mad diaries: 5 things i (re)learned in 2025
lessons on grief, love, longing, and care work
i experienced the deepest of griefs and the brightest of joys in 2025. here is a letter to myself, in memory of so much transformation and reckoning this year.
sometimes in you’s and sometimes in i’s - in reflection of the varying ways that i relate with myself.
1. tend to grief when it calls to you in ways you can no longer deny. grief is a portal and an invitation to tend to spirit.
if you’re spiritually exhausted, tend to grief. if you are burned out from supporting people trying to survive eugenics, genocide, late-stage capitalism, tend to grief. if you constantly tell yourself that you’re fine because maybe you are in comparison to the multiply marginalized kin around you but actually you’re not as okay as you think, tend to grief. if a sense of indebtedness is what has driven your mad survival, tend to grief. if you’ve dissevered yourself into parts that feel too fragmented to mend together, tend to grief. if you’ve now lived twice the lifetime of your childhood best friend, tend to grief. if you’re entering a new decade of life, tend to grief. if you mourn the spark within you that you know you’re capable of but can’t seem to access, tend to grief. if your love breaks you open, tend to grief. if your rage devours you whole, tend to grief.
if you want to live life like it’s yours again, tend to grief.
go through the archives and face the pieces that you’ve been neglecting. look at old photos and listen to songs from your childhood. acknowledge the ways that you’ve been trying to survive. spend extra time tasting water each morning to notice that you’re still here, still alive. spend an extra moment tasting this water for those who are violently taken away from us. and another moment in the knowing that water connects all of us.
write letters to 13 of your people who have made your 30 possible. write letters for your parents with the words that you’ve been holding for the past 10 years, the ones that are still too hard to say out loud. but write them because it’s time and you’d rather leave blots of tears in the paper than regret having words unshared when it’s too late. look up at the sky and breathe deep breaths as you do so.
identify the throughlines that have held you throughout the fragmentation and the many seasons of yourself. go back to your old tumblr blogs and read the haikus you wrote when life didn’t feel doable. touch moss and lean on trees. practice surrender with your back against the trunk of a cedar tree and know that you are held. remind yourself that you are capable of grief. your capacity for grief shapes your capacity for joy. spend time with the people who enhance your yes to life1. write them love letters. pray into the earth. know that you are a part of creation. you are nature. swim in multiple bodies of water and cry into the ocean. pray into the ocean. start to feel the magic of life again. know that you still have that spark of life within you.
who knew it would take so much water to fuel a fire?2
2. celebrating life is not in opposition to, but is in parallel with grieving death & loss.
there is so much state-sanctioned death and we need to celebrate life while we have it. the point of all this organizing is not merely to prevent preventable (slow & fast) death. yes, there is so much of it and so we practice grief. and. the point of all this organizing is for life. survivors guilt will not bring them back. working from a sense of indebtedness does not sustain our bodies or our movements. proximity to death teaches us the fragility and precarity of life. and so we nourish, cherish, and celebrate life while we have it.
you are still alive and i need you to live like you know its value.
yes, you wouldn’t be here if not for them and so yes, your life isn’t merely yours. and, i need you to live your life like it’s yours. claim it. cultivate and reclaim your sense of aliveness.
declare life with audacity—i am alive.
i am alive.
i am alive.
i am alive.
again, your capacity for grief shapes your capacity for joy. your capacity for death shapes your capacity for life. you know death well, so lean into life. it is irresponsible and silly to deny ourselves life when life is the fucking point.
3. my loving is an expression of my aliveness and it is reflected back in what i receive.
8 years of committed study & practice in the art of loving and i am reaffirmed that my relationships (& my relating) are my legacy. love as an act of will, as an act of extending oneself for the spiritual growth of oneself/another3. where self and other are not separate, but intertwined.4 i am committed to love. not an object of love, but to love itself. i love well, through beginnings, middles, and especially, endings, rooted in praxis.
while these skills bring me so much joy, i am reminded that my commitment to love began with my refusal to die. studying the art of loving in order to survive. oh, the joys of mad loving. the gift of being loved by a mad person whose relational skills were/are so tragically and strategically cultivated as an act of survival. iykyk!
and what a joy to receive the reflection of the love that i put out into the world. inviting and receiving affirming feedback as a birthday request in my turning 30 has been one of the most life-changing (and yet simple!) experiences. to be so deeply & specifically witnessed and seen by my people. to be celebrated.
to have kin burst into tears and tell me,
i’m so glad that you’re (still) here.5
for fellow mad kin to share,
in the process of your staying alive, you have effectively been integral in saving mine.6
false humility does not make us accountable7 and so i receive their affirming feedback, with full embodied knowing. how dare i play small and insignificant? i can no longer deny the ways that i shape my people as they do me. they reflect back the love that i pour out into them. of course. of course. i will write more about this experience but wow, it is not for the weak-hearted. to be made to confront and face the love in my life. i have never cried so many tender tears of love.
thank you to my people for loving me, seeing me, knowing me. this is the love that will sustain us in the face of and resistance against fascism and empire. this is the love that builds new worlds.
4. i am committed to cultivating a therapeutic practice that nourishes me as well as my people.
i already am and have been the practitioner that i dreamed of becoming. and beyond.
the actually abolitionist, mad-affirming practitioner that interrogates their own complicity in the mental health industrial complex and is deeply and creatively committed to practicing differently. i already am and have been the therapist that i needed as a youth.
but that original goal didn’t account for me as the practitioner, only on how i served others. five years in, after burnout and spiritual exhaustion, is the perfect time for a reckoning, for a new orientation to my work.
being a therapist-ish, or even a liberatory careworker has never felt enough. and i am reminded that it’s not actually meant to, just the way that mutual aid is important but incomplete. the way public protest is important but incomplete. the way political organizing is important but incomplete.
recognizing the value of my care work will not turn me into a boba liberal so-called anti-oppressive therapist that doesn’t do shit outside of sessions. i never have been and i never will. what i do is not “therapy” as society knows it. “therapy” could never. this practice is mad legacy. this mad femme care work is a form of tending to the impact of this world on our souls8. i cannot devalue my work any longer. false humility does not make us accountable and i need to believe my people when they tell me this work is helpful, needed, liberatory.
in the releasing of my sense of indebtedness, in the recognition of mad legacy, in the knowing that this relational work is what sustains our resistance & worldbuilding, i long for a therapeutic practice that also takes care of me, that recognizes my edges, the limitations of my bodymind. i already am and have been the practitioner that my younger self needed. and i am committed to becoming the practitioner that my older self needs me to be because this is my role and i cannot afford to burn out. 5 years in, and i am committed to cultivating a practice that nourishes me as well as my people.
5. to long for is to be alive. to deny myself of yearning is a form of death.
oops, turns out i do want romantic love.
i have decentered romantic love in the commitment to anti-mononormativity and the refusal to devalue platonic relationships. my platonic relationships are the central relationships of my life and are the pillars of my critical polyamory. and. i have been in denial that perhaps i do long for romantic love, maybe even romantic partnership. i have been in denial because i worked so hard over the years to become my favourite lover and to center friendships in my life. and i feel so abundant, relationally. so why would i face the immense grief around covid and queerness in the pursuit of romantic/non-platonic love?
but in the glimpse of a short & sweet summer romance, i learned that i do long for romantic love. ugh, so goddamn vulnerable to acknowledge. i used to lose myself in this form of longing, but i am no longer that person. i am rooted in myself and my people and my skills and my structures. i am capable of endings, of heartbreak, of messiness. so i shall embrace longing again. to deny myself of yearning is a form of death. to long for is to be alive. may life-enhancing, erotic-body-joy love flow into my life. a romantic love that invites me to trust again.
may i be ready with my full embodied yes when romantic love arrives.
in solidarity & with care,
ji-youn.
→ ji’s invitations: sign up for announcements on offerings
thank you to my love, gabes torres, who shared that i enhance their yes to life.
thank you to shivani narang for guiding me through the mad grief work all year. for these perfect words this summer when i shared about all the swimming in multiple bodies of water that ignited the fire of life within me again.
BOOK: Erich Fromm, the art of loving
BOOK: bell hooks, all about love
thank you to the client community member who made me CRY in session with these words!
thank you to the client community member who wrote me a goddamn ESSAY on mad survival. mad, queer, asian kinship is everything.
thank you to my supervisor, S. M., who helped me realize that i had quite the inaccurate self-assessment. for our work that confronted me to work on receiving affirming feedback & shift my therapeutic practice. for these words that will stay with me forever.
thank you to my other supervisor, Fayza Bundali for our work all year on tending to my spiritual exhaustion. on helping me find the words of commitment “a therapeutic practice that nourishes me as well as my people.” for these words on what it is that we do with our work. for role-modeling slow practitionership, a disability justice praxis that includes us as practitioners.
this was everything <3