Monday Matter: Aging alone, girlfriends and a new crisis hotline
Your weekly Foreign Bodies roundup
Every Monday, I send subscribers and gift recipients of immigrant mental health and storytelling newsletter Foreign Bodies stories I recently inhaled and adored. This is also a chance to do some housekeeping and give shout-outs and all that jazz.
First things first
A little housekeeping
Two weeks later, chugging along.
Good Monday morning, Foreign Bodies readers! I’ve been away for a bit after a heavy depressive funk, lots of sleeping in, more take-out than I can actually afford and some much-needed, albeit temporary healing. I felt a little empty without a newsletter to spend time with every week, but I know now how necessary it was to take a hiatus and feel this eagerness to return. A handful of things, people, creatures etc. lifting me up these days:
a short but sweet trip to Charleston with my besties
reading from Afterparties by the late Anthony Veasna So to said besties on the beach
weightlifting
these kajal eyeliners from Indian-owned brand Kulfi Beauty
Prozac (phew, but seriously)
hosting my college girlfriends for a lovely summer dinner party
sweet, cold and juicy watermelon to accompany this Georgia heat
a shared disdain for a certain #BookTok author
Borgen, a Danish political drama on Netflix following the country's first female prime minister
that feeling where you miss the people you love and can’t wait to hug them again
my animals, always
doing the AJC Peachtree Road Race with my dad
A musical start to your Mondays 🎧
One song to groove to, cry to, drive to and share
I just love listening to Brazilian songwriter Qinhones’ silky voice during my daily post-workout golden hour cleaning sprees.
Resource(s) of the week
Something helpful and interesting and cool (*storytelling opportunity)
988: the United States’ first nationwide three-digit mental health crisis hotline, where instead of a dispatcher sending police, firefighters or paramedics, 9-8-8 will connect callers with trained mental health counselors
Moribayssa: Women Overcoming Obstacles through the Power of the Djembe: a free July 30 drum workshop in Chicago honoring women who strive and triumph through adversity from Sista Afya
*YES! Magazine is on the hunt for pitches of reported stories on “initiatives, groups, and movements that are transforming the way we relate to our bodies — beyond ourselves” for their Winter issue, “Bodies.” Leads and pitches due Aug. 2.
Read this!
Personal stories I’m loving
There are Trees in the Future, Or, A Case for Staying (Lupita Limón Corrales, Protean Magazine): “As immigrants, we are committed to our moves, and we also know everything’s provisional. A year later, hiking high above the basin, Jo, Shabina, and I share stories about the parts of L.A. where our families have lived, about loved ones who left or kept getting pushed out. ‘I love L.A., and I feel loyal to L.A. too,’ Jo says as I count at least eighteen former homes across L.A. County. ‘But why struggle so much to stay?’” Maybe instead, poet and author Corrales writes, “we should ask, ‘In which versions of the future can everyone have a choice?’” Read here.
On Aging Alone (Sharon Butala, The Walrus): “We look back through our lives, thinking that loneliness didn’t strike us at all when we were young, except—oh, yes—in certain rare, specific situations: mom in the hospital, siblings gone somewhere without you, being sent off to the relatives while your parents holidayed, starting a new school, that kind of thing. Or, later, in adulthood: betrayal, divorce, living alone, changing cities, children leaving home, without the money to do whatever it is you want to do, dreaming of some life you can never have. Now, in old age, though, we are baffled by our loneliness no matter what we do to alleviate it; we resent it and start searching through the past to try to discover how we have come to this.” I loved this essay on loneliness and aging and all the ways Butala ties in existing literature on the subject. Read here.
Signs of Life (Raksha Vasudevan, Hazlitt): “Outside, the sun was rising, seeping through our lacy curtains. In Syria, forty-five kilometres to the east, it lit up the Great Mosque of Aleppo, its marbled prayer hall blackened by rocket-propelled grenades. Syrians kept praying there anyway, the crowns of their heads kissing daylight and ruined stone. Elsewhere in the country, it warmed the faces blinking awake in makeshift camps. Warmed, too, the hands of bakers, already at work kneading manakish bread. Even in a war, signs of life. As the day went on, death tolls rising, I tried to hold onto this.” An achingly beautiful essay about love, tragedy and faraway wars two years in the making. Read here.
Bringing Up Mother (Idman Omar, Guernica Magazine): “I was not dressed correctly when/motherhood interviewed me./I wore flat shoes and a passport./My knees were pearl handles,/my mind, on and off like static./But I got the job.” A snippet of poetry from London-based Somali freelance writer Idman Omar. Read the full poem here.
The Sitting Month (Jiadai Lin, First Person Singular): “In Chinese culture, the month after a woman gives birth is sacred. Our bodies gradually close up after labor, and it’s critical to protect ourselves from cold forces that could seep in through our cracks… I imagined a cold breeze that might blow right into my body, how that would damage me forever. How I would never close up, never be whole again. The temptation of it stopped me in my tracks…Who would be more devastated, me or my mother?” So grateful for personal storytelling like this. Read here.
For Ada Limón, We’re All the Hurting Kind (Eliza Harris in conversation with Ada Limón, Catapult): “I think this is my first book that has a dedication to silence and to where language fails. That’s not a judgment. Language is important. I value it. It’s just that it can’t do all the things.” Loved this interview with the country’s newest poet laureate, Ada Limón, on her highly anticipated sixth book of poetry. Read here.
America Saved My Father’s Life. It Tried to Destroy My Mother’s. (David Treuer, The New York Times Magazine): “There is much I still don’t understand about her. I don’t understand how someone who had been told, in ways direct and indirect, that she wasn’t supposed to achieve anything could end up driven by so much ambition. She was simply wired to want, despite the country’s attempts to prevent it. My father seemed to labor under a vow of engagement with the country and its institutions, but my mother was moved by something else.” Treuer writes about his father, an Austrian immigrant who loved this country—and his Native mother, born on a reservation, who could never forgive it. Read here.
In the news
Relevant news coverage that doesn’t really fall under our larger mission to de-stigmatize through personal storytelling, but is still essential reading for anyone who wants to stay up-to-date on immigrant and refugee mental health as well as general mental health news.
Illinois expands health care coverage for immigrants 42 and up (KHQA): The Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services is expanding the Health Benefits for Immigrant Adults program to now provide coverage to undocumented immigrant adults and certain legal permanent residents aged 42 and over. Read here.
San Diego refugee, immigrant mental health program is role model in US (Jacob Aere, KPBS): “They talk about housing issues, they talk about food insecurity issues, and so on and so forth,” says Nyaduoth Gatkuoth, who turns to “Girl Talk,” a monthly support group designed for South Sudanese Women in San Diego, California. The program, which provides counselors who speak 13 different languages and are all refugees and immigrants themselves, has “expanded what mental health means,” Gatkuoth adds. Read and listen here.
Challenges increase for immigrants accessing abortion after Roe reversal (Amanda Su, ABC News): “With a near-total abortion ban in Texas and trigger bans going into effect across the country following the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade,” reports Su, pregnant immigrants with pending immigration cases who are unable to travel are especially worried they will be forced to carry their pregnancies to term. Read here.
New research 📑
Neighbourhood and family correlates of immigrant children’s mental health: a population-based cross-sectional study in Canada (BMC Psychiatry): In this study of 943 first- and second-generation immigrant caregivers in Ontario, Canada, researchers highlight the importance of parenting behaviour and parental experiences of trauma and distress for immigrant children’s mental health. Explore here.
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One sorta unrelated story on my mind
Is Abortion Sacred? (Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker): “The idea that a fetus is not just a full human but a superior and kinglike one—a being whose survival is so paramount that another person can be legally compelled to accept harm, ruin, or death to insure it—is a recent invention,” Tolentino writes in this excellent, must-read historical account and essay on pro-life absolutism. Read here.
Bookshelf
Books and collections I’m currently reading (plus reader-recommended works!)
Currently reading: Afterparties: Stories by the late Anthony Veasna So, a vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life—immersive and comic, yet unsparing—that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities (Harper Collins)
Reader rec from Rosalie C.: The Seventh Day by Yu Hua, a novel following 41-year-old Yang Fei that limns the joys and sorrows of life in contemporary China
Remember, we always have tons of wonderful stories and resources available at foreignbodies.net.
Love to see it
Shout-outs, thank-yous and more
Always read Sahaj Kohli.
Flushing, New York folks:
Sharing this callout for immigrants who may struggle to talk about their mental health in their mother tongue from freelance writer Dominique Gené:
So excited for this new initiative.
A huge congrats to the new class of Carter Fellows, including the lovely Rainesford Stauffer!
Text ya friends, friends.
A reminder that I, too, have been Going Through It and you are absolutely not alone. My inbox is always open.
That’s it for now.
Did you absolutely hate this? Open to criticism and suggestions. See ya later!
Love,
Fiza
Special thanks to our growing Foreign Bodies Sustaining Members <3