Mimi Zhu has used their immensely popular Instagram platform to connect with people across the globe. And now the author of the newsletter “Write, to Heal,” which also has a dedicated following, is speaking to their audience in a new medium with their debut memoir, Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection.
Zhu, who was raised in Australia and lives in New York, brings their belief and practice of writing as a healing process into book form. For three years, Zhu endured both emotional and physical abuse in a deeply destructive and harmful relationship. Throughout their memoir, Zhu refers to this person as X. They capture the process of healing with incredible compassion, writing honestly about grief, anger, numbness, and fear, and how community, connection, and ultimately, love are the salve to past traumas. In a series of interconnected essays, Zhu touches on the inevitable messiness that comes from surviving violence in many forms — from intimate relationships to the broader destructive structures in place. Ultimately, this book is a celebration and relic of a dark moment when, as Zhu says, they were doing their “best during a time where I didn’t even know if I could come out of it.”
Shondaland spoke to Zhu about numbness and grief, the ancient nature of emotion, what dreams may come, and the “intersections of love and fear.”
SARAH NEILSON: Can you talk about the relationship between the two emotions of fear and love and how your thinking around it changed over the course of writing the book?
MIMI ZHU: I like to explore the intersections of fear and love. I think they overlap constantly, or we confuse one of them for the other. I wrote this book about fear and love in relationship to each other because of that conflation and also because, for me, I was noticing a lot of terror in how scared I was to explore love again. The focal point of the book is unpacking that. What I was afraid of was not love; the book itself explores what love is and what love means to me. It comes to a place where love is a state of embodiment, not so much something that you search for or that you hold on to and grasp onto and control, but it’s something that already exists within you. If we are afraid of what’s within us, then it’s an obstacle to getting closer to ourselves. That, for me, was a big part of the book writing process and a huge point of the book — that we experience a lot of fear surrounding love, but what we fear is not actually love. What we fear are all the other things that have attached themselves to love, misconstrued themselves as love. I also feel like fear can be a form of protection, or it can be an instinct that asks us to take care of ourselves while at the same time really getting to the root of fear. Both fear and love, I think, actually bring us closer to what love really is.
Penguin Life
SN: There’s a line that reads, “I like to imagine every emotion as a vital sacred protector, an ancestor embodied as a feeling, telling me in their own language what I have been taught to overlook.” What is the importance of connecting the emotions within us to ancestors?
MZ: I think the core message in that is just trying to say that every emotion holds validity. Of course, there are really intrusive thoughts and feelings that kind of take over and make you sink into them or feel really consumed by them. It can be healthy to kind of sink into an emotion in that way, but I also do think that it’s just a point of being present with your body and listening to what these emotions are trying to tell you. And for me in my healing process, something that I found quite harmful for me was pushing feelings away constantly, especially when they were uncomfortable or difficult. I think emotions can all just be very generous offerings of something deeper within us. And when I speak of [the] ancestral, I mean something that’s existed long before us, something that I may not personally even be able to name but that exists within us almost like an instinct or just something that’s ingrained in us that existed long before we’re even aware of it. When I say that feelings are ancestors, I just mean that they are ancient and that they are offerings.
SN: Can you talk about the role of numbness in the journey of healing, especially from trauma? Why did you decide to start the book with that emotion?
MZ: It’s interesting to start the book off with numbness. When I made that choice, I was like, “I can’t just write a chapter about numbness not being valid,” because it was actually such a huge part of my healing journey because I prolonged it. I wrote about how I manipulated numbness and tried to extend it beyond its time, while at the same time I am grateful for the numbness that I was granted, and I’m grateful for that period where I was able to discern these emotions that were coming up for me, almost like a moment of reprieve. And it’s interesting because it is an inherent part of all of our healing journeys. I think that it’s an offering that is important for us to really become aware of and understand instead of just manipulate and control. Again, that’s the core message of my book — it’s not about controlling or manipulating emotions but about sitting with them and listening to what they’re telling us. With numbness specifically, I’m really grateful for the moments of reprieve that I’ve been granted and also the lessons that I’ve had in extending my numbness, and also learning from the harm that that caused me and not wanting to repeat those cycles.
SN: How did you approach thinking and writing about the overlaps and divergences of intimate relationships and relationship with the state, and how violence manifests in both?
MZ: This book for me is about relation, it’s about being in relation to the world, and I couldn’t write about that specific harmful relationship [with X] without considering the other harmful relationships that I am a part of, and that is especially with the state. In doing so, and in writing about X in a really intensive way, I also was thinking about his relationship to the state and what within the state or what within his upbringing and the oppression that he faced, what relationship does he have with patriarchy? What relationship does he have with emotional suppression that is ingrained by states of supremacy, states of white supremacy, states of misogyny? I’m not here to say this relationship is exactly mirroring the other; what I am saying is that these relationships are interconnected, and what we learn from our relationship to the world and with the state directly impacts our relationships with each other. I wrote this book for survivors and for myself. And for this book, I hope that survivors can [learn], in a way, not to take on the weight of the violence that they should not have endured but instead additionally see it as all these relationships taking place, and it being a bigger framework of needing to change. That’s really, really important for me, and for survivors to feel some kind of peace in themselves, to be like, “I didn’t deserve that.” It wasn’t easy to write at all because there were moments where I felt this sense of despair. But at the same time, while I believe in the interconnections of all things, including the violence that we experience, I also believe in the interconnections of healing, and that’s what I want to focus on.
SN: How do those ideas of community and interconnection contribute to your healing and your own sense of self?
MZ: Especially with the sense of self, I think we’ve been taught in a Western framework that a sense of self is hyper-individualistic. But I think to get closer to yourself, you have to get closer to what you are connected with. I really wanted to write a book that could talk about the ways in which there aren’t these black or white distinctions and that it’s a very nuanced culmination in coming together, like a watercolor painting of all these mixed parts that create these beautiful energies. Specifically with my sense of self, I remember I was feeling so adamant about having this sense of hyper-independence, thinking that was a form of self-love, but then I felt extremely isolated and almost like the boost was always ego and not spirit. Whenever I felt proud of myself, it was always concerning what I achieved on my own. That actually felt very isolating and unfulfilling. What I’ve learned is that I am deeply connected to the community that I’m a part of, and that actually allowed me to come closer to myself because I was given the opportunity to see other people being honest with themselves, to see what their love is connected to, and for my love to have a relationship with their embodied love. I really would not be the writer I am today without my community. And when I do celebrate this book as it comes out, I’m not just celebrating myself, but I’m celebrating every single person that made writing this book possible, because the whole idea of this book is being in relation, and I could not have written this book if I wasn’t in relation to anyone.
This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
SN: Can you elaborate on the importance of that for you, of learning from and citing other writers, thinkers, and artists?
MZ: My friend Neema [Githere] is a theorist, an organizer, and one of my dearest and closest friends. And they actually introduced to me the importance of rigorous citation, especially of Black feminist writers. Because there is a history of a lot of Black theory being erased, a lot of critical theory written by non-white people being erased. So, I think it’s extremely important to cite extremely rigorously. It almost felt like every footnote was also a little moment of gratitude. I cannot write a book without extending that gratitude to all the conversations and people that I’ve been in relationship with and in community with.
SN: There’s a line where you write that “All we can know is what we care about and how we lovingly choose to hold it close.” What are you holding close right now?
MZ: I’m holding on to everyone who has supported me through this journey. I started giving some of my best friends the book just for them to read in advance and to hold in their arms, and that’s been so deeply emotional for me because they’ve been there with me since the assault, in some cases even since I met X. It’s so emotional giving my friends these books because they know on the deepest level possible why I venture into writing about love and fear the ways that I do. Holding on to community and holding close the will to celebrate. Celebration is not always the easiest thing for me to do, especially myself, but I have to follow my own advice from the book and celebrate myself because I am really proud of myself for writing a book that is honest, and is beautiful, and is messy and nuanced and imperfect but is still a relic of me trying my best during a time where I didn’t even know if I could come out of it. And another thing that I’m holding close is the dreams that I still want to wander into and that are to come.
Celebrate Be Not Afraid of Love with Mimi Zhu. Check out their tour dates here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Neilson is a freelance writer. They can be found on Twitter @sarahmariewrote.
Get Shondaland directly in your inbox: SUBSCRIBE TODAY
"Love" - Google News
August 24, 2022 at 06:00PM
https://ift.tt/ot8X1h3
Mimi Zhu Is No Longer 'Afraid of Love' - Shondaland.com
"Love" - Google News
https://ift.tt/mHcZ98S
https://ift.tt/ehYRcoH
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Mimi Zhu Is No Longer 'Afraid of Love' - Shondaland.com"
Post a Comment