letter

Letter to Another Survivor (essay)

Prose

On October 6, 2018, I wrote a thank-you email to Christine Blasey Ford for her congressional testimony. I shared intimate, vulnerable details of my life because I thought she could understand as another survivor. I share it with you all in the hopes that you can have greater empathy for us as survivors and victims.

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Dear Professor Blasey Ford,

As a concerned American and fellow survivor of sexual violence, I followed Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process through the news with a good deal of interest. I thought your testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee was brave and inspiring. From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to thank you. Even though he was ultimately confirmed, your efforts meant the world to me and to survivors across the country.

His confirmation to the Supreme Court is particularly painful for me, given that I attended law school in pursuit of my belief in government institutions to create and maintain justice. Perhaps I was too naive. Perhaps not. But I know that the Senate did not give you justice with their vote today. The FBI did not do you justice with its limited and cursory investigation. And the White House did not seek justice for you with its partisan trickery and manipulations.

Disappointment is not new for me. Yet I continue to weep when such news reaches me. My father sexually abused me throughout my childhood, starting from when I was just two or three years old. When I attempted suicide during my second year of law school and sought help from Harvard (we were entitled to 10 free mental health sessions per year as students), I was told that since I was off-campus for an externship program (for which I was receiving school credit), they would not provide any resources to me. 

On my own, I exerted great efforts to transform my life and to treat myself with care and kindness, including changing my inner dialogue with myself (no tolerance for diminishing self-talk, reasoning through my beliefs, delving deeper into philosophy to structure a more positive worldview) and developing healthy habits (curbing alcohol consumption, limiting processed food intake, incorporating exercise, using stretching/mindfulness/essential oils to reduce stress, embracing arts/crafts, picking up the violin again). During this time, my dissociation was extremely difficult to manage, and I endured periods of numbness when I felt incapable of connecting to any emotion. For the first time in my life, I felt genuinely concerned that I could lose touch entirely with reality, and had nightmares reflecting that anxiety. During my third year of law school, I went into the health center to be assessed for ADHD. I got a neuropsych test that confirmed my suspicion of inattentive-type ADHD, but not before the prescriber, Dr. David Abramson, attempted to block me from getting help. 

During my last semester, I started dating Dr. Jon Einarsson (ob/gyn surgeon at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, professor at Harvard Medical School). He came to visit me December 2-3, 2017, when he transmitted chlamydia and garderella vaginalis to me. After examining our text communications and writing down all of our experiences together, I determined that he is a psychopath, and that the STI transmissions were premeditated, deliberate, and malicious.

In the aftermath of that sexual battery, I have been diagnosed with PTSD and fibromyalgia. I had to take a leave from work– a pastime that was a source of great fulfillment in my life. All of this to say that I know what it feels like to be abandoned; to appeal to power only to have your cries for help fall on deaf ears. I just want you to know that you are not alone, that you’ve never been alone. I and countless others stand with you.

Wishing you strength and love,

Ally

College Freshman Writing Assignment – Reflection

Prose

Ally Chiu                                                                                                Professor James Polchin

GLS Writing II                                                                                                         11 March 2010

Reflective Letter

This essay was a struggle for me, as I imagine it was for many people. As an adolescent in college, I feel that I am still attempting to discover myself. Although I do hold beliefs and convictions, I don’t believe they have been challenged enough because they haven’t really been exposed to the world yet. This, I believe, has made it difficult to articulate the reasons why I believe in certain things, and to further convince others that they should believe the same. If I don’t have a thorough understanding of something, how can I persuade you that it’s right and infallible? It’s just not convincing.

The lack of motivation for this assignment has made the writing process extremely tedious and painful. I found myself procrastinating for endless hours to avoid working on the draft, and after a certain point, each sentence had to be squeezed out with enormous difficulty. This may have affected the flow and readability of the essay. I find that it’s easier to formulate a cohesive and focused argument if more of it has been composed in one sitting. During the revision process, I tried to improve the flow and structure of the piece.

I chose to write this letter to my father. This presented a different challenge for me because it’s difficult for a child to criticize her parents, especially since I admire my father so much. I believe I owe much of my way of thinking to him. I feel like he’s opened up my mind about the world and encouraged an attitude that makes it possible for me to be understanding and accepting toward others. Who can fault a man like that? It feels audacious and pretentious of me to find fault with someone to whom I owe my life. And as my father’s daughter, I believe that this has made me blind to his faults for a very long time. Now that I’ve grown up a bit more and moved away from home, I can adopt a more impartial attitude in regarding my parents and their idiosyncrasies, though never entirely so. Human nature ordains that it is infinitely easier to point out the faults of others than to identify these faults within ourselves. This is why people can be unconsciously guilty of hypocrisy, and why they can belittle other individuals, races, cultures, or nationalities of something while they are just as liable to the same. 

The nature of my father’s criticisms of me was not academic. My parents did not put any pressure on me to do well in school. For the most part, my father would analyze shortcomings in my personality and urge me to correct them. Regarding this aspect, it’s difficult to determine how effective his methods were. I don’t think I’m a reliable judge to gauge this sort of improvement, but I don’t think it was the best method to approach the problem. 

It’s a fine line to tread between directed and open. Part of the difficulty of this assignment is that it must develop some sort of significance outside of the events I describe that transpired between me and my father. My father is supposed to be representative of some larger audience, some abstract group of people who I’m actually addressing, even while my father’s name is the one printed at the top of the page. In order to achieve this, I must be able to differentiate which qualities are unique to my father, and the characteristics that my father and this larger group of people share. These shared characteristics are the ones that truly need to be questioned and refuted. However, my father is a man who has been shaped by his own past and experiences. He’s been molded by the places he’s lived in and by the culture that he’s been immersed in. Part of my father’s attitude that I critique in my essay has some sort of cultural basis or foundation, but I believe it would be presumptuous to assume that it is a phenomenon unique only to the Chinese or merely to Confucian cultures. I am not simply issuing a dispute against all oppressive Asian parents, but rather refuting the idea that learning and education necessarily has to be attached to negative feedback or crippling pressure to reap profit. I wanted this essay to be less of a critique on my father’s parenting skills (because I don’t believe my siblings and I grew up to be terrible people) and more of a query about the ideas that governed his parenting. I had to learn to separate my personal narration to a specific individual, my father, to be able to open up my argument to a universal level. 

Letter to Young Me

Prose

If you feel like other people are selfish and lacking empathy, you are correct. People like us do human development backwards. Before we can develop our own ego, we must build our empathy and ability to cast ourselves into the minds of others. It’s how we survived.

But when the time comes, when that danger is behind you, you can focus on developing your ego. You will learn to be selfish while others are still figuring out how to be selfless. You’ll be building yourself from scratch, while it appears everyone else is already complete.

Will I ever stop feeling different? You must have wondered that a million times. You will never be like most people. You will always be a minority. That’s a state of existence you must accept about yourself. But you aren’t destined to be existentially alone. In that elusive intersection between you and other people, when your paths to development overlap and intersect, you can feel connection so powerful it will make your soul soar. But you must seek it. Such treasures do not hide in plain view.

You are special, young me. You are a treasure. Many will want to plunder you, but some will want to cherish you. Such is our blessing and curse.

It’s a strange, liminal place to be. Being able to relate to almost everyone but pretty much no one can relate to you.