Begin Again

Dedicated to the things that were stolen from me.

In Berlin at my friend’s house, wearing the pants I was in when I was robbed, and a new top, and jewelry I bought a few days prior.

I was robbed on my last day in Italy in a parking lot in Rome. Being robbed tears a fissure into the fabric of your life and identity. The size of that fissure varies, depends how badly you are robbed, I guess. I wasn’t robbed that badly. I struggle to even name it as a robbing. When I do, the blame always seems to drift back towards me. Since it happened, the tiny digital gods in my phone have shifted my algorithms: Reddit posts written by panicked fellow travelers with the same experience, Instagram Reels of people tracking down their stolen suitcases to the far edges of town. The comments under these posts are almost the same. It was OP’s fault for leaving luggage in the car in a foreign country. What a rookie mistake.

I should have backed up my hard drive when I said I would. I should have bought AirTags when they ran out of batteries last year. I should have brought my passports with me to the beach. I should have hidden the bag of film I shot at my friend’s wedding under the car seat. I should have known that somebody was going to punch a hole through the back left window of my rental car and take everything I own. $10,000 of cameras, a small fortune amassed over the course of a decade. My hard drive with the only copy of the book I’ve been working on for the last two years. The photos on that hard drive - another thing on my todo list that I never got around to, doing a second back up. My boyfriend’s mother’s jewelry, my laptop with god knows what on it, the favorite jeans I bought from Zara that Ghost ate the crotch out of, so it has this ugly patchwork on the ass. The necklace my friend Ash made for me years ago. The floral Betsey Johnson dress that was out of my budget that I saved for when I was 24. I had to tailor it to fit my body perfectly. All my favorite pieces of clothing, shoes. The library book I had 13 pages left to finish, which I will be charged for by the library once I failed to return it.

They’re only things, mere objects. The problem is the emotional attachment I have to my things is potentially higher than the average person (derogatory). Since I began purchasing things as a way to shape the person I aspired to be, I have always bought and treasured secondhand things. I love imagining an object’s prior life, the hands they were held by before mine. I feel like I’m inhabiting the role of sacred custodian. My cameras, my clothing, my books, my shoes, my furniture. Most things I love were once owned by somebody else, and why should I be surprised that my time is up, that it is time for those things to travel into a new pair of hands, even if by force.

Following the robbery, I was angry and depressed. I could not stop thinking about the way that my most cherished things that had no financial value were most likely strewn all over some Roman alleyway, hidden in trash cans and offered to tourists on a Sunday market. I imagined the thieves opening my film camera I had not yet manually rewound, ripping the film out the back and throwing it away. Photos I took of my friend’s wedding in Tuscany exposed to sunlight and destroyed. My underwear being handled by the rough hands that punched a hole in a stranger’s car. What did they imply about who I was by the things they took from me?

I have spent almost every day since returning home looking on Ebay for the things I lost, with zero luck. It’s like a terrible morning ritual that ruins my day before it even begins.

My sublet in Berlin

I’m reading The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. I found it on the free shelf in my apartment building. It seemed a good time as any to finally learn about Buddhism. He wrote:

“The conventional “self” or “person” is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories.”

My self was a structure towering in size, the strength of its base rooted in material objects as anchor points to memory. I’ve always found solace in physical objects. I like to have things because they feel like tangible representations of a change that happened in me, or an experience I had I want to remember.

My therapist has speculated that I collect things, that I imbue them with meaning as a way of creating personal heirlooms in the absence of actual heirlooms in my family. I have never lived in a house that me or my family actually owned, and I will receive nothing when my parents pass. She said that it was a class thing, to be so attached to objects. That it probably was some form of armor, a protection against being poor and miserable, which is how I saw my family. I still remember the running list I kept in my diary at age 12 of the things I wanted to buy myself, before I had access to money.

I have, my whole life, cobbled together the person I am through the things I wear and own.

“…According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real “me” than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final.”

Finding who you are with the help of things/objects creates a sense of weightiness, of reality, of something rooted in stuff you can see, touch, smell. Many of these things served as guideposts to the person I wanted to be. They were significant because of who gave them to me. Gifts from my boyfriend, from his mother, from friends. Gifts can be loved embodied, materialized.

Maybe I thought that having so many things would keep my identity safe, that it would buffer me from the confusion and anguish of not knowing who you are without them. I started buying second hand clothes around the same time I started high school: 13-14. There was a Salvation Army next door to a KFC on the main highway that cut through the suburb I lived in Western Sydney. It was a 15 minute walk from my house, and as I started developing interest in style and clothes, it was a perfect outlet for a limited budget. Every week, a new selection. I went to a few in Sefton after school as well, including the St Vinnies in Chester Hill in that plaza, the memory of which feels like a far off dream. There was another one in between the library and the station that had tiny aisles packed to the brim with clothes and bric-a-brac.

In thrift stores I found an entire universe. I tried on clothing I had never seen before, clothing that was unflattering, clothing that was aspirational. I looked at the hodgepodge of human living on display like a shoppable museum. I bought tutus, little boys jackets, leather handbags with wooden handles. What was available and affordable to me in a thrift store did the same thing a good fiction book did—it expanded the boundaries of my life. It was an outlet of creativity and possibility with the limited resources I had available. In a regular mall, everything seemed impossibly expensive. A single shirt for $45. At thrift/charity stores, I could buy four of them, all completely different versions of a person I could try on for a moment. I could transform myself without needing much.

I am no longer the person who can only afford what’s available in a thrift store, but the habits remain firm even as I meander through my 30s and have very much shifted class. A Marxist I once dated called me a class traitor, and that has been a dissenting note in the goop of feelings that have come up after the robbery. A friend started a GoFundMe, one that I was forced by my friend Jade to reluctantly re-share on my story. I didn’t want to. It felt like asking for handouts, an inherited idea from my Asian parents that asking for money is the biggest sin that one could commit.

“Do you feel like you don’t deserve help?” Jade asked.

“Yes, because I have savings and this will drain my savings but there are people whose entire house is consumed by fire, whose lives are displaced by war. These are just belongings.”

“Do you think you don’t deserve help because you have savings?”

So I shared the GoFundMe, and told myself I would only share it once. It raised 50% of its goal - around $3500, enough to replace at least one camera. I am humbled and touched by everyone’s generosity, and I still feel incredibly uncomfortable thinking about this money, like I scammed people out of it somehow. I feel as though I do not deserve it. Fariha Roisin wrote in a recent Substack of hers:

“Asking for things has caused a lot of friction in my life in the last ten years. I don’t think I ever ask for much, but I witness that when I do ask people for things, so often they don’t want to give. Instead, friends get antsy and annoyed, they grow short and temperamental with me. Maybe it’s because they harbor these projections. I am read as having so much, why would I want more?”

I am read as having so much, why would I want more? I resonate with this so deeply. There is a cop in my head who is constantly monitoring how much I give to others and if it balances out with how much someone else gives to me (emotionally, spiritually). When the balance is off, more often than not it tips to my side. I compulsively support, share, give, and when I don’t receive that same energy back it touches some part of me that feels as though nobody wants to help me because I don’t deserve it. Getting older has only exacerbated that feeling, that I should be self sufficient because of the class that I am in now. Because I have friends, a modest savings account, a roof over my head, because I present as someone who can take care of themselves, that people don’t want to help me, or is it that I don’t deserve their help? I try not to ask for much from my friends because that cop is always watching. To ask for too much is to jeopardize the sacred balance. The problem is, I won’t ask, but I want people to offer their help without me asking. It’s like a secret trauma test that everyone is set up to fail at.

Losing everything I care about, years of work, a lifetime’s accumulation of special things has brought so much offered care. My friend Leah gave me her Mason Pearson hairbrush because she knew I would have lost mine. She remade a shell necklace, a baby version of one I lost in my luggage. My friend Moni gave me a Canon point and shoot she had thought I lost (it was actually in my beach bag on me at the time). My boyfriend bought me an expensive Leica M9 to lift my spirits because he couldn’t stand my loss of faith in my art. He wanted me to keep going when all I wanted to do was give up. It felt like an obvious sign from the universe - to stop writing and shooting. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to start again. Endless friends have offered words of support, their own tears, encouragement, space to help me process this.

My identity as an artist has been propelled by the material, by the cameras I saved up and bought for. It took a long time for me to feel brave enough to call myself an artist, and I think my cameras and my hard drive and my negatives and all this stuff was an easy way for my ego to believe that I was an artist when the spiritual base was still shaky. I know you can own an expensive camera and still not be an artist, but in the lack of self-belief, my tools were talismans, proof I could see and touch that I was an artist. Other people couldn’t take that away from me. Until they did. Some time has passed since the robbery, and I have almost emerged from the deep depression it threw me in. I know now that it was not a message, it was a test, a challenge. Are you an artist still, even without your things? Can you start again, can you keep going? Who are you without your things?

In Berlin, I went to my friend’s Mike and Yun’s apartment and spent twelve hours drinking chrysanthemum tea with them. Midway through our hang, Yun gave me a disposable camera. I have never actually used a disposable camera before. I thought its was below me, wasteful. I could not imagine any of the photos a disposable camera made could be usable. That camera was incredibly special to me. All the photos in this post were taken on it - a brief window of light I felt towards the end of my time in Berlin, before the depression set in again back home. I felt immensely protective of it, overjoyed to have something to document the last few days of my trip on. In the absence of all my fancy gear, all my preferred tools, the disposable was more than enough. It was a symbolic gesture, an invitation to begin again.