order to become a buddhist teacher, I hate the way you ask me for tech help. I’m not your fucking tech specialist, pay me my consulting rates if that’s what you want from me. Don’t place your sorrow or feelings of non-belonging onto me, don’t guilt trip me every time I do something bigger than you can imagine for yourself. Have you ever thought for yourself about this practice? Is it helping you to confront the demons of your own past?
And you know what? I’m not ashamed that I pay the taxi driver in palestine what they charge locals. Fuck you for guilt tripping me, I don’t need to account for my privilege every time I enter a fucking taxi, you’re asking me to place myself above them, to pity the Palestinian taxi driver because they were born into that wretched place. I don’t pity them and I don’t care about giving them an extra 5 shekels. Why don’t you do it if you think it’s so important? You see me and my economic privilege, my family’s money, my engineering salary, you demonize it, you see it as something that requires punishment. Honestly, fuck that whole line of thought, I don’t give a fuck that I have made more money in my life now than you ever have at age 70-something. I honestly don’t give a fuck, you chose to live this life of scarcity. I refuse to live a life of scarcity and service out of guilt, shame, remorse, whatever the fuck it is that I feel when I see the disparity between my life and those on the streets. I refuse to live your life. Fuck scarcity mindset, fuck scarcity.
Fuck you for your jewish guilt. Fuck you for your poverty, for tensing up every time I talk about money. Fuck you for creating an enemy in your mind out of my dad, fuck you for perpetuating that story in my head, fuck you for not cutting it off as my teacher. You are a grown woman that needs to step down from her pedestal and see your own darkness a little more fully. I refuse to treat your opinion as truth simply because you’re a fucking certified dharma teacher, no you need to grow the fuck up and own your opinion as your own, not some god-certified truth. Fuck that, I see your suffering in your responses to me and I’m done catering to your bullshit. Fuck you, take responsibility without requiring me to call you out over and over, fuck you. Mostly, fuck scarcity and herd mentality, even when the herd is sangha. Especially when it is.
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Another thing. To my mom and my grandma, and all the women who put up with the emotional immaturity of men for love, fuck you. You’ve seriously fucked me, you raise men who can’t deal with their own emotions, who can’t grow a pair of balls, can’t fight for the things they love, who declare their worth in dollars or job title, not in their own real strength. These men can’t even walk over to a woman that challenges them, declare their intentions to fuck them, and await the risk of real vulnerability and rejection. Fuck men who look for submissive women to hold their emotions, women who act as their therapists at home because no, they definitely don’t need real therapy. I am not going to be one of those women, fuck submission, fuck having to give before receiving, fuck looking to a man for permission to do anything I want, fuck having a man for a manager, or for a director, or for that matter, for a coach. Fuck men who can’t take care of themselves, I am over it, I am never dating one of you again, you are never fucking me, I refuse to suck your dick or take any shit from you. You are nothing to me. I do not give a shit about your money, your job, your car, your house, whatever the fuck gives you the ability to look at yourself in the morning. I want to break you so hard that you have nothing to cling to, so that you’re crying outside in the street until something in you decides to live. That’s the only point at which I’ll look at you and decide if you’re worth my time. When you’re broken and have finally chosen to live.
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And another thing I hate about myself. For the last two years I’ve felt so depressed and cut off from my sexuality that I’ve refused to dress nicely, contented myself with wearing glasses, baggy pants, sweatshirts, as if by doing so I could escape the fucking lack of safety of the male gaze. In doing so I’ve numbed my sexuality, I haven’t flirted with any man or woman, I’ve been so fucking paralyzed that I did not even feel attraction in the past two years. I fucking thought my vagina was broken, was settling into the thought that I don’t need sex, I don’t need physical touch, I’m a fucking buddhist robot that meditates to calm myself and sees all sensations as simple pleasure, all desires for fucking as conditioned thoughts. What the fuck melanie, seriously? I stopped touching myself as an experiment to see if it was possible to feed all sexual energy into my work, my writing, to practice letting go of sexual desire as part of practice.
I hate that you turned away from sex in cowardice, in fear that you’re not pretty enough or good enough to stand up to a powerful man and to have him want you, that you don’t even know who the fuck this kind of powerful man would be. I can’t believe that you are nearly 30 years old and have no fucking clue what this man would look like, that you’ve only played with men of money and ambition, that don’t have the real power required to fight you, to meet you. And I hate you, melanie, because once you meet this kind of man, I’m afraid that you’re going to back down, to run away from whoever the fuck this is, declare that you’re into women, fight and punch and destroy this person, because they won’t submit, they won’t give in, and they won’t fucking leave. I hate that you’re imagining play parties and sex with strangers as ideal, no they weren’t fucking ideal, they were scary and weird and I didn’t know how and if I fit, I mostly backed down when men from those parties asked if I wanted to fuck again afterwards, I was angry, I felt objectified, how dare you imagine you could meet me, how dare you think you could fuck me on your own. Who the fuck are you?
I hate that I went to Israel Palestine, where the jewish men are married by 25 or otherwise looking for their jewish wife, I hate that I was always perceived as an outsider, how the only men possible to date were other expats from Europe or the states, how they too were confused by an Asian-looking American girl in Israel to save Palestinians. I hate that israeli men didn’t give a fuck about what was happening in their backyard to the palestinians, that I had to lie when I first met people about where I worked and who my friends were, that I cowered behind some story of myself to survive. What the fuck were you doing there, Melanie? I hate that in Palestine, even old men would tell me that they could get married twice, that I couldn’t go into the fucking best pita restaurant because every time I did the owner would propose marriage or look at my body, I hate that I feared making friends with every young man I met in Palestine because it’s weird for single Palestinian men to be friends with women. I hate that I couldn’t tell if they were trying to take advantage of me because I was a rich American, if they wanted to fuck, or if they just wanted to be friends. I hate that they would probably bring their conservative views on gender into the bedroom, fucking expect me to please them, see me as a fucking exotic brand of foreigner who if only they could be lucky enough to marry to get american citizenship and get the fuck out. Why the fuck did you spend two years of your life in a fucking wasteland for powerful men? I could never date or marry a palestinian from a refugee camp, I could never move to palestine for life to raise my kids in the trauma of the occupation, I could never date or marry a fucking israeli who clings to their narrative of fucking oppression and anti-semitism to justify their blatent ignorance of the brutalization of a people just kilometers away. Fuck the whole region, I don’t want to go back.
And fuck the economic engine that keeps the refugee camps running, the usaid money flowing to palestinian ngos to keep the oppressed just happy enough not to revolt, fuck the american weapons companies that get off on using gaza as their own personal playground, fuck the iron dome, fuck the stories that israel tells itself about being surrounded by hostile arab nations, fuck narratives that perpetuate oppression and lack of belonging, hostility, trauma. Fuck the sirens going off on holocaust remembrance day, fuck re-creating the trauma again and again and again, because to remember is to fear, and fear allows the fucking dictator bibi to spend more money on weapons and military, to storm refugee camps and terrorize the sweetest kids I’ve ever met, the kind that can be utterly content to play soccer with crumpled pieces of trash, that find nature novel, that delight in the simple joy of playing catch across a dimly lit shitty room in the bottom floor of the ngo. Fuck people that think that the memory of the holocaust is a good excuse for terrorizing kids today.
Fuck funneling money from the us to israel so that israel can buy from our weapons manufacturers. Fuck lockheed martin, fuck boeing, fuck all the us manufacturers profiting off of war, fuck politicians that support this, that feed on power driven by military might, that are so worried about reelection in 4 or 6 years that they take lobbyist money from these firms. Fuck the court case that said corporations are like people, that allows them to pour money into politics, fuck the lack of transparency that drives the lack of trust, fuck the government that takes 40% of my paycheck every year to spend 50% of it on war. What the fuck. I fucking wish I could deposit my money in some tax-exempt island like the rest of the billionaires or make everything in capital gains to exploit the same fucking system that prioritizes investors over normal working people, I wish I could burn down the irs, congress, all of the fucking liars called politicians that speak about education, human rights, democracy, but are really choosing to funnel over 50% of government income aka taxes on the fucking military.
I hate that I go to palestine and see the military in action. Is it enough that the guns israel is buying from the us are being used to shoot palestinians at the separation wall? Is it good enough? When the fuck will the misery and violence end? I hate my cowardice that I never want to return. I hate that my taxes from etsy, consulting, whatever the fuck it is I pay, is manifesting in more violence overseas, not just in israel but in every country with american military presence, done in the name of democracy but really to protect our own “strategic interests”, oil, manufacturing, basically money for the already rich and powerful. I hate that we're creating the next generation of veterans suffering from ptsd, insomnia, fucking nightmares from being ordered to kill, destroy, to live in conditions of such heightened vigilance that the only way out is injury or death. I hate my own hopelessness that this is the way it is, I hate that I am so fucking privileged that I can choose where to live, who to fuck, whether to work, if I want to spend the whole day sleeping or writing or doing absolutely fucking nothing. I hate that I love this privilege and would never give it up. I hate myself for my complete and utter attachment to my own security, ease, comfort, and happiness, I hate that I would destroy everyone and everything in my life to keep it. Sometimes I wish I was born as nothing, just a fragment on the street, so when I finally stood the fuck up I would know I earned it. Now I'm just floating in my bubble of privilege, wondering what is even worth doing, finding every fucking thing incredibly meaningless.
Tell your dad he’s a fucking coward. Why, so he can continue to be a fucking coward, so I can continue my rampage in the house? Tell your brother he needs to grow a pair of balls. Why, so he can retreat back into his room and drown his anger in video games or masterbating to the thoughts of this new girl? Tell Lisa that she needs to grow the fuck up and stop acting like a child. Why, so she can rage at me again and resort to her mentality of victimization, so she can put me into the box of people she doesn’t belong with? What the fuck. It’s all a meaningless pile of shit. Who cares.
I hate that you’ve brought me to the cemetery Leo, left me at the fucking entry gates and demanded I step inside. I hate that now I’ve walked through the fucking graveyard, bashed every tombstone, I’m still so full of rage now but the graveyard is destroyed, I hate that I can’t unsee the destruction I’ve now seen. I hate that I can’t talk to John without thinking, what a fucking boring coward, that I can’t talk to my father without wanting to bash his head in. I fucking hate this. And I hate you for making me see. I fucking hate you.
Don’t fucking congratulate me on touching my anger, fuck you. Fucking help me figure out what to do with all of this incredible rage, where the fuck does it go, it’s fucking breaking me and I don’t want it, fuck you. Fuck you. I fucking hope you’ve tried the experiment on yourself and found the way out. You say the way out is through? Okay, we'll go through the burned remains. Everything is broken. I'm broken. What’s left now?
