Drained
This morning our toilet was acting up again. You know that little rubber stopper that goes up when you flush a toilet? Ours is just a little too small, or it doesn’t land exactly over the hole it covers, which means it sometimes leaves a small sliver open — just enough room for water to slowly drain from the tank into the bowl. This causes the tank to occasionally refill on its own because the float mechanism senses the water level has dropped.
Anyway, it’s been an ongoing problem, although one that doesn’t happen frequently enough for me to care to fix it, and this morning it was doing it again. I tried the usual solution (opening up the tank and pushing the rubber stopper out a little and down so that it has a firm seal), but after two or three tries it was still draining water down into the bowl. “FUCK YOU!!” I shouted at the toilet as loud as I could, if you want to know how my morning went.
My therapist told me anger is an umbrella emotion. Meaning, it covers other emotions. What surfaces as anger often has as its source other emotions buried underneath — anxiety or sadness or fear, for example. Anger is simply the tip of the iceberg.
Kaitlin always wakes up before me, and twice in the past three mornings the first thing she’s said to me after I get up is: “Have you read the news?” The soft, somber way she asks this question lets me know something bad has happened. Last week it was about the 18-year-old Indiana University student who was repeatedly stabbed in the head for “being Chinese.” On Sunday it was about the Star Ballroom Dance Studio shooting in Monterey Park. Today it was about the mass shooting in Half Moon Bay. By the start of this week, there had already been 39 separate shootings where four or more people were injured or killed. I mean, we’re only 24 days into the year — how have we had an average of 1.5 mass shootings per day???
I’ve written about this a couple times before, but I’m sick of guns. I’m sick of how a small number of Americans own so many guns. I’m sick of how we treat these incidents as a tragedy that can’t possibly be prevented. I’m sick of how Republicans refuse to do a goddamn thing to help enact legislation that can solve this problem. I’m sick of how mass shooters target people at dance clubs or work or schools or concerts or movie theaters or places of worship or grocery stores — public spaces where we should all feel safe to be. I’m sick of how these fuckers are almost always men, almost always white, and almost always young.
Which is why it was so surprising to learn that in both Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay the perpetrators were East Asian men in their late 60s or early 70s. I mean, what the hell is going on here? Not that there’s any way to make sense of senseless violence, but this shit is frustratingly confounding.
If my dad were still alive he’d be turning 75 next month. That puts him close enough in age to these two shooters. I think one of my dad’s brothers might be 72, and my mind just does not compute uncle Jonathan causing violence on this kind of scale. I mean, that’s largely because Jonathan is a pretty mellow guy, but it’s also because no one should be committing violence like this — let alone someone of his age. What’s even worse to think about, though, is Jonathan going out to a place like the Star Ballroom Dance Studio for a fun Saturday night and not ever coming home again.
I don’t know if we’re ever going to find out what led to the Monterey Park shooting. It’s hard not to think that it wasn’t calculated to inflict the most amount of pain possible, what with it being a predominately East Asian neighborhood and at a location near a large Lunar New Year celebration. This kind of cruelty is what makes me the angriest.
Actually, that’s not quite true. What makes me the angriest is how these two fuckers give the rest of us in the AAPI community a bad name. I’m worried about the backlash. Stop AAPI Hate has been amassing reports of anti-AAPI harassment since the start of the pandemic. Their latest report came out in July of last year and covered the period of March 2020 to March 2022. In those 24 months there were almost 11,500 reported incidents — an average of about 480 incidents a month, or about 16 per day. Keep in mind that this number is only a small fraction of the total number of incidents, many of which go unreported.
I was a senior in college when a 23-year-old Korean American killed 32 people and wounded 17 others at Virginia Tech. It remains the deadliest school shooting in US history, and for a time it was the deadliest mass shooting in US history. (That distinction now goes to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.)
I was at James Madison University, only a couple hours north of Tech, and I was in a computer lab on campus when I first heard the news. This guy was the same age as me, attending a school close to where I was, and although he had been born in South Korea, he had lived in the United States since he was eight. I still remember how uncomfortable I felt walking around campus in the days after the shooting. Not because I felt unsafe, but because I didn’t want anyone to think that I was going to shoot up their classroom. I didn’t want anyone to be afraid of me.
In hindsight, this was very much a young person’s response to the tragedy: I wasn’t worried about my safety because I felt just as invincible as anyone else does in their early 20s. Rather, I was worried people wouldn’t like me. I was worried I wouldn’t fit in.
Now that I’m older and have more anxiety about death and dying, my reaction to the news from this week isn’t so much fear that people won’t like me, but rather fear that people will want to hurt me (either verbally or physically, online or in the real world) simply because I kind of look like other East Asian men who have done something horrifically bad. The pandemic has already caused a spike in anti-AAPI hate. At a time when we should be trying to extinguish the flame, what we don’t need is more fuel to add to the fire. Shit like this just makes our community seem more dangerous, more worthy of suspicion, more other than we’re already made to feel on a day-to-day basis.
Because, here’s the thing: Young white guys, no one is going to assume you’re a potential active shooter — even though statistically you are. And, truth be told, maybe other people don’t assume that of me, either. But the fact that it even crosses my mind as a possibility is what separates people of color from whiteness. One facet of white privilege is not having to think about this shit. And, to be fair, coupling anti-AAPI harassment with America’s long history of othering any kind of non-dominant identity (be that race, gender, sexual orientation, what have you) then I think my fear is not entirely without merit.
All of which is to say: I’m sorry I yelled at the toilet this morning. The past few days have made me more sad, more anxious, and more afraid than usual. My blood pressure has been higher than normal, even with my medication. I’ve been in a bit of a funk, and the fact that we can’t seem to catch our breath before the next horrific shooting just makes it feel all the more punishing.
I think it’s important for those of us in the AAPI community to speak up about our mental health struggles. We need to let others know that they’re not alone in feeling scared or anxious or sad and that help is out there. Anger is easier to spot than fear, and it’s often a visible warning sign. In that Violence Project article I linked to above, they mention that over a third of mass shooters showed five or more crisis signs. Examples of crisis signs include: increased agitation, abusive behavior, isolation, losing reality, depressed moods, and mood swings.
But here’s the thing: I chose to take a mental health day today so that I could do what I normally do when it comes time to process things — I write. I didn’t lash out at the cats or at Kaitlin, I didn’t buy a gun and stock up on ammunition. There are better, safer, more humane ways to untangle these thoughts and emotions than violence or yelling. I happen to choose writing because organizing my ideas on the page helps me organize ideas in my mind, but you can do any number of other things that don’t involve killing or hurting someone else.
Because it comes down to choice, really. What are you going to do when you’re having a hard time at work, or a hard time in a relationship, or a hard time existing in the world? I’m pretty sure there are times when everyone feels like our faulty toilet: Energy levels slowly draining until we’re depleted. Which of course only makes things harder, because we’re exhausted and not able to think as clearly as we could otherwise. It’s in those darker moments that it’s even more important to try to see what other options are available.
In some ways, the toilet is lucky — it has a sensor to automatically refill that missing water. We humans aren’t so finely tuned, although it’s possible to notice those shifts in yourself, even if it takes some practice. Give yourself some time and patience. Go easy on yourself. It’ll be okay.
