Note: This article contains discussion of intimate partner violence.
If you’re a queer person with an Instagram account, then you’ve likely encountered Mimi Zhu’s writing. The Brooklyn-based Chinese-Australian writer, artist, and queer organizer has made a name for themself with bite-sized meditations on love, community, and self-care. Between Zhu’s soothing messages and lush, gradient-adorned visual aesthetic, it’s easy to see why they’ve amassed more than 100,000 followers on Instagram.
But even as their audience has grown, Zhu says they are still primarily writing their missives to and for themself. “I’ve found that the messy shit is always the writing that resonates with my readers the most,” the author tells me over coffee at Playground Coffee Shop, a mutual aid-focused café and community space in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “People are like, ‘Oh, you’re thinking this messy shit, too? Cool. I can let my guard down and be honest about something that I've been told to lie about.’”
That same refreshing authenticity permeates Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection, Zhu’s debut book, out today. The memoir-in-essays is a culmination of an unexpected journey into the public eye. A lifelong writer, Zhu eventually “took a leap and decided to share snippets of my personal writing on Instagram for me, truly thinking that nobody would pay attention to them.”
But people were paying attention, including pop icon Britney Spears, who reposted one of Zhu's quotes about the importance of community care and wealth redistribution during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a “real full-circle moment” for Zhu, who remembers dancing to Spears’ music in talent shows as a teen growing up in Brisbane, Australia. “She moved me so much, and now I’m moving her in her time of need. It was surreal,” they recall.
The love from “Comrade Britney” led to an influx of new followers — including Clare Mao, Zhu’s literary agent, who DMed them to ask if they’d ever considered writing a book. “I feel like Instagram has been such an incredible tool for people to see the surface of what I write about,” they add, “but this book is an opportunity for us all to go deep.”
And go deep, it does. Be Not Afraid of Love opens with a chilling story about Zhu’s relationship with their ex-partner, anonymized throughout the book as “X,” whom they dated on and off while living in California in their early 20s. Zhu recalls X violently assaulting them in an alleyway during a night out in Oakland. In the aftermath of the traumatic incident, local friends come to their rescue and tend to their wounds. Zhu “robotically [recounts] the story” of what happened, too shocked to even cry after being physically and verbally attacked by someone who claimed to love them.
What follows is a soul-baring look at Zhu’s journey toward healing as a survivor of intimate partner abuse. Taking cues from both memoir and self-help, they employ the wisdom of prolific scholars and philosophers like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Thích Nhất Hạnh to make sense of their trauma, develop self-compassion, and reconfigure their understanding of love. This complicated, years-long process includes X coming back into Zhu’s life multiple times before finally exiting for good. “I felt hollow on the inside and convinced myself that at least I loved, at least I was loved, at least I was loved,” they write, their anguish palpable. “Except I was not. Not even by me.”
A quintessential Gemini, Zhu exhibits a remarkable capacity for nuance. In one particularly moving essay, “Grief,” they miss X’s presence fiercely; they simultaneously seethe with anger, enraged by the harm he caused them. They call this acknowledgement of duality the “sacred concept” of both/and, a cognitive tool they learned about in therapy. Holding space for multiple contradictory truths encouraged them to eschew black-and-white thinking and practice tender, non-judgmental self-reflection instead.
Although Zhu has always been “very anti-binary,” they struggled for quite some time to honor the full range of emotions that came up around their tumultuous relationship with X. “I realize there’s very few things I’ve read and watched that talk about the deep, complicated dualities of being a survivor,” they tell me. “It was difficult but liberating to be able to say, ‘Yes, I wanted to leave so bad. At the same time, I was so used to this toxic dynamic that I would go back to it and crave it.’”
Zhu’s candid storytelling, both/ands and all, underscores an uncomfortable but deeply human truth: Healing from abuse is a complicated, nonlinear process. Leaving an abusive relationship isn’t a cure-all, either. They write: “Just because a survivor has physically left an abuser does not mean that they feel safe in public, in new relationships, or even in their own body.”
In that same essay on grief, Zhu recalls two distinct rites of mourning: a traditional Chinese funeral they attended for their grandmother, and a private ritual in which they wrote down slurs that X uttered on small pieces of paper and lit them on fire. “When we allow ourselves to be complicated,” they tell me, “we can heal and be more centered and intentional about our actions moving forward, instead of just pushing a part of us away.”
As freeing as it was to tell their story as a survivor, Zhu’s book-writing process was not without pain. “I don’t actually encourage other writers to write about trauma so much that it retraumatizes you,” they explain. They’re especially protective of queer writers, immigrant writers, and writers of color, who are often told to mine their pain and make their art “more tragic.” Zhu has access to therapy and a stable network of supportive friends; many of their marginalized peers do not. “If you're telling a writer to write about their big trauma, are you also providing them unlimited therapy in the process?” they ask.
The book’s publication has come with new stressors, too. “Something that I’ve noticed within myself is this nervousness because I know how interconnected we all are,” Zhu adds, knitting their hands together. “I know the weight of my words and that they actually do mean a lot to some people, especially survivors of intimate abuse. And I carry such a deep responsibility with that.”
But if there’s one thing they’ve learned throughout this process, it is to embrace love and connection, as the book’s title suggests. “For queer people of color especially, community is everything,” they explain. “It's because of my community here [in New York City], truly, that I have been able to reclaim love. And a big part of my book was wanting to write about how love is not just in another person, or even in social spaces, but in so many different areas. It’s all around us — it’s in the trees, it’s in the soil, it’s in the pages we flip through, it’s in everything.”
Zhu embodies this ethos via “rigorous citation,” a framework they attribute to their friend, the theorist and performer Neema Githere. They cite several sources in footnotes throughout Be Not Afraid of Love, from books and TV shows about survivors that empowered them to tell their story (such as Carmen Maria Machado’s lauded memoir In the Dream House and Michaela Coel’s acclaimed HBO series I May Destroy You) to the IRL conversations they’ve had with friends and fellow organizers who have informed their politics. This practice is a textual enactment of love.
Toward the end of our time together, Zhu jokes that the book’s title has become a refrain of sorts among their friends. “I’ll tell them, ‘Oh, I went on a date,’ and they’ll be like, ‘Hey, Mimi. Be not afraid of love.’ I love the title because it’s like a prompt. I just know how afraid people, including myself, are of love.”
Zhu, too, has fears and hang-ups. They are no more or less qualified than anyone else to define love. But what distinguishes their writing, Instagram affirmations and essays alike, is their honesty and humility. “To be committed to love is to be committed to the infinite life of change,” Zhu says. When it comes to love, they are both a student and teacher, often in the same breath.
Be Not Afraid of Love by Mimi Zhu is out now from Penguin Life.
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