Healing Through Writing Love Letters to Ourselves
“Do you mind if I eat?” Tori asks as they sit down across from me.
Tori is a Visual Artist and facilitator based in Minneapolis; their art centers around their experiences as a queer Hmong/Korean nonbinary person, often allowing glimpses into their life.
Asian American Organizing Project (AAOP) invited Tori to facilitate their workshop titled “Writing Our Own Love Letters” as part of the staff self-care program. The workshop had previously been presented at various conferences including the Korean Queer Trans Conference in New York and Midwest Indigenous and People of Color Conference in Minneapolis.
“Since 2014 I had been going to therapy — I wasn’t doing well,” Tori says. “Through different ways of therapy, I learned about different methods to treat mental health and different skills to be. One of the ways was through journaling.
“I realized at the end that I was writing in third person and that I was signing off each entry as ‘love, Tori,'” they explained. “And I realized that — holy crap — this is basically love letters to myself.”
Writing letters to themselves wasn’t new, however. Tori had been writing letters since high school, but the direction and the feeling of each letter grew more positive as they grew as a person.
“My relationship with myself got healthier and I got to a place where I wanted to see myself more and more,” Tori says, explaining that their high school self had basically written hate mail to themselves.
Tori came into AAOP to facilitate their workshop as part of the new staff self-care program. The program hopes to provide techniques and resources for young organizers to take care of themselves after extensive and exhaustive work.
Self-care varies from person to person and for Tori, it is not just healing but growth and nourishment as well.
“Self-care looks like the food that makes my body feel good, in terms of giving me energy throughout the day. It’s about nourishing me and my soul,” Tori explained. “It’s important for me to spend time with people who affirm me and let me know they love me and support me in ways I need to grow and if that means that they’re straight up telling me like hey, my actions hurt them, then that’s growth, too.”
As a local artist, Tori is currently working on two different murals in Minneapolis. One of the mural projects is a youth mural that will be located just outside St. Vincent de Paul’s Thrift Store alongside local artists Olivia Levins Holden and Reggie LeFlore.
The mural on St. Vincent de Paul’s will focus on cycles, both natural and unnatural, including: intergenerational cycles, recycling clothing, the changing of seasons, and the process of gentrification.
“This issue of gentrification came directly from the youth,” Tori says. “I’m amazed by how the youth described it because they didn’t have the [academic] vocab but were able to describe what was specifically going on and understand its implications.”
The other mural will be on the Green Way under the Columbus Avenue Bridge and is part of Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association’s #RenterPower campaign. Tori is working alongside local artist Cori Lin.
The #RenterPower mural is a narrative-focused mural, with a goal in amplifying low-income renters’ and renters’ of color voices about their experiences. Tori and Cori connected with South Minneapolis renters through canvassing and online story-collection in order to gather stories and build a a design around those narratives.
Those narratives are important in creating change and even writing letters to ourselves can help in creating change in ourselves. For Tori, the process of writing love letters to themselves was helpful and powerful.
“I wanted to share this process with people,” Tori says, “and as a queer trans person of color, anything we can do to help ourselves and heal is a good thing.
“When we are trying to exist, thrive, and change the conditions we live in, that self worth is not only important for ourselves but also in the way we show up for other people.”
You can find Tori’s work online at www.ToriHong.com or on Instagram, @Tori.Hong.
Edit 10/12/18: This piece was initially published on AAOPMN’s website. Tori’s work has since been featured on Twin Cities Daily Planet in an article on the Sheriff position.