“Should we change?”

“Should we change?”, my nineteenth chapbook, was written on 2026 March 16; it is 5 pages long, excluding the front cover. It is my first foray into essay-writing and my first chapbook that does not contain poetry. I consider it one of my finest works in prose; as such, I am saving it for a shot at traditional publication, and have not yet published it here.

I started writing it mainly to prove a point to myself (and, in my head, to my teachers) that I didn’t need the five-paragraph essay format anymore to produce compelling writing. About eight days after completion, on 2026 March 24, I gave a copy to my English teacher and signed it for him. The next day, he kept me after class to talk about it; he praised the craft and also asked me if I was okay. I said yes and explained to him that my artistic philosophy about suicide is always:

• To write it non-euphemistically (because there are far too many ways to dance around it on social media, ex. “unalived”, “took their own life”, “self-exited”, “self-deleted”, etc., and also to directly counter the trend of romanticising it); and

• To write it vividly (this allows me to capture the full texture of what the mind experiences while overcome with suicidal ideation).

If I didn’t treat suicide so directly, it might make me or the reader feel better about ourselves, but the writing would objectively be much weaker.