Thank You Letter to Chaos, Myself at 19

Forgiveness and gratitude often come hand in hand.

TW: this post details memories of rape, physical assault, disordered eating, alcohol, and references past suicidal ideation.

Dear Chaos,

I am trying to think of a better way to name you. Certainly there must be some sort of descriptor that does not only speak of a reckoning of an internal will, a will to escape the moment. Nineteen is a funny age. You are both an adult and a child, aware of the certainty of change and the necessity of adaptation yet still clinging to the freedom of fresh, unbolted agency.

This photo is from the beginning of your sophomore year. You live in Hangzhou, China. A few weeks earlier you had arrived, unaware of the weight you already were carrying, completely convinced that the past had never eviscerated you. You like to do what everyone else does. You have friends who listen to boy bands with you, those who read bell hooks, and some online. You’re in love and in turmoil, as the person you’re in love with lives in a different hemisphere and only had come into your life by sheer chance of Internet. You’re a week out from the domino being pushed, one you could never have foreseen. One you didn’t see lined up at all yet oh how little you knew of the way it all falls.

You and me, you see, we have never been good at not knowing. Seekers of knowledge, one might say, and in many ways Chaos, it started right there with you. In many ways it was long before, when I needed to understand the void, the abyss, the aching of circumstance often far beyond me. I couldn’t though, and you couldn't, sometimes I still can’t. Even though you didn’t know what was coming, the blunt shift was evident. The domino fell in September, only a month of time in Hangzhou without the shift. It’s barely a recollection of how it was before then, as it was already coming on. The change was building underneath, influenced possibly by smog and language barriers, but the loneliness nagged before September. It’s engulfing you now.

It started at a club called Coco Banana. I barely say this name anymore, you know this name well. Anyone who partied in Hangzhou found themselves at one point or another at four am taking free shots from the bartender, fucking in the squat toilet, or crowding around a VIP booth with your friends and some men with accents you can barely understand. The multi-colored flashing lights would fill the space where smoke hits the air. The night the domino fell Rihanna’s (then) new song Bitch Better Have My Money was playing. You loved dancing then. You enjoyed going out, the feeling of your body moving from every angle, every movement meant to be in line with the echoing of speakers.

His name is Hugo. You knew him for less than twenty-four hours, his voice isn’t even a recognizable memory. I don’t know if this is comforting. Neither really is his face but you’ll remember him as being blonde, from London, and the way he slapped your ass as you walked back to your dorm from Coco Banana. This didn’t keep you from walking. I suppose, Chaos, no one had really explained to you that a man couldn’t just slap your ass to show affection for you. That it wasn’t actually as charming as one might think, that just because someone wants to touch you doesn’t mean it’s open season. You don’t grasp that.

You still recall how he commented on 1970s porn bushes, you still recall the morning it happened. Your body froze and I think you have been holding this against yourself for a long time. I think you have been holding walking from the club with him against yourself. I think you’ve been holding going to the club against yourself. Your body froze and so did your understanding. The domino fell and all you could hold onto was the knowledge that it all had occurred. There was no one else to point to but yourself. Hugo showered after, he walked away. He never talked to you again, you never ran into him. I just want you to know that you have been to London twice and never seen him. You never saw him in a bar, in a club, in the street. You can remember his gross hands but his physical reality is merely a mirage of the past now. If he were to walk by, it’s highly possible he’d be unrecognizable and so would you. The domino fell there though, and Hugo to you was very quickly a date marker.

Suddenly September was difficult every year but would you believe it, Chaos, if I told you that a few weeks ago in the year 2022, I told my therapist that I didn’t need to think much about Hugo because the domino effect was enough to traumatize me. The year traumatizes you, Chaos. After Hugo, you find yourself in many bottles, glasses, late-night cigarettes, and fucking that fucks for the sake of forgetting. You forgot to eat eventually, too. Your friends don’t know how to help you, some even make a big point of reminding you of that before they stop talking to you (not with a conversation, mind you, I am sorry to tell you Chaos that you will feel an absence that is untouchable yet solid and blocking), and you must learn to survive within your own destruction.

I am wrong to believe and fully promote the idea that the year traumatized me alone but I think for so long it’s been easier to look at the span of time as a bludgeoning act; instead of reckoning with the weight of guilt and blame I place on you for getting raped. When you call Mom after it happens, she says “It happens to everyone, sweetie. It’s okay.”

You later will familiarize yourself with the works of French writer Virginie Despentes when an anonymous stranger leaves copies of her book King Kong Theory at the sex dungeon you’ll work at. You’ll grab a copy. Like you, Virginie was assaulted as a teenager, and like you Virginie later worked in the sex industry, and like you Virginie became a writer. You do not know her work yet but when you do it’ll make a lot of sense to you, Chaos. It would make a lot of sense to you even then. Despentes has said on rape:

“We don't kill women who've been raped, but we do expect them to have the decency to show that they are damaged goods, that they have been polluted. They may become hookers, or ugly, whatever, as long as they spontaneously exit the marriage market.”

It didn’t start with Hugo. Hugo was simply the glass wall shattering that revealed all that was yet to be accepted. You couldn’t accept when you stepped foot in China that you weren’t like everyone else, or maybe you were, maybe that’s the exceptionalism of trauma. The belief that ours is so unique and isolating that no one could grasp it, but when I sit with the weight of it all then it does feel exceptional. When our mother said it happens to everyone, all you could think about is that means it happened to our mom.

You know Chaos, you’re allowed to admit that you need help. Not everyone runs away. Some people stay, some people welcome you in with comfort, warmth, and love. There are people in life who respect you, even before you do. You don’t respect yourself, Chaos but it’s not your fault and I forgive you. I forgive you for not knowing that there is only one you. I forgive you for not knowing that life is finite yet can grow as full as a ripe peach.

I forgive you, I know this is supposed to be a letter of thanks but before I can thank you I have to forgive you. I forgive you for not knowing better. I forgive you for no one ever teaching you to value and protect yourself, that you are a person worth getting to know. I am sorry that you are alone, I am sorry that you will continue to be alone in many ways for a long time. You learn to survive eloquently, with the grace of a circus acrobat navigating fire hoops and the swift rush of air. Your body isn’t always something you need to escape from, there will come a day when your body isn’t as strong as this moment.

It is easier to accept yourself as a chaotic being beyond any force of nature than to accept that you deserved love, protection, understanding. It’s easier to demonize yourself, Chaos, after all your name is still Chaos, isn’t it? I am still grasping at straws, admittedly, to find it within me to know it isn’t your fault. That you can no longer be the scapegoat to the year, Hugo raped you. You didn’t rape you. You didn't push the domino. You are not responsible for the push. In life what happens, happens, and you aren’t always responsible. Sometimes they just do, and you move forward.

Since Hugo in 2015, you’ve been raped a few more times. You were raped by a friend on a roof but she later apologized (only one to ever do it) and you later called her when her mom died. You were raped by a philosopher in your friend’s apartment in the summer of 2020, in a parallel reality to your rape at the hands of Hugo. I want you to know Chaos that time you didn’t freeze. You told him “You know you’re not supposed to wake someone up by fucking them?” and he said “Oh, I didn’t realize.” This philosopher who certainly knew about consent but of course maybe they don’t teach consent in the Ivy League schools. I said to him, “Well the first time I was raped it was like that.” You are later raped by a client who took a condom off without permission a year or so after the philosopher. You’ll use the money you make to buy a nice meal and a red wine, and Chaos, that rape was nothing like your rape. I want to say sorry that I didn’t treat your rape as important because eventually it had happened so many times.

It was wrong of me to act like you, Chaos, were at fault in your reaction. I forgive you for not knowing where to turn, you’re in a foreign country. You do find people that support you but it’s okay that if at first you felt alone but it is not right for you to convince yourself that the isolation should cement into an understanding. You will find love and acceptance even if the ways it finds you aren’t as you envision. Thank you for surviving. Thank you for not walking into the street, thank you for not falling off a mountain, thank you for not jumping off a bridge, thank you for not drinking yourself into an early grave. You quit drinking for two years in this period and I want to say thank you for that. Thank you for knowing something was wrong and that you couldn’t continue. Thank you for believing things could get better even if you couldn’t grasp the future.

Thank you for letting me be alive today to experience everything we now have. I forgive you for wanting to die, I forgive you for not wanting to know sometimes if the future would be good or bad but my heart is full of gratitude to your survival. To the fact you didn’t allow the year to swallow you and end you. You will survive more before you can truly understand what you are healing from. You are only in the beginning now, you must have patience with yourself for not knowing love will flow to you if you accept it, for not understanding that you deserve more than putting yourself at constant risk just to prove your body will land. You’ll learn it doesn’t always land. In December of 2018 you’re going to be beaten by a mobster and it will be nothing like your rape, outside of your body freezing. I want you to know that there will come a day where you no longer freeze but only time will teach you the right moments to run.

Chaos, I have written too long to you, and still I would write more. There is never enough to say that can soothe you, Chaos. I know writing to you from the future only can assure you that the moment is temporary, that being nineteen and twenty are only years in a large span. I find you still everywhere I go, as the leaves of autumn golden out I think of you in a far off place learning how to survive, and through your survival I am still noticing the colors change yearly. Thanks to your survival I am alive to forgive you, Chaos, for being raped. I am alive to forgive you for the ego death that occurred, and am alive to remind you that in several years your life will be better than you could have ever imagined, even in the fantasies of childhood, life could not have been like this. It is though, Chaos, and it’s thanks to you.

I love you.