June 23, 2017
Ho Chu Minh City (Phu My), Vietnam
Note: Potentially upsetting topics such as mental illness and war are discussed in this piece.
I always joke that in a horror movie, I would be the first to die. I
would be the first to die by choice. As soon as I became aware of what was
going on, I would walk right out and demand the evil spirit take me early on. I
am not going through all the running and screaming and two-hour movie when the
ending will be the same. Just kill me now please and thank you.
Horror movies are different from reality, of course. I started reading
the Hunger Games series last summer (I’m starting the third book now), and I
wondered if my logic would be the same. In the Hunger Games, I would most
likely die, and early on I’ll bet. Would I fight for my life in this fictional
world?
Or, a more disturbing question: would I survive a war time, like that
of the Vietnam war?
There are other factors that go into this, ones with much darker
realities. As most or all of you reading this know, I have struggled with
serious depression and anxiety for my entire young adult life. I take
medication to treat my symptoms, but mental illness is not something that
disappears as soon as you drop some pills. It is a lifelong disorder, and
something that rears its ugly head when you least expect it.
In general, I have been free from my depressive symptoms for about two
years now, maybe more. But there is an indelible mark depression leaves, one
that my family is still struggling to understand and one that disturbs me to
this day. Depression takes away your will to live.
There are stories you hear, especially from war and violent times,
when people defeat all the odds fighting to survive. They are the stories of
those who are so desperate to keep living that they make do in the worst
situations, begging the universe to let them keep going one more day. My story
is not one of those. And it was with this mindset that I set about examining
the photos in the war remnants museum in Vietnam, trying to understand the men
and women who gave everything for their country.
I don’t want to get into the politics of war. If you must know, I am a
pacifist, and a pretty extreme one at that. I do not believe I deserve to say
who lives or dies; killing someone else, even in self-defense, I see as
choosing their life over mine. I do not believe that is my call to make.
Soldiers who come back from war are never the same. I took (and aced)
a class last semester called “Trauma and Memory”, where we discussed the
theories of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder at length. One of the arguments
against PTSD in war veterans is that war is not normal. Mental illness is an
abnormal reaction to a normal situation. When I started shrieking and
shuddering in the Vietnam market because there was a tub of eels that reminded
me of snakes and I have nightmares about snakes because I have a sleep
disorder—that’s an abnormal reaction to a healthy and safe situation. Men and
women in war are in situations so far outside the normal human experience we
cannot even imagine. Wouldn’t being depressed, scared, and sleepless be a
perfectly normal reaction to that situation?
So back to my initial question: would I survive? In a way, I wish I
could say no. I wish I could say I would die and I would be at peace with that.
But the reality is much more complex than simply if I would have the will to
live.
The reality of this is: in the worst conditions imaginable, would I
rise to the challenge? Would I protect myself and value my life, despite what
it would mean for the world around me? Considering everything I have been
through in my life, both physically and in my own troubled mind, would I
persevere? Would my strength in battling my own mind translate to a higher
confidence when danger and anxiety is the actual reality?
What would you do? How would you survive?
With love from Vietnam, humbly,
Rivi
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