tm37:

xcopy:

Midweek roll call - everyone still alive?

goruma:

my brain: ur dumb/annoying/ugly

me: 

sexcake:

idk about you but im trapped in a brain that hates me and im exhausted

“There are days where I cannot find the sun even though it’s right outside my goddamn window”

Now You Sea Me (Working title) Excerpt #idk

I’m two pages into writing this thing, which doesn’t sound like much, but I haven’t been able to write two pages that I’ve really liked in a long time. So, progress. Here’s an excerpt that I won’t be able to insert into the story for a while but that I don’t want to forget when the opportunity arises. 

For the first time since Asha died, I felt the anchor being severed from my chest. My heart was trying to fly again. There was a lightness in the way my body felt. Though I had been successfully getting out of bed day after day, it always felt like my soul was holding onto the bed post for dear life as I attempted to move forward. It was like a child throwing a fit about being forced out of bed to go to school. Even after I’d managed to leave the room, I felt it clawing in the other direction, forcing me to drag it along for the rest of the day until I finally allowed it to retreat to its sanctuary at the end of the night. Now, I felt like I could stand up straight again, I could take breaths that didn’t feel like I was at the top of Mount Fiji. I didn’t realize how much my soul had weighed in the past few weeks until I felt the absence of its resistance. 

Still, guilt was tugging me back down every few seconds, reminding me that nothing has changed. I felt I was betraying her, that the anchor was the weight of her soul, tying me down to reality. Though it was a constant weight I had to bear, I felt a duty to carry it, because I wasn’t going to sever her from my heart. I couldn’t, because for a long time, she had been the one holding it together. 

Thoughts on comparing worth

The first instance I remember that really affected me was in 4th grade. Grades had just come out and I had received all 3s and 4s, which was pretty good, as I recall. But my friend, Angela, had gotten all 4s. Truthfully, I don’t remember what it was even out of, but I remember being excited to tell my parents about my grades. As I would later learn to expect as their immediate reponse, they asked the follow up question: well what did everyone else get? When I told them Angela had gotten all 4s, my mom asked, “Why didn’t you get all 4s then?” I had no idea why. “Well then find out so you can get all 4s next time.” In an effort to attain some degree of validation, I told her that so-and-so had gotten some 2s or mostly 3s so I still did pretty well in comparison to a lot of people in my class. Then she said the words that have come to define how I look at life: “Don’t compare yourself to people who aren’t as good as you; always compare yourself to the people who are better than you.” 

Her intentions were good; she wanted me to use competition with others to motivate myself to do better. Maybe that’s what she had done throughout her life. She had always been the top of her class and went to the best university in China. But it had the opposite effect on me. Maybe it’s the depression-prone genes I inherited from my dad’s side of the family, or the submissive temperament that had earned me praise as a child. In any case, after a while, I started doing this comparing thing on my own. It became ingrained. One minute I’d be feeling something close to pride in my abilities and the next minute I’d hear a friend saying he/she did better and suddenly life would become a pro and con list with no pros. 

Since then, life has been a never-ending game of should’s. This is how/what I did, but that’s how/what I should have done. This is how I feel, but that’s how I should feel. This is where I am, but that’s where I should be. I didn’t realize how often these should’s were ruining my life until my therapist first handed me a list of negative thoughts. Each session, she would point out whenever I said the word “should” and it was astonishing to see just how often it came up when I was talking about how depressed or anxious I was. I realized how exhausted I was, because no matter how well I did, there was always someone better than me. That’s a fact of life. But even though I knew that, objectively, I still couldn’t stop doing it. It was like a drug addiction. I was addicted to should’s. 

My dad made matters worse by setting the goal to even more unreachable heights. Again, he probably also had good intentions. He had had a less-than-ideal childhood. For most of his life he didn’t speak to his father, who was off working at the steel factory during the Cultural Revolution. My grandma worked for food stamps and they lived off of the money my grandpa sent back home. They were fairly poor but my dad managed to rise up in his classes (though later he conceded it was mostly because his classmates didn’t care about school) and eventually ended up at the same university as my mom, who had a slightly more comfortable childhood. I was his first child and he was so excited to be able to provide for me what he had never had. But, in doing so, he imposed endless expectations on me. 

When I didn’t meet those expectations, he grew frustrated. The pride and adoration faded from his eyes, until I couldn’t remember a time when he looked at me without disappointment. I still tear up when I watch videos from when I was a toddler and see the excitement in his eyes for all that I could become. He tried to give me everything, so I should have been able to do anything. Not only was I competing with my peers, I was also competing with my dad’s idea of who I should be. How the hell could I win that battle? 

In the last couple years, I have been doubling my efforts to combat the should’s that run my life. I’ve realized that my parents have really ruined me in irreparable ways, though I blame them less and less as I try to understand them as people. Most of the time, I’m able to catch the should’s before they bury themselves in my brain and start controlling me. Sometimes, when I’m tired or otherwise mentally weak, they sneak up on me, and before I know it, I’m a submissive child again, getting yelled at by the voices of my parents in my head that have become my own now. It’s weird how meta the should’s are sometimes, in their effort to try to sabotage my happiness. Tricky bastards. Like, sometimes I catch myself thinking, “I should be able to stop the should’s from taking over my thoughts.” 

The only real thing I can do is to keep trying to internalize the affirmations I once thought were so cheesy when my therapist would hand them to me to say out loud: I am doing my best and that is enough. Other people’s successes are not my failures. That I am not perfect does not mean that I am worthless. Hopefully, by repeating these to myself, they will start to replace the contradictory words my parents have said to me over the years. But until then, I am doing my best and that is enough. 

Thoughts on free will

Man, it’s been a long time. The creative thinking part of my brain feels like it’s creaking slowly into movement. The gears have long since become rusty and covered with dust from disuse. Perhaps that’s why my soul feels much the same nowadays. 

For the last week I’ve been largely bedridden with some sort of plague (they think it’s mono). All the symptoms that are normally tolerable are now accompanied by an extreme physical fatigue, the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever experienced. Yet, somehow it feels oddly familiar. It’s the amount of fatigue I typically feel emotionally as one of many symptoms of depression. Usually it’s my physical being that feels tied down by my mind. I’m used to that feeling. I have some handle over how to deal with it. This is something new.

It’s like depression 2.0. My mind feels trapped by my body’s fatigue. I feel it giving in to this, sinking in to the lack of motivation my body is showing. “Well if she’s not moving, neither am I, so fuck it,” says my brain. But this cannot work while I’m in law school. 

I have struggled with the idea of free will for a lot of my life. The first time I considered it was while watching Sailor Moon, funnily enough. (I’m going to use the English dub names because we didn’t have fancy subs when I was younger.) Serena was telling Luna that she didn’t want to be a princess or a warrior. She just wanted to be a normal girl, who only had to worry about normal girl things. I could understand that, but I could not accept it as a child. I wanted so badly for my destiny to be decided by fate or something equally as mystical. 

Is it, therefore, any surprise that now it feels like the answer to any big life decision seems to be hidden behind thick nimbostratus clouds of anxiety? Free will is a terrifying concept for me. While it’s freeing to some with the courage to follow their desires, to me it’s imprisoning. I’m paralyzed by the sheer gravity of every choice that I have to make. And I’m realizing now that, of course, like all other shortcomings and challenges in my life, it traces back to my lack of self-assurance. 

Every time I see a new psychiatrist or therapist, everything always seems to boil down to the fact that my parents pulled the rug of self worth from under me at a really young age, and I have been struggling ever since to slowly build it up again, stitch by stitch. Out of one whole, finished rug, I believe I am halfway through my first row of stitches. And that was a lot of work, a quarter century worth of it, to be more precise. I don’t know much about knitting, clearly, but I know that with most designs, you can find a pattern on the internet that tells you how to do it, given you have the basics down. The thing all these psychiatric doctors fail to do is to give me the pattern that’ll lead me to a lasting sense of self worth. 

As a result, I find myself in times like this, questioning what my value and purpose is. I know what I want to do and I know what I want my life to look like, ideally, but getting there seems to involve an effort that I can no longer muster. These kids in law school, they are no joke. We aren’t even a top-ranked school and I can’t seem to keep up with the gusto that these kids have for studying and keeping a hold of the material. Part of it is how messy this semester has been for my section: a professor that spends all of class humble bragging and teaching us so little that another, unrelated professor is taking time out of his schedule to reteach us the material every Friday, without extra pay because he feels so bad for us; and another professor who we all actually loved but who had to jet off to Spain last minute when his partner had to have emergency open heart surgery, leaving us to be taught by 3 other professors before finally settling upon a 4th from Santa Clara this week.

Everything is constantly being jumbled and more things are being thrown at us every minute and even the strongest of my friends has started to fall apart. So when I look around in class, I feel this profound helplessness. I start thinking about what the basic people say about one being completely in control of one’s life. “If you wanted to, you could leave work right now and hop on a plane to Italy.” No, I don’t know what white daydream you live in where nothing bad ever happens to you but that is not reality for most people. I know this, and yet, I feel like there are things that I can be doing with my time, that I’m not. I see other people achieve things because they followed a whim or passion, I see other people traveling the world and sometimes I think that the path I am heading down is one in which I will never get to do these things.

Because I am a coward. When we were kids, everyone wanted to be in Gryffindor because obviously. But I always knew that I was definitively not Gryffindor material. I don’t know how to not be a coward. “Trust yourself.” Ok, how? Imagine you have been raised to believe that you are fat, worthless, and incapable of achieving your full potential. How, then, are you to be expected to trust yourself? 

I never know how to end these. Usually, I end it on some sort of insight, but this is a topic for which I have no answers. I guess, trust yourself to make the decisions for your life. Whether it leads to success or failure, you should feel some worth in the power to choose for yourself. Do not be like me. 

To Anyone Who Thinks They're Falling Behind In Life »

So like I really needed to read something like this. Maybe it will make you feel good too.