On Body, Name, and Identity
The essay below was originally published on August 22, 2021.
Welcome to Past Bangers, a series where I re-publish some of my old work because I don't think they got enough attention the first time. Yes, this is a self-aggrandizing project. This week's Past Banger is from circa June 2019. Please exercise some caution if you're not mentally in a great place at the moment; this essay speaks in and around depressive thoughts and trauma/PTSD, though it does end on a somewhat optimistic note.
Before we begin, an introduction from 2021 me: This missive about names is timely. At time of writing, I have just sent off a round of emails asking various editors to change my byline from “artemis lin” to “Jonah Wu.” For the whole of my life, I never liked my birth name. It never seemed to fit me, and I always attempted, with failure, to have people call me by a masculine version of my name instead. I also tried a number of feminine online aliases, only for them to crumble at last under the weight of their fakery. In the end, my birth name would inevitably come back like a boomerang, and anyway, I was reluctant to throw it away full stop. It’s the only thing I still have that was given to me by my grandfather.
artemis, to some extent, acted as training wheels — I always liked its proximity to amorphous gender, thanks to one Artemis Fowl, and I had, after all, always loved the goddess of the hunt. But it was also an escape in the wrong direction. I can’t tell you how many times I’d scribbled some piteous line in my notebook: “i wish i could be artemis lin” or “artemis lin is who i want to be” — never fully realizing that naming oneself is supposed to be an act of freedom, and not one that further binds you. I had made a mistake, as it turns out. I was never confident in who I was; my identity had always felt unearned. Even after I crossed the threshold of gender, I held onto this image of perfection, grace, and intellect incarnate like it was the only reliquary worth my attention. “artemis” was also something I deliberately used to tie me to my mother, who had chosen Diana as her English name. For anyone who knows about my relationship with her, this looks like a counterintuitive move, but she, too, was something I couldn’t let go of. In The Body Keeps the Score, van der Kolk talks about how war veterans and other sufferers of PTSD often return to the source of their trauma, because for them, endorphins and stress hormones produce a paradoxically palliative effect. I suppose I had considered myself conqueror, but as it turns out, I was just another one of Maier and Seligman’s dogs, shocked into helplessness.
The only time I can remember being truly and completely myself was when I went around on the internet, between high school and college, by the name of Johan. I can’t tell you what drew me to the name other than that I simply liked it. And, judging by my written roster of fictional characters, I foster a natural love for J names. Ten years later, when I was looking for a new name to go by in casual life, I was summoned back to this brief memory. A strange but specific joy surged through me; I still loved this name. But it would have been weird, as an Asian American, to go by a distinctly Germanic name, so I did what any resourceful language tinkerer would do, and simply switched the “h” and “n.” And to my surprise, I never needed an adjustment period with “Jonah,” as I often did with my other names. Being called “Jonah” triggered an automatic function in my body. I responded without fail every time.
Reading back through this 2019 essay, it’s striking to me just how much of my body, identity, and name discomfort actually came from gender discomfort that I wasn’t fully aware of at the time. Any trans/non-binary person will tell you that, upon this realization, so many memories that held one meaning suddenly take on another under this new light. But like any interpretation of a text, it’s not as if the new reading cancels out the old — it just provides a deeper context, another dimension. More than anything, it grants clarity. It’s true that so many of my struggles with identity were because it was stolen from me before I could even remember when it was stolen, but it’s also true that I never felt comfortable with any name before because I simply wasn’t naming myself correctly. And getting the name correct means getting myself correct. Nowadays, I never feel as though I have to “become” Jonah, I am Jonah.
To name something is to give it power, and now I name myself, myself, myself.
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How many times I’ve thought of simply shedding my body.
Someone asked me once what “artemis lin” meant, whether it was an alter-ego. Something like “Sasha Fierce,” maybe. This morning, I listened to Jericho Brown speak about how he is in fact not a Jericho but a “III,” the third of his name. It felt, he said, like it wasn’t his own poem if he signed it with the third iteration of his grandfather’s name. “Jericho,” therefore, was a path to freedom. I’m afraid that “artemis” was created under much more cravenly conditions. That is: I simply don’t like my name. And I’m much too shy to let any of my published work find its way back to me. At a party yesterday I told a group of eager and drunk listeners that I’ve never submitted to my alma mater’s Class Notes. I’m a private person; no one, I declared with dramatic sweep, is allowed to know anything about my life. My friend from high school, whom I haven’t seen in nine years until this very party, and who has a preternatural knack with strangers I was never blessed with, is the opposite: everyone is privy to the details of her privacy. We laugh at the contrast. I do not say: what I’m masking with my facetious nature is a universe of hurt that I cannot move on from.
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Often I come under the delusion that a haircut or different clothes will do enough to change or mask me: that if I started looking like “x, y, z,” that people would start to treat me differently. As in: if the world stopped seeing me like the innocent and anxious youngster who’s much too easy to fuck with, as a result, maybe my countenance would change in kind. But even after changing my hair and clothes, I am still scared, I am still easy to fuck with and hard to love, passersby still peg my nervous energy and run me into the ground with the ruthlessness of pity and exclusion. I got it all wrong. It is not a chicken-and-egg cyclic dichotomy; I am a horrific field of stagnancy. Plotted but without fecundity. I am nothing if not consistent.
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One of these days, I always say to myself, I will shed my skin and be loved for the person I am. But what really is the cost of love. Jericho Brown says there is a scale between love and brutality, how you can always find one in the other, and that is a yardstick I know to be measured on my own body. What is the cost of love? It is knowing pain. It is knowing a pain so deep that it thunders from down inside the core and threatens to cleave you into two continents.
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I saw a tweet this morning that said that the moon is moving away from the Earth at the rate of two inches per year. This is like betrayal, I think. This is like loss. Think: what was cut from you, the lower rib from ribcage, set into the world on a violent and radical course. Artemis, after all, is the goddess who represents the moon. My name, the one I chose, is deliberate.
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I think of all this self-pity as weakness. My therapist, whom I will stop seeing in two weeks, will tell me to stop pathologizing myself. I contemplate lying to her and telling her that I am fine and that my depression, in advance of our parting, has cleared up, when it has not, when it has deepened into a sore. Why not, after all. What’s one more lie — when I am telling lies to myself all the time, about who I am, who I ought to be, who might feel blessed to know my presence and why would they.
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Perhaps I should have been Janus, of two-faces.
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Overall, what if I am writing to hurt myself? What if the self-excoriation has taken on a fetishistic ritual — that is, if I did not do it, I could not otherwise feel alive, or worthy, or able to breathe and feel pleasure?
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I tell myself one fiction that enables me to breathe these days. Asking myself — what kind of God would allow — ? To me? And answering, what if I were an angel, with whom God tasked to bear witness — what if I were an angel that loved humanity so much they asked to know it. And God had told me that the path would be full of pain, and I had agreed anyway. Otherwise — who would’ve wanted this?
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(And to what end, to what end, to what end.)
— — —
I cannot end like this. Morally, I am obligated towards hope. Personally, I am required to uplift myself, to be okay again, to breathe and be alive.
— — —
Probably Adrienne Rich’s most famous poem is “Diving into the Wreck,” with which shares the title of her illustrious poetry collection. The poem is a beauty in and of itself, but it’s the title that stops me in my tracks every time. Because me: a wreck; writing as an act of diving; in all of this, the implication that this is okay, the act of exploration is something beautiful to be celebrated, and we are all ruins to be excavated for wonder.
I confess: these are some of my worse days — not my worst, by far — but on these days it is hard to believe anything that comes out of my own mouth. I feel like a liar if I tell myself: I am okay whoever I am, I am valid in all of my flawed expression, what good I think of myself matters more than how I appear to others, but most of all, it is okay to be as messy as I am human, but even if I do, even if the pain is so loud that it splits me in two, this is okay. I am alive; I’m human. We circle silently / about the wreck / we dive into the hold.
“Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich.
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An endnote from 2021 Jonah: As a trans/non-binary person, I also have to mention that Rich edited and contributed greatly to a transphobic screed in the early 2000s that caused incalculable harm to trans folks, particularly trans women. To balance the moral scales (I'm a Libra, after all), I'm also linking you to Stephen Ira's fantastic poem, "A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill," which engages with, critiques, and transforms Rich's own work. It's one of the best poems I've read this year.