return home

My dad used to tell me I get spooked easily because my spirit is a wanderer, detached from my body. I’ve always felt like parts of my spirit search for the parts of my parents that were left when they fled war, the parts of them that were stripped away when they became refugees. In healing, I’ve searched for and continue to heal the parts of my body to coax my spirit back home. It required construction and reconstruction of how to become a home for myself after years of making it a site of harm and a home for everyone else. What does it mean to return to myself, my spirit, and my body? And what does it mean to vacate the harm done to me when it has become such an integral part of who I am?  

In this essay, I will focus on my identities as a queer HMoob woman and a daughter of refugees as I navigate my community and the military in these identities. This essay also details the very things I did to survive these institutions that made me forget gentleness with myself.  I was taught that my body is not my own; that it belongs to other people, communities, and entities. This essay is a love letter to my spiritual body. It is a love letter and a testament to the non-linear healing that occurs when we want to leave the bodies we live in but must reclaim that it is ours and ours alone to hold. Content warning: this essay will cover sensitive topics such as self-harm, suicide, and sexual assault. I ask that individuals who are close to these topics check in with themselves and plan for additional support after reading this piece; this piece is my story, but it could also mirror yours. Return to yourself. 

*erm, disclaimer bc y'all don't need to come at me: this was a way to explain my journey through this world. i know this isn't how hmoob spirits work in its entirety.* 

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the beginning

I’m sure my dad said this in a joking way when I was a kid, but I took it literally. It’s not culturally correct yet it was the proper description for what I felt—for who I was.

My dad used to tell me I was easily scared or spooked because my spirit was slightly detached from my body. I imagined a string tied around the ankle of my spirit as it traveled. I understood it because my spirit was not there to protect me when I was meant to be strong in instances of…jump scares? As I grew older, I held my dad’s description of my spirit and my body as something that would define my relationship with myself. Disconnected. Wandering.

For traditional HMoob folks, this concept is frightening—our spirits are meant to be in our bodies and any threat that comes to our spirit makes us susceptible to sickness and death without it. But I’ve always been sick; I’ve always been susceptible to death. There are traditions that have made me sick—physically, mentally, emotionally. There are traditions that enable death. Many of them involve the devaluation of the womxn in our community, the destruction of ideas and curiosity, the indoctrination of patriarchy. It only made sense that my body—even as a child—would feel that passed down through to me.

If anything, I knew that my spirit wandered and it began with the beginning of time for our people.  

the wandering

The HMoob (also spelled “Hmong”) people are an ethnic minority that originated in China and we are now spread across the world, mainly Southeast Asia in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. I don’t think there has been a time in our oral history where we have not been fleeing persecution in genocide. First, it was fleeing China, then the Vietnam War happened and the HMoob people aided the Americans, then when the war was lost, we were left fleeing again. This time to Laos, Thailand, France, French Guyana, and the United States.

And I suppose that’s what my spirit is doing. Searching for home when it has never been safe in its body. When the ground my body  walks on has the potential to crumble; when my spirit holds onto the survival that sustained my grandparents, to my parents, and now passed onto me. There are songs that HMoob people have written about the people they have lost through separation or death during the war. Songs that I listened to as a kid. There are images of Ban Vinai, a refugee camp, and I remember one that was hung up in our living room, where my parents could identify where they had grown up, lived, and where others had as well.

But it had never been their home. Neither was the United States where their accents were too thick, skin a little bit too different. Food too smelly. Language too scary (or exotic). Practices too barbaric.

Even as someone who was born and raised in the United States, I knew that this was not my home. My spirit knew it better than I did.

the lost

The first time my dad told me about my spirit wandering was after we had watched a scary movie and I refused to sleep without a light or a flashlight on. I asked about every movement or sound—fearing that something would come get me. That was probably the first time I had heard it put into words what I was feeling, what was happening to my body. After that, there were other instances where I felt my spirit wander further, where I felt more distance with my body.

I am my parents’ first child, a girl (who looked good in a bowl cut, may I add), and I would be the only daughter my parents had because after me, they would only have boys. Boys in HMoob culture are coveted. They are the bearer of the family name and fortune. They are the ones whose placentas used to be buried inside of the house (as a foundation) whereas the girls’ placentas were buried outside (guests) after birth. When parents pass away, boys are the ones who will guide their spirits back to the homeland.

We have a phrase in HMoob, “ntxhais qhua.” The guest daughter. It is used to express the predetermined reality and future of what a woman/daughter is when she is born and her role as a guest in the house. When I was old enough to grasp the concept of women being guests and never the foundation of families and homes, I asked myself if my parents preserved themselves of their heartache by withholding love from me because I would leave. I grew up understanding my parents loved me by condition and the care I provided for my siblings. Their love was always on the condition that I would leave them, as is expected of ntxhais qhua. I don’t know if I can ever prove if my parents loved me by condition. Or if they chose not to love me fully and completely to protect themselves. But this thought would eat at me and made me fear ever marrying; I knew I would leave and be told to “not come back” because I was no longer “theirs.” I also knew that no one could love my parents better than their daughter.

In these moments, I remember the anguish I felt. The deep cut of what it meant to be labeled as a guest in the place I called home. If the label did not come from my parents, I don’t think that the label from my community would make it hurt any less. I wanted to leave the body I was in. Wanted to be the son that my family deserved, but knew that this was the body I had been given to live in. More than anything, I became obsessed with being worth not only my parents’ sacrifices, but to be the daughter that could measure up to a son.

I made my body an active site of harm when I dedicated it to proving my worth, to becoming more than. I joined the military for the money, the prestige. I joined it knowing that it would attempt to stifle and tame my voice which had become my most powerful tool of expression and dissent. I learned to minimize the person that I was to be the leader they wanted me to be (and who I was not). I lived and operated in so many worlds as a military servicemember by day and activist by night.

There were parts of me that were experiencing friction. I lived so close to home that my parents still wanted me there to parent their children, to care for them, to be at their beck and call. And at the same time, they excluded me from difficult and life-altering conversations—these would catch up to me at our extended family gatherings where my aunts and uncles cornered me to ask: “Why didn’t you know they were on the verge of divorce?” “Where were you?” “Why didn’t you help?” These moments would define the way I interacted with the life at home and the life I lived at school. I was on constant alert for every crack in the foundation at home so I could fix it before the house came tumbling. I had to hold it together, paint it, make it look nice enough for others to stomach. All while tending to the home I was creating within me.

There were parts of me that were blossoming. The voice I would use to spit spoken word. The way the tears fell as I wrote my pieces, but the fire that it bred on my lips. These were the moments I remember feeling closest to the core of myself; where my spirit returned itself to feel my warmth. I was tapping into my HMoob identity, truly developing relationships with my community that I had suppressed when I had tried to distance myself from them to appear more “successful.” The way these relationships ignited both sorrow, shame, anger, and love all at once.

And then, I was sexually assaulted by an acquaintance.

Up until then, I had focused so much on proving who I was with my body. The labor I put into holding people together, gathering them in spaces, engaging with my community—it was my body and heart and soul’s work. After I was assaulted, all I wanted to do was run away from my body. I wanted to run away from the words of my partner at the time, who had told me once that if I was ever raped, he would “never look at me the same.” Because in the moments that followed my assault, those were the words that stuck with me.

More than anything, I couldn’t look at myself the same after that. I drowned myself to see if I could leave my body to reach my spirit, wherever it was—further than it had ever been. I remember drinking until I didn’t feel, drinking throughout the day to just get through. Maintaining my grades just fine, and burying myself in things that did not require me to feel, or if it did, only allowed me to feel rage. It was easy to feel rage in 2016. I drowned myself in its fire.

My body had never belonged to me. Maybe my spirit was just smart enough to figure that out before I did. It belonged to the men in my community to label as worthy or unworthy of being a wife. It belonged to my family, that dictated my worth based on conditions of service, it belonged to the military when I signed on the dotted line. And then it belonged to someone when they took my body from me.

My assault was not the culminating moment that forced my spirit to run, but it surely didn’t help. I was battling burnout from activism. I was cradling my months-old brother to sleep some nights. I was battling with my body as it cycled through various forms of birth control. I was too depressed to get out of bed some days, but too anxious to not be doing anything, so I’d lay in bed and do homework. I harmed my body by drinking excessively to drown out all forms of feeling, only to cut myself to feel again. It was so destructive some days, I wonder how the people who witnessed me through these times are still alongside me today. And in those days, my body was not my own. I harmed my body to try and prove in some sick way that while violence had been done to it by someone else—whether cultural expectations of HMoob women, my parents, the military, activism, or a rapist—that they couldn’t harm myself as well as I could.

The series of events that had to occur for me to pull myself away from destroying my body started with the person that was doing the most harm to me. And that was myself. I can’t honestly say what events led me out of the dark, but by the time I graduated from my undergrad, I was “completely healed.” I had pulled myself away from destroying my physical body and had channeled that energy into school. I don’t remember feeling a sense of ease. I don’t remember feeling anything at all. I channeled my energy to create a cloud around me to shield myself.

I had changed the home that was supposed to house my spirit; that it came back and was even more lost because I was not me anymore. I was a new version of myself, and my spirit did not know if it was safe to come inside yet.

The person I became to survive, remained with me. I became a master of compartmentalization; kept so busy that I didn’t have a spare thought. It was then when I would come to my reckoning.

the returning

The years that followed my graduation was both the darkest and the brightest moments of my healing. I had moved to a new city for more schooling, but I was completely unprepared for the amount of love that would pour into me. For so long, I emulated my spirit—wandering and running—and this was a time where I could not run, even when I wanted to. It was impossible not to heal, not to want to be better.

It was my community. We should never underestimate the power of community. We are constantly told  to “work on ourselves” in isolation. What I desperately needed in my healing was community and connection. There is no other inspiration for change and self-care than the love and accountability that comes with community. I felt an obligation to do better to be a safer, healthier version of myself for my community. The way they fiercely held up a mirror to the person that they saw and nudged me to accept the person I was, to let go of the person I was no longer obligated to be.

The turning point was when a colleague spoke to me about an observation she had of our interactions. She said, “You do this thing when you’re about to cry” and continued to explain that it looked like I was trying to run, to escape my feelings, to embody strength but never quite allowing myself to give up control of my emotions. To her, this was just another moment of holding space for truth, as we had done before. But this one was different. She was saying “You don’t have to run from yourself here.” I wanted to come home, and my community reminded me that home was wherever we were together. That home required all of us to be alive to be there. It required us to feel—yes, anger, hurt, disappointment, and frustration, but also—love, joy, mediocrity, audacity, and hope.

It was me. I healed myself when no one else could. I became the version of me that I needed. The version of me that I was the proudest of. The version of me that my younger self never could’ve imagined.

No one ever tells you the grief that comes with healing. The grief of letting go of the person I was when that person was so epitomal to my survival. Letting go never means forgetting, it simply means to make peace. The honor and love I feel for the people I had to become is undying. My fear in letting go was that I would not be left whole when past versions, habits, and thoughts could no longer hold me hostage. But letting go meant I had space to accept the person I was growing into. There are still days I feel my body isn’t my own, but it never discounts the loving I have done to get to this point. Healing is messy and nonlinear; I am still doing it to this day. 

I asked my whole self to come home—I had never asked myself to come home before, but when I asked, my spirit listened. I wondered if it had been waiting this entire time to be invited home. I set realistic expectations; I reminded myself that it was never going to be completely safe, that the intricacies of life did not give me the ability to promise that. But that I would protect, nurture, and embrace myself with compassion and forgiveness while honoring my anger. My spirit returned with apprehension, set the expectation with me that it was still a wanderer, but home was where she was rooted. She ignited parts of me and remained my mirror on the days I could not look at myself. We are better now; we are the result of what happens when community pours love into us—when we pour that love into ourselves.

the next part

There was a point recently where I realized who I had become.

The sun was loving as it cast rainbows against the wall in my apartment; it was beautiful, but I was uncomfortable in my futon. I had a lingering headache from the brightness, lying down to escape its rays. I had my phone in my hand and it hit me. I wrote, “I want to be alive for this next part.” Writing it out made it real. It meant I was onto the net part of my journey; it meant that I could lay to rest the parts of me that wanted to die. “I’m so ready to live for myself. It’s looking pretty good. Not easy, but good. Like I want to be here for the next parts, and not just because it’s for other people. I really want to see what’s next. I want to enjoy this next part of my life.”

Never will it discredit the person(s) I was to get myself here. Nor the people I lost along the way (even if it was myself). It simply means, I am onto the next part. The part where I rest. The part where I love fiercely. The part where I am still. The part where I hold my spirit close to me as I nurture it—as it nurtures me. The part where I recuperate on an individual level to ensure my strength for when I reconvene and come for the cultural, institutional harm done to myself, to others.

In a world that thrives on our burnout, I will do everything in my power to normalize rest for myself, and the ones I love. I want to be alive for this next part. This is my return home.