Jade rabbit down the sink

eating the rabbit

I wrote this in January. It is about the week when my jade rabbit necklace fell down the sink, and I was dealing with a month-long anxiety-induced insomnia spell. It is also about prayer.

January 2026

There is nothing I like more than the feeling of decompression when I’m high. Especially in my spine. I twist myself open in strange ways, just so I can feel the bones of my spinal column pull away from each other and then finally pop, and what a Pavlovian rush.

In truth, I like it too much, and sometimes I take it too far. I developed a new technique where I bend over, standing up, placing my hands in the hollow of my jaw, using the weight of gravity to pull my head to the ground. My head pulls out of the cavity of my shoulders, and again, that magnificent pop that radiates through my skull. Doing this neck pop thing has slowly grown into a compulsive behaviour. I began doing it every single day. But a week ago, high and ready for my daily spinal decompression, I used my new technique and for a brief, wonderful moment I felt the glorious sensation of being freed from this tight constricting body, and then… I took it too far. It was a full moon. People can tend to take things too far during a full moon. I knew that I was testing fate.

As I stood up, I felt that something was slightly off. Not alarmingly so, but as I turned my neck, pain shot up to my head, and a fog of dizziness came over me. As I got into the shower, I prayed to God to protect my neck. The only piece of jewelry I wear, a jade rabbit hanging on a silver chain, was now my new divination tool. I ask it questions about my body; questions that feel too pre-lingual or maybe too sensitive for tarot cards. Naked, I took it off my neck and asked, “is this new neck-pulling technique safe for me to keep doing?” It turned counterclockwise. No. I vowed never to do it again, even though it made me feel incredibly free from the whole business of gravity.

Resolved, I placed the necklace down on the bathroom counter. Or maybe, I swung it. I probably swung it because it slipped off the bathroom counter, slid into the sink, and before I could process what had happened, it fell down the sink drain. I gasped and clamoured at the empty sink, yanking out the sink stopper and peering inside with my phone flashlight, only to find darkness.

Over coffee, Shelly told me that there is a Korean superstition that claims that a small form of bad luck is protecting you from something much worse. Your favourite cup broke, you dented your car, you lost your favourite piece of jewelry, the object held the bad luck for you, deflecting it, and thus protecting you. This was my initial thought about the jade rabbit. The last question I asked was about my neck. I considered the thought that it had shielded my body from my desire to test the limits of it. And then there was that time at eighteen years old at the club, far too drunk to control myself, evading the advances of strange men. The evil eye bracelet that I had worn for a year and a half broke open on the dance floor; the beads flying through the air like beams of light deflecting off of a disco ball. It was this last conscious memory that I held on to of the night; the rest fell into a murky darkness, but I was returned to my dorm room safe and unscathed, and maybe also protected.

I feel naked without the necklace. I keep catching myself reaching to thumb it. Every outfit I put on, I reach under my neckline to pull it out so that it rests on top of the fabric, and every time I’m surprised to find my neck completely bare.

I got the jade rabbit pendant at a store in Chinatown. I bought it because I am the year of the rabbit, and that felt like as good a reason as any to have an emblem of it. It sat in various jewelry boxes for years, mostly unworn. It was only a year ago, last February, that I bought a silver chain at Plaza Saint-Hubert and wore it around my neck, where it had remained until it fell down the sink drain a week ago.

I can’t believe that it was only a year that I had been wearing it for. Symbolically, I had been thinking about the rabbit for some time. The rabbit first appeared in my writing in a short essay about an insomnia episode I had in New York that lingered well after I had left the city. It was the first and last time I had taken an Ambien. The sound of the word Ambien felt good in my mouth, soft and soothing, so after confirming that I was not taking a lethal dose, I slipped the tiny pill down my throat and let the sirens and car alarms fall away. At home, still unable to sleep, tossing and turning till the early hours of the morning, I would wake my partner up in a fit of tears, raging against my mind. “Why is it doing this to me? Why is it punishing me?” I warbled on in the heat of exhaustion. During a late-night walk, or maybe this was the next day, the time of day is unmarked in the essay, I say to my partner, “I’m the year of the rabbit. That’s why I have a rabbit heart.”

What did I mean by that? Probably, that on sleepless nights, I would hold two fingers right under my jaw line, feeling for the pulse of my racing heart, as if it were preparing for an attack from an unseen assailant. Or it was my easily excitable nature, I often struggle to sleep in New York, or during a full moon night. I would get excited about a project, and then get too excited, spending a night in bed buzzing with life, and then I would be up, pacing around the kitchen island with the stove light on, pontificating into a voice memo. Or it was those ugly thoughts, intrusive and brute, a medium for a more primal fear; the feeling of being a small rabbit in the clearing, completely and utterly vulnerable.

Anxiety, that hummingbird tremble, made me a nervous child. In an old house we lived in, I was convinced there were ghosts, some dark spirits forcing their way into my dreams and my most intimate thoughts. “Grab the knife,” they said. I was scared of my free will. I was scared that some people committed murder and hurt people, and I could be one of them. I could not watch the news. I recoiled at witnessing others suffer, and much worse, I despised seeing others humiliated. The mortification on their face played on a loop at night, nauseating me with the most visceral disgust. In English class, when we were tasked with writing a scary story and reading it for the class, I excused myself to the bathroom and then spent the rest of the class discreetly plugging my ears with my fingers and quietly humming to myself. Eating too late would make me nervous, so would lying, so much so that I would correct every half-finished retelling with “I think so” or “maybe,” as to avoid being untruthful.

When my parents sent me to a child therapist during that strange, sweltering Australian summer when I turned twelve and toyed with suicidal ideation, my therapist, a beautiful, tanned blonde woman, presented me with the idea of a balloon in a pool. “Imagine the balloon is a thought you don’t want to have, and the pool is your mind. If you push it down, under the water, it will keep trying to resurface. You will use a lot of energy pushing it down, but the further you push it down, the more energy it has to pop to the surface, disturbing the water. However, if you just let the balloon sit on the surface without pushing it away. You can exist with it, peacefully.”

It’s funny to me that this metaphor stuck with me more than a decade later. I think about it when I spend long nights tormented by a single thought: “What if you can’t sleep?” It’s hard to describe how disturbing this thought is in the light of day. With sunlight streaming into my bedroom, it’s easy to rationalize things: “not sleeping well for a few nights is hardly the end of the world,” “sometimes I struggle to sleep, but I know this spell passes eventually.” But down there in the dark, alone with my thoughts, my partner fast asleep beside me, the thought churns in my psyche. It threatens to overtake me, destroying every good thing in my life. I will be too tired for my dreams, too tired for my art, too tired for my relationships, too tired for my life. I will watch in horror as everything I love is stripped from me one by one. I will slowly fall into insanity due to sleep deprivation, and my partner will be forced to leave me. I will be institutionalized, addicted to sleeping medication forever, my brain addled and fogged. It’s like being asked not to think of a black sheep. What if I can’t sleep? “It’s okay if you can’t!” I remind myself. But I can’t quite believe it.

The day that my jade rabbit fell down the drain was followed by a night like this. I had been falling in and out of an anxiety-insomnia episode. I had a panic attack in Florida about it, clutching on to my sister and sobbing into her arms. It lingered on for two weeks, far longer than normal, no night the same. That night, I felt utterly defenceless without my jade rabbit.

I had hung it around my neck because it was beautiful, but in that year when the jade lay close to my heart, I had charged it with a weighty significance. If my anxiety was embodied by this jade rabbit, green to reflect the heart chakra, rabbit to reflect my unpredictable bursts of fear, by wearing it, I reminded myself that I could not push away this strange psychic burden. It was an albatross on my neck, my cross to bear. It was not necessarily a punishment, but an undeniable part of me that I could no longer afford to push down; the rupture, as it resurfaced yet again, was too detrimental.

Scared in bed, I woke my partner up. Pulled out of the bliss of sleep, they kindly asked if I could manage by myself for the night. Anxiety had made me selfish; every other night, I had been pulling them out of sleep to comfort me. The consequence they were now feeling, having to wake up in the early hours of the morning for their physically demanding job. I proclaimed that they didn’t care about me!! I knew this was not true, and I also knew that they were right. It was time for me to brave the night alone.

So what did I do? It’s hard to write about invisible things. It’s like telling someone about a synchronicity; the way that the world sometimes talks to you in soft murmurs. How strange and comforting those moments feel, but relayed to another, it seems to become emptied of all its depth and texture: “Well, I saw 3:33 on the microwave exactly when I was playing this song that has this specific meaning for me.” Well, you kind of had to be there. And by be there, I mean you needed to be inside my mind, or inside the song or inside the microwave to really get it.

But, to lay it out plain, I prayed. I prayed for protection. I prayed for strength, and as the cancerous thought crested like a wave on the surface of my mind, I said “thank you,” or rather, I felt the feeling of saying “thank you.” Instead of pushing down the thought or even letting it sit peacefully beside me, I prayed to it. I repeated, “What if I can’t sleep?” over and over again, and each time I sent it love, feeling how lucky I was to have such a wonderful life that I was scared about losing it. It became a symbol of how great my life was, and that scary thought began to radiate with a dazzling glow. I fell asleep shortly after. I had slain that dragon.

It is the last week of the year of the snake, and I have been considering that the whole year has been about eating the proverbial rabbit. No longer could I simply make peace with it, allowing it to rest on my chest, close to my heart; I needed to eat it, to integrate it.

Fear, the beating heart of anxiety, often tells the truth. Life surprises us all the time. It surprises us in ways that sometimes may not be favourable or may not feel “safe.” How vulnerable we all are in the face of the unknown. Last year, the question that was on my mind at that tentative time, when spring turns into summer, was, “Am I strong enough to withstand the seasons of my life?” or whatever Stevie Nicks said. I wept into my cosmopolitan on some patio in Montreal at this thought. I feared that the answer was no. My sensitivity proved to be too burdensome, too everywhere. It felt as if everything hurt more than it ought to. A rainy spell in May sent me spiralling. I couldn’t sleep for one night, and it felt as if the hinges of my very life were falling off. How could I weather life like this?

I’ve been thinking a lot about trust lately. On a rambly voice note to a friend speaking on the subject, I realized that the whole long-winded four minutes could be summarized in one succinct sentence: trust is a state of being more than it is an action. It is a state of being that alters you when you enter into it. I prayed because I needed to trust beyond what was logical. I could not guarantee that something shocking, painful, or challenging would not happen, but I prayed for the strength to consume it, to consume the unknown.

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-Thai x