i started writing this to some fellow Mad Disabled friends this morning, but then i stopped, and realized that i needed to publish it.

— 28 Nov 2022 at 22:53

what i'm realizing is that nobody else really cared.

nobody else would have EVER been as invested in my healing or well-being or mental health or life or ALIVENESS as me.

even when i was fucking traumatized to the point of being unable to talk out loud, and completely not functioning.
when i was hallucinating and homeless.

literally, nobody else was EVER going to care as much as i did.

even now, i have friends. but are they really willing to do that much for me? the way i help others in my situation?

no.

and i wanted somebody else to care that much, and help me as much as i help other people.

but nobody did.

or would.

so that’s it.

i am the only person invested in my own trauma, my own healing, and my own life.

i am the only person invested in my own survival, while i am surrounded by human beings who consider themselves "good people" — and, even worse, "activists" — who actively look away when i'm in pain.

and so it was when i was 5 years old, basically being abused by almost every human being i knew or came in contact with — white classmates, white teachers, chinese parents, for my entire childhood

— having to take care of myself alone as a young child,

in a majority-white california suburb where i was one of a handful of asians in the entire town, in a country where i was violently abused by my assimilationist parents to learn my third language, the colonizer language.

nobody other than me was EVER going to care that much.

this was true even when i was dying.

this was true when i was going in and out of ERs and psychiatric incarcerations, not functioning, no home, no money, no family, no friends, utterly and completely alone.

this was true when i was crying and screaming and throwing up every night in front of other people, who would like to call themselves my "friends", my "chosen family", who promised to help me.

capitalism didn’t care that i was homeless and hallucinating and unable to talk out loud and Disabled and couldn’t function.

capitalism didn’t care to help me,

and neither did any of the trans / queer / PGM “anti-capitalist” and "abolitionist" activists,

the “we support abuse survivors" activists,

and the “housing justice” activists that i knew.

none of them cared to help me, either.

in fact, they all actively excluded me.

when i was, and am,
an impoverished,
homeless,
survivor
of
abuse
and
psychiatric incarceration.

in fact, they all actively excluded me —

for being traumatized by violence and homelessness and police and psychiatric incarceration and white supremacy and capitalism.

for barely being able to talk out loud.

for acting a little... "different" (read: traumatized and neuroatypical).

i was laying in a bed in the emergency room by myself in october 2019, after a "well-respected" queer chinese-usameriKKKan "anti-capitalist" "abolitionist" "organizer" in the "community", who publicly fundraised for API abuse survivors & constantly postured about "the importance of community care" for supporting API abuse survivors, and whose best friends worked for the API abuse survivor nonprofit, removed me from the group chat of an organization i had been a part of for over two years, for asking for help in response to being abused, and never talked to me again.

i was laying in that bed in the emergency room,
in a bed i was screaming and crying in,

when at 5 in the morning, i spoke on the phone, for the first time,

with a cis male cambodian refugee-now usameriKKKan immigrant settler from "the community",

who worked at the nonprofit "community" space, started by the "community" nonprofit company that provided affordable, low-income housing in the asian neighbourhood, where everybody hated homeless people, and loved cops — that i, a dissociated and confused and out of place homeless cop-hater, volunteered at every week, for over a year — ,

who was romantic partners with yet another "well-respected" ["taiwanese"/ethnically chinese-usameriKKKan] "anti-capitalist" "abolitionist" "organizer" in "the community" —

he was telling me:
"when you first came into the office, we all knew you were a little... different."

he was telling me this, as i laid in an emergency room bed alone, where i later screamed and cried.

and i could tell,
that he didn't mean
"different",
in a good way.

capitalism didn't care to help me,

and neither did any of the people who claimed they loved me,

the people who donated to "asian mental health" organizations,
who fundraised for suicide prevention,
who fundraised for asian abuse survivors,
who fundraised for other Disabled trans asian people,
... do you get the idea?

and neither did any of the white male "anti-racist allies" who promised to support me, who put his pronouns in he/him/his bios, and founded "nonprofit" companies.

and neither did any of the "communists" who do nothing but sleep soundly and comfortably with their clout and twitter following counts in their beds.

capitalism didn't care to help me when i was dying, and neither did literally any of the "activists", or other people i knew, who consider themselves a "good person".

even when i asked.

capitalism didn't care to help me when i was dying, & neither did literally any of the "activists", or other people i knew, who consider themselves a "good person".

even when i asked.

"go to therapy," they say.

"ask for help," they say.

"reach out for help,
i know it's scary,

you're so brave," they say.

the less proximity you have to housed, employed, wealthy, neurotypical, abled-minded, abled-bodied, cisheteronormative, eurocentric-attractive, thin-ness, non-Blackness, non-Indigenousness, desireability, sanity, whiteness — the less people care about you and want to help you.

even when those people are so-called "anti-oppression" activists of the global majority.

the only reason i’m still alive is because
i’m light-skinned, non-Black, non-Indigenous,
and because i can speak english somewhat convincingly,

and because i know how to mask my neuro-atypicality
and act sane for my survival, when i’m not.

these are the only reasons
why i’m not permanently psych-incarcerated yet,
(to anybody reading this: i have never committed a crime or broken the law. psych hospitals are incarcerations.)
why i haven’t died on the streets yet,
and, crucially, why i haven’t gotten shot by the police yet.

(because white strangers have indeed called the cops on me — a potentially lethal choice — when i was homeless and hallucinating.
multiple times.
including that "anti-racist ally" white boy nonprofit founder with pronouns in his bio, mentioned above.)

NOTE: the reasons i'm still alive are all PRIVILEGES I DID NOT EARN OR CHOOSE.

they were not my choice, and it is not your fault if you can't mask, or lie, or pretend to be sane, or anything else!

it is capitalist ableist white supremacy's fault that this world is so unsafe for us.

anytime cops are involved, is potentially lethal. i have dissociated and hallucinated so hard that i absolutely could not control what i was doing, which was extremely unsafe for me (and also, completely not within my control, or my fault or choice). other asian-usameriKKKans have been murdered by the police, especially in response to "mental health crisis" calls.

it is ALL about how other people perceive you, which is what gives you privilege. i hypothesize now, in retrospect, that the way that cops may have perceived my gender in the past, may have possibly led them to believe that i was more "harmless".

i remember when a white male lawyer at a free/charity legal clinic in usameriKKKa told me that it wasn’t illegal to not save a dying person's life.

"if you walk by a homeless person dying of a drug overdose, you're not legally obligated to help them," he said to me casually, apathetic to my obvious emotional state of horror.

"nobody's going to get in trouble for not saving somebody else's life."

"nobody's going to get in trouble for not helping someone who's dying," he said to me.

autumn 2019. on stolen Dxʷdəwʔabš Lands.

january 2016. a tiny, relatively-unknown-outside-Deutschland town in Deutschland, where i was most likely the only asian with blue hair in the entire town.

i was trying to figure out what colour of reusable bag to buy at the grocery store, so that i wouldn't have to get any plastic bags.

"do you care this much about everything you do?" they asked skeptically.

"yeah," i replied.

"do you care this much about everything you do?" they asked skeptically.

"yeah," i replied.

"that sounds exhausting."

their words felt dismissive.

it was this year when i learned that white supremacist capitalist usameriKKKan publication The New York Times greatly exaggerated the facts of when Kitty Genovese was murdered in 1964, just to sell a better story.

Kitty Genovese's murder was what inspired research into the so-called "bystander effect" —

"when a stranger is suffering, & there are other people around, nobody will give a shit, bc humans are just inherently bad or selfish or something idk lol" the theory attests.

A 2015 documentary, featuring Kitty's brother William, discovered that other crime reporters knew of many problems with the story even in 1964. Immediately after the story broke, WNBC police reporter Danny Meehan discovered many inconsistencies in the original article in [The New York Times]. Meehan asked Times reporter Martin Gansberg why his article failed to reveal that witnesses did not feel that a murder was happening. Gansberg replied, "It would have ruined the story." Not wishing to jeopardize his career by attacking a powerful figure like Rosenthal, Meehan kept his findings secret and passed his notes to fellow WNBC reporter Gabe Pressman.

[ source. emphasis mine ]

fuck capitalist individualism.
fuck individualist social capitalists, who call themselves “anti-capitalists”.

you are genociding Mad and Disabled and neuroatypical and marginalized people, with your abandonment of us.

(don't worry, rich people aren't human beings, so they don't count)

"What do you want?"

I couldn't admit that I was following her. "Help," I said. "Homework."

In truth I had not looked over our English assignment. I grabbed a paper on top of her binder and read aloud: You come across a horrible four-car accident. There are people moaning in pain, and bodies strewn all over the place. Do you have an obligation to stop?

"Why should I help?" she said.

"Well, legally, you shouldn't. If you pull someone out and hurt them more, you could get sued." *

[ writer's note: *this is not actually factually accurate, at least in usameriKKKa, where this book is set. "all fifty states and the district of columbia have some type of Good Samaritan law." ]

"I meant why should I help you."

[...]

I put my foot down on top of a textbook. "Would you do it?"

"Tutor you? No way."

"Stop. At the car accident."

Her hands quieted. "Yeah. Because even if the law says that no one is responsible for anyone else, helping someone who needs it is the right thing to do."

I sat down beside her, close enough that the skin of her arm hummed right next to mine. "You really believe that?"

She looked down at her lap. "Yeah."


"Then how," I asked, "can you walk away from me?"

— My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult (emphasis mine)

fuck capitalist individualism.

fuck individualist social capitalists, who call themselves “anti-capitalists”.

水仙 shuixian is an impoverished, housing unstable, Mad, Disabled, trans, shanghainese-usameriKKKan loser with no friends or family (jk, i have a few non-ableist friends now), #based on the internet.
please support 水仙 here.

note: i feel like perhaps some of the people who have helped by donating money once, or in other small ways, might think that this post dismisses their contributions. financial donations, regardless of amount, and small actions, isn't real solidarity, or a commitment to do the material work of helping pull someone out of homelessness or poverty, or the traumatization, isolation, and loneliness that makes someone chronically suicidal. it isn't even a commitment to being someone's friend.

as proven by the above-mentioned fact that multiple (now ex-)friends who donated to mental health initiatives, etc., have deeply traumatized me, and/or even endangered my physical life, knowing full well that i was in crisis.

and believe it or not, i have directly committed to helping support chronically suicidal individuals long-term, and helping several individuals get out of homelessness, poverty, and abusive relationships, even when i myself am/was homeless/housing unstable, impoverished, suicidal, unemployed, and being abused. i have committed to an extent that nobody else i have ever witnessed, has ever committed to. and especially not committed to me, specifically. especially because i don't look like the ideal "victim/survivor" or "traumatized by police/incarceration" or "homeless" or "impoverished" person, that the "activists" around me imagine as deserving of help and support. and this is the kind of genuine commitment to solidarity and support that i needed.

even just having just one consistent and proactive friend, probably would have saved my life.

but i did not actually receive real solidarity. if i had, i probably would have gotten better by now. i now have a few friends, who have actually been consistent and committed to being my friend, and supporting me — even if it's "only" emotional support.

i realize now that i have been repeatedly deliberately (and often, surreptitiously) excluded from many things by "community members", because i was traumatized, Mad, and Disabled.

also, giving someone support, only to abandon them in crisis, especially without warning or communication and then never talk to them again, or just stop talking to them with no explicit warning or communication in general, no longer qualifies as "i helped you", but a brand-new, deep trauma. everyone who did support or help me in small material ways at one point simply stopped after a while, with no communication, and never checked up on me again. i was still housing unstable, impoverished, and suicidal, while all the "activists" and "community members" around me, simply moved on with their relatively comfortable lives. none of these actions actually made my life better long-term, especially without a longer, real commitment to supporting my well-being.

once again, even when i asked for help, people ignored me. one person in the "queer asian community" proactively messaged me after i was psychiatric incarcerated once, to tell me that they were not going to support me, even when i never asked. unsolicitedly receiving such a message, after i was removed for no reason from the two main "community" and "organizing" group chats i was in and i was psychiatric incarcerated, was traumatizing. and all of the people who visited me when i was psychiatric incarcerated, never reached out again.

in addition, this article is also about other specific individuals, including previous close friends i deeply trusted, who actively mistreated me, or literally endangered my physical life.

for me, the solidarity i wanted was genuine care for my well-being, a commitment to being my friend, and being there for me in the ways that a friend had capacity for, and communication when they couldn't be. one simple, proactive text of "i know that you've been going through a lot, and i care about you" would have made a world of difference. but i never received that from literally anybody. nobody deeply cared about me in the last area i lived in, even though i lived there for over 6 years, and tried really hard to make friends — and i know this for a fact. people are scared of Mad and Disabled people. that's literally what ableism & saneism is.

a severely Disabled person should not have to do all of the work of "asking for help" and advocating for themself, anyway. but that's what i had to do, and that's what i still have to do, just in order to simply attempt to not die.

i never expected capitalism or the state to help me, even when i was a small child.

but so-called "anti-capitalists" and "good people" have betrayed me for their loyalty to saneist ableist capitalist individualism and white supremacist desireability, repeatedly.

** also yeah i still cite wikipedia (which is biased, often towards a privileged, white, cis, het, male, enabled, and/or wealthy perspective, because it is edited by people with the privilege of having enough free time to volunteer) as a source, i'm not in school anymore so u can't do anything about it lol

the background photo for the bolded sections of text throughout the article was taken by César Couto. image description: a bunch of blue flowers, on a solid black background.