Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Wellness

Let’s talk more about sleep

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I have started my journey to stay awake for quite some time. Originally, it was going to be 72 hours, but I decided that was unreasonable. I was already so tired, and I didn’t think I could make it 72 hours. I will say the first 24 hours were easy. I got up around 10:30 a.m. yesterday morning because I had Taiji (Zoom) class at noon. Lately, I’m been going to bed anywhere from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. so staying up two more hours past the latter limit wasn’t that big a deal.

Oh, and around five in the morning,  I went to shut the curtains, and what did I see outside? A noticeable dusting of snow! In late April! My bestie’s birthday is coming up soon, and her metric for snow is that it has to fall before her birthday to be allowed. I messaged her letting her now that a light dusting just squeaked by her legal limit.

I love joking with her about snow and heat v. cold. She is a hot weather person (though that has changed since she hit menopause), and I am a freezing cold weather person (though that has changed somewhat since I hit menopause). Back when she used to live in Minneapolis, we would go out once a month or so. If it was in the winter, I would be happy as a clam while she was shivering (as we smoked outside. This was after smoking was banned indoors. I do not smoke any longer). She would look at me incredulously and demand to know if my spine was scrunching up.

“Nope!” I would say happily. In my youth, I played the fun (to me) game of seeing how long it would take me in the winter to roll up my window. Usually it was around -5F to 0 degrees. And then another ten degrees lower until I actually turned on the heat. In other words, I really fucking loved the cold.

My bestie, on the other hand, grew up in Miami. She thrived in the heat and humidity, and when we went to the beach in the summer, I would moan and groan like I was being asked to drag myself across the Gobi Desert. My other bestie lived in Raleigh for some years and visiting him in summer was the worst. Even after immediately taking a shower, I would be dripping in sweat once again.Ugh. I’m sweating just thinking of it right now.

How the hell did I–oh yeah. Back to sleep.


Continue Reading

More about sleep, martial arts, and whatever else

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I’m back to talk more about just how fucking tired I am. Wait. That wasn’t the topic of yesterday’s post? Well, it might as well have been. I got a decent amount of sleep last night–oh, by the way. Last night is when I sleep regardless of the time. For instance, I went to bed around 7:30 in the morning and got up at two in the afternoon. The former was my night and the latter was my morning. This is my late evening, and I’m going to try to get to bed before the sun rises–you know what. Let me be real with myself. I cannot fix the problem if I lie to myself. Or not lie, really, because I know I’m not being real.

Here’s the thing. After my medical crisis, I was able to get to bed at a reasonable hour, get a tight eight hours, and then go about my day. This was four-and-a-half years ago. I maintained that for about a year, and then it slowly started reverting back to my norm. If it had been all at once, I might have had the wherewithal to make myself stop. I can deal with disasters well–it’s the slow creep that causes me trouble.

It’s something  that’s common for people who are neurodivergent, apparently. That we are really good in emergencies/crises. There are a few reasons for this. One, we tend to think outside the box. Which means that we can come up with solutions that other people may not think of. Two, things that distress other people may not be as immediately distressing to us. Hm. I don’t feel comfortable talking about the whole neurodivergent populace, so I’ll just speak about me. While I’m anxious in my day-to-day life and about really trivial things like ‘was my tone in that email too curt?’, I am, quite contrarily, really chill and cool whilst in the middle of a crisis.

Things that would hit other people hard do not do the same to me. Or rather, I can still keep my head in those moments. Probably because my brain quite simply does not think in the same way as other people’s brain. For example, after 9/11, I just could not understand why people kept saying, “How could this happen in the U.S.?” To me, my only surprise was that it didn’t happen earlier. In other words, with all the shit we were doing, why wouldn’t other countries want to attack us?

Please note that I am not making excuses or saying it was justified–I’m just saying I’m not surprised that we got attacked. It happens all around the world, and it’s grimly funny to hear so many people think American exceptionalism meant that there was a protecttive bubble around us that would deflect any negativity that came our way. Again, I’m not saying it was justified or that it wasn’t shocking. I’m saying it wasn’t a surprise, and I could not understand why other people thought it was. Or rather, I understood on an intellectual level, but emotionally, it baffled me.


Continue Reading

Radically rethinking my sleep–and martial arts

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I have two things I want to talk about, so because it’s my blog and I can do what I want to, I’m going to write about both. Or one until I run out of steam and decide to write about the other one tomorrow. They aren’t directly related, but there are tendrils that grow out of each that entwine and become merged together.

Let’s starct with sleep. It sucks. The end.

Of course, that’s not all I have to say about it; I’m just getting started.

I have written about sleep so often, I’m begin to bore myself. But it’s getting worse, so I’m going to keep writing about it. About twenty years ago, my therapist at the time told me of an experimental treatment that was getting some attention. It’s to stay awake for three days (and nights) straight–72 hours in order to jumpstart your brain. (That’s a very grossly simple explanation of what it was supopsed to do.) When I tried it at the time, I made it roughly 62 hours before my bestie called me to say she had her baby–prematurely.

Follishly, I went to the hospital to visit them. I was out of my mind as I talked to K. I don’t remember what I said or if I even saw the baby  through the glass. I think maybe not? As I was driving home, which was the same as if I was driving home from her house, I forgot how to get on the last freeway I needed to travel to get home. When I got home, I went to sleep immediately. (I really, really, REALLY should not have been driving).

Did it jumpstart my brain? Not really. Do I think it’ll do it this time? Not really. But! I think it might interrupt the slide I’m experiencing as far as my struggle to get to bed at a reasonable time.

Side note: I do think there’s too much pressure to go to bed at a ‘good’ hour (which means before midnight I guess?) and to say that anyone who goes to bed after that time has a mental health problem. Yes, there are studies that show that people who go to bed ‘late’ suffer more from depression, but correlation is not causation, and I would wager it’s the other way around. (People who cannot  go  to bed before midnight get depression from trying to force their natural biorhythms to fit those of the world around them.)

That said, I would like to go to bed before the sun rises. I want to aim for 3 a.m. I think that’s reasonable for me (but not tonight).

Side note deux: I was watching a show in which the participants were talking about when do you conside the next day to have begun. These were night owls, andthey did not think of a new day beginning at midnight. I was excited by this because I have long given up that metric as the start of a new day. For me, it’s when I wake up–that’s the new day. Anything before I go to sleep is the same day. In the show I was watching, one person answered that anything until the sun rose was one day. Another said that if he was called anytime before going to bed to set up a meeting at any time after he woke up, that would be the next day, regardless of what time it actually was.


Continue Reading

Accepting my brain as it is

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I’m fifty-five years old.

Waits and thinks.

Yes, that’s right. I tend to add a year to my age on January 1st every year so by the time I make it to my actual birthday, I’m confused as to hold old I am. I think it’s because it’s an Asian thing? I’m not sure, but I’m sticking to it as my reason for doing it. I don’t care about my actual age because it’s always seem so random to me to celebrate one day for being a year older.

I mean, I get it on the basic level of it’s the day you were born, so yay for you! And then the next year on the same day, you add a year to that number. In reality, though, we’re aging every day. It’s not like aging is put on hold for 364 days and then you suddenly get a year older on one day. Oh, by the way, here’s my post from yesterday.

I know I’m thinking too literally about it, but that’s how my brain works. I am very literal in most ways and then I’ll be theoretical in some random sudden circumstance. I am terrible with people who are deadpan jokers beacuse I can’t read their tone properly. This is ten times worse over text/email because I can’t get any verbal/visual cues as to how I should react.

Here is how I react to any comment.

Other person (OP): Comments on something happening in their life.

Neurotypical person: Immediately responds.


Continue Reading

More about my brain and if it’s broken

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Let’s talk more about my brain. In the last post, I talked about how a friend helped me realize that maybe my brain wasn’t broken–rather, that I had autism. When she suggested it to me, it was as if a fog cleared up in my head. I have mentioned that I was the one who clued my brother in about his autism a few months before I ended up in the hospital.

About eigt months ago, I was talking to a friend of mine. She’s very frank about herself, so I knew she was autistic. What’s more, she has no problem with talking about it. She will answer any questions I have about it, just as I will answer any questions she has about anything about me. We met in a Discord for a content creator we both watch, but oun friendship quickly progressed past that.

We’re both queer (bisexual for lack of a better term), genderqueer, poly/ENM, and, apparently, autistic. She’s also ADHD, which I may have as well. Neither of us are religious, either. She’s a math person whereas I am not, but that’s probably the biggest difference between us. I like math and I’m good at it, but it’s not a passion for me as it is for her.

We bonded over the fact that we were both magicks-based in Elden Ring (FromSoft), though she was a sorceress, andI was into faith-based magicks. We laughed over having 18 Vigor for the first 100 hours of the game (which means getting one-shot). To put it in perspective, it’s suggested that you have 60 Vigor as soon as you can. I had 38 by the end of the game.

We quickly took our friendship offline (as it were. We took it to DMs), and we sent long messages back and forth. It has been a delight getting to know her, and I would call her a true friend now. I really appreciate that she brought up the possibility that I might have autism because I never would have thought of it myself.

I took an online test, and it was borderline. My friend told me to try to take off the mask, as it were, as I took the test. In other words, she wanted me to ansnwer on impulse rather than think about it at all. Because if I thought about it, then I got trapped. Why? Because I have been heavily masking since I was a young kid. My mother made me her emotional support person when I was eleven, but she had trained me for the job for several years prior.


Continue Reading

Trying to be gentle with myself

Posted on by • 0 Comments

For most of my life, I’ve thought that my brain was broken. I’ve referred to it as such for quite some time. I would say it jokingly, but I actually meant it. I didn’t think like other people, and I always assumed it was my fault. It wasn’t until a friend of mine pointed out gently that maybe I was autistic that I really dug deep into it. Here’s my post from yesterday which is about how I’ve struggeld with my brain all my life.

Before that, I had thought a while ago that maybe I had ADHD. I knew that the most  well-known symptoms were more male-coded than female-coded/non-gendered coded. I could see some of the symptoms fitting me, but not others. The big one, though, hyperactivity, most emphatically did not describe me. When I found out that it wasn’t an essential part of having ADHD, I did not know what to do with that. I mean, it’s in the name. I did not know then that you can have ADD rather than ADHD.

I knew I had the hyperfocus part down pat. When I am into something, you cannot tear me away from it. It might be weeks or months or in rare cases years, but I’m 100% into it. Some of them are just meaningless hobbies such as jigsaw puzzles or black cubic zirconia rings. I would say Taiji didn’t start as an obsession, but once I got into weapons, it became a long-term obsession. It’s an interesting exception to my all-or-nothing mentality, and I’ll get back to that in a bit.

FromSoft games are also one of my obsessions that consumes me, but also in a weird way. I’ll talk about this one right now. When I have a new FromSoft game that is the game in my life at the moment, it’s all-consuming. I can play it for hours every day until I finish it. That’s what happened with Elden Ring. I played it for hours every day until I finished my first playthrough (well over 200 hours). That continued as I went for the platinum (about another 125 hours). Once I was done with that, I still played it every day, but not with anything close to the same intensity.

I play a From game nearly every day–or at least I did up until about three or four months ago. I can tell you why. I found another obsession to fill my time, yes, but also, I feel FromSoft games moving away from me. I did not get along at all with the last two games (Elden Ring: Nightreign and Armored Core VI Fires of the Rubicon. I did not expect to like/be able to play either game, but I’m sad I was not wrong.


Continue Reading

Unbreak my braaaaaaain

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I want to talk more about mental health. I think now is a good time to get a therapist, but as is the bitter irony of mental health issues–the time when one most needs a therapist is the time when it’s the hardest to summon up the energy to find one. This is a well-known problem with depression, by the way.

When I first got out of the hospital, my depression was about 90% gone. My anxiety was down by about 60% (meaning I had roughly 40%) what I used to have. Over the years, both slowly crept back. Now, I would say my depression is about 80% of what it used to be (before my medical crisis), and my anxiety is about 75%. In other words, they are both back in almost full force.

Am I surprised by that? Not really. I have had depression since I was seven, and I’m sure I’ve had anxiety nearly as long if not equally so, but I just never recognized  that anxiety was a thing. Not even when I was a psych major in college. It just wasn’t really well-recognized back then. Now, it’s acknowledged to be a thing, which is good. But I have a hard time grappling with it, even more so than depression.

Depression is…weird. Since I’ve had it for so long, in a weird way, it’s almost a friend. Or at least a longterm adversary with whom I am so intimate. I know it so well. I know every trick in its bag, but that doesn’t mean that I know how to deal with it or repeel it. I do think I’m better at dealing with it now than I was twenty years ago, but better does not equal good, sadly.

One thing I would really like to learn in therapy is to set healthy boundaries. Again, I’m better at it than I was twenty years ago, thanks to Taiji; I’m still not good at it, however, especially with my parents. I think this is the biggest problem, frankly.

My mother thinks of me as her emotional support person. This is not just a guess on my part–she has said, out loud, with her outside voice, that I was her therapist. When I tried to protest, she said that she could not find a legit one because she knows all of them personally in Taiwan*.

One thing you need to know about my mother–if she makes up her mind about something, nothing will change her mind. She can find a million excuses not to do something. I’m saying this while shaking my head beacuse I’m like that. I’m sure I get it from her, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it. In fact, as the truism goes, it probably angers me so much because it points out something  I don’t like in myself.


Continue Reading

Patting myself on the back, part three

Posted on by • 0 Comments

When I look back on the person I was in my twenties, I want to give that person a hug. That person was so emotionally fragile that a single negative word could crush that person into a (not-so-fine) dust. To be fair to that person, the home life was very rough. I don’t like thinking about it because it still hurts. I think about how lost and utterly miserable I was. I felt like an alien, like I didn’t belong in this world–and what’s more, the world would be better without me. Oh, here’s my post from yesterday.

When I was in my early twenties, I had a break from reality. I was very lucky to make my way back without any mental health support, but I never came all the way back. Someone once said that you when you broke something, yes, you could put it back together, but it would never be as good as new again. They were using the metaphor as a way to explain how difficult it was to deal with mental health issues, and I had never felt more seen.

Yes, I have spent decades trying to fix the cracks and breaks in me. I’ve gotten good at plastering over them, but I have yet to truly fix them. And while I am much easier on myself than I was back then, I still have lingering thoughts of self-hatred that flair up now and again. While I can talk myself down most of the times, once in a while, it just runs all the way through me. And if it reaches that point, I have a hard time getting out of that dark place.

All my life, I’ve been fighting (or not) the feeling of ‘why bother?’. Why should I try when life is, in the end, worthless? Eh. That’s not the right word for it. It’s nothing like pointless or meaningless. I guess it’s more that the world is so grim, I do not know what to with it. Every time I check the news, this president is doing something else that is so terribly bad. Just awful. It was bad during his last terms, and yet, he managed to make things even worst.

Wait. Why the hell am I going down that path?

Oh, I know why. Because I have a hard time thinking that anything matters. Or more specifically that I don’t matter. And again, I don’t mean that in a negative way (this time). I really don’t matter as a person.  Believe me that this is a better mentality than thinking I was the absolute worst as a person (that I made the world a worser place just by existing). I still cringe at things I say and do on the daily, but I can get over it more easily.

I give much thanks to Taiji (and now Bagua) for helping me become mentally stronger. I once told my teacher that while I  wasrn’t expecting to get into a fight nor did I want to, I did want to be able to use Taiji to help with relationships on an emotional level.

Since I’m terrible with boundaries, that was what I was mostly hoping for–that Taiji would help me set them. Has it? Yeah. I’m still prone to being a people-pleaser and am pretty easy to push, but when it matters, I can stiffen my spine and not give in.


Continue Reading

Feeling pleased with myself, part two

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I grew up in a Taiwanese household (though in America), which means that I was told repeatedly that everything I did/thought/was was wrong. I know that my family was particularly dysfunctional in addition to being extremely East Asian. (The latter at that time meant never saying anything positive about your child to your child.)

“You’re too loud.” “Don’t run.” “Sit with your legs crossed.”

My mom likes to recount a story of how when I was two, I chased my brother’s bullies away (he’s three years older). By the time I was seven, I consciously wanted to die. I had lost any spark I had for life–and I was but a pale copy of myself.

I spent the next thirty years absolutely hating myself. I wanted to die–or rather, I did not want to be alive. There’s a slight, but distinctive difference between the two. I was not suicidal*, but I would not have minded if I got, say, hit by a bus. I aws fast and loose with my life, which changed when I had my medical crisis.**

For a year or two after my medical crisis, I was simply grateful to be alive. It was a miracle (as I was told over and over again), and I felt it in my heart.

But, as you know, any kind of big feeling cannot last forever. It’s inevitable that it’s going to fade over time. How do I feel now? I’m not feeling life at the moment. Partly for personal reasons, but more so because of the state of the world. Many times, I’ve felt like, “I came back for this?!!” It’s been really difficult, especially this past year, and I am just not sure I’m up for it.

I don’t want to live in this world. I know we all have to work to make it better, but I feel beaten down and why bother? Look. I’ve been a lefty since I was born, basically. In ideology, I am about as far left as you can get. I’m more pragmatic in real life, but in my dream world, I’m almost a communist. I’m definitely an anarchist at heart, if not in practice.

Well. That was not what I was going to write about.

So let me switch over with no segue because that is how I fucking roll.

I was writing yesterday about how hard it was to gauge how well I was doing with my Taiji and Bagua because I have nothing to judge it against. My teacher’s classmates have all been studying songer than I have (though maybe not by much), so it’s not really fair to me to judge by them. On the other hand, none of my classmates do weapons. Wait. There’s one person, but he’s just started, so it wouldn’t be fair to him to compare myself to him.


Continue Reading

Feeling pleased with myself

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Today, I had a private lesson. My goal was to focus on the Solo Long Form, but when my teacher came over, we started talking about other things as was our wont. One thing I mentioned was how much trouble I was having with my sleep. That’s not ususual for me in general, but it’s been really bad for me. My teacher suggested that when I could not sleep, I do a portion of the Solo (Long) Form until I got bored and ready to fall asleep.

One of her teacher’s teacher firmly believes that there is no style of martial art beyond human style. He also does his Taiji with his weight fully forward rather than 70% forward. That’s for combat rather than health, and I much prefer that. My teacher’s teacher has been teaching his students to practice by taking the first section of the form and taking five minutes to do it. That’s a really long time. A REALLY long time. I did it today with my teacher after she did it, and it was so hard. I spent over a minute on the preparation and beginning combined, and then I rushed the rest of the first half of the form.

This was an exercise to be aware of what you were doing while practicing and to really sharpen your focus. I was able to do the first section with seventeen seconds to spare. Not bad, but I really struggled to even do that well. I tend to go really fast, and if I do slow down, then I go waaaaaay too slow. To do it slow enough but not too slow is a struggle.

I also talked to my teacher about how difficult it was to not fall into the American trap of pushing yourself too hard at all times. Since I’d been writing about it for the past few days, it was at the top of my mind. I’m a bit frustrated that I forgot an easy move while teaching myself the Bagua Knives Form, and I vented a bit about it to her. She said that it was good that I had caught it at all and that it wasn’t any big deal. Intellectually, I knew she was right, but it still bothered me.

I also said that I felt envious of her two classmates, let’s call them Jim and Nicole, because they were both so dedicated to their weapons and so much further along than I was. The latter is the reason I really wanted to teach myself the Double Saber Forms because I saw her do it at the demo (right before the pandemic locked everything down). I was so impressed by it and by her every time she did a weapon form.

As for the former, I was blown away by him at every demo. The one time he subbed for my teacher, I was so intimidated by him. He worked on the Sword Form with us and asked to see me do something. i was so wowed by him, I made a mistake. He was so dedicated to the weapons, he invented a weapon form that was only him unsheathing weapons (and then ‘using’ one on a classmate before resheathing it). I was so awed by it, even if it’s not my thing. In addition, he made weapon bags, and the one I use was made by him.

When I told my teacher how I felt about her classmates, she interrupted me and said that she put me on the same level as Jim. I was gobsmacked because it’s most certainly not true. She added in terms of dedication to the weapon and my abilities. I think what she meant is that I had the same ability to learn them than he does, not that my current abilities are equal to his.

I was so flattered because I don’t think of it that way at all. It’s only within the last year or two that I’ve even had the courage to call myself an advanced student. Yes, sure, I am teaching myself weapons, but…well, I do’nt know where I’m going with that but.


Continue Reading