Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Mental Health

Mental health is a health issue

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I may have to move mental health issues to the top of my list. I have been dealning with my mental health issues mostly by burrowing my head in the sand keeping my news input to a bare minimum.

Today, though, living in the Twin Cities made it impossible to avoid the most explosive and horrific news of the day. The killing of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE agent. I heard about it tangentially, and then I discussed it with several friends.

I’m outraged, furious, scared, and–numb. This year has been too much, and it’s been especially stressful for us Minnesotans because we’re being targeted by the federal government. There are several reasons for this, and I am frightened about the upcoming  governor’s election. While we vote Democratically on a federal level (though just barely in the last election, worryingly enough), we’re all over the map locally. We tend to split the vote, and the batch of batshit Republicans running for office, especially mayor, is making me very nervous.

These are dark days in this country. Our president just attempted a coup of a foreign country because he wanted their oil; he’s embroiled in nasty business (I mean, he always is, but this time, it’s especially nasty); and now, this.

It’s really hard to look back at the last year and not be filled with despair. I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t think it was going to go to hell in a handbasket so quickly and so starkly.

Early in 2024, I had to get my driver’s license renewed. When I went to the DMV in order to do so, I was pleasantly surprised to see that nonbinary was the third gender option (it had only been male and female before). We are one of the most progressive states in the country–at least the Twin Cities are progressive. Not so much so the rest of the state (like many states).

And yet.

My heart sank when I saw that third option. Why? Because I knew there was a very real possibility that we would have the return of a certain president as president once again, and he had made it quite clear that he would de everything in his power to discriminate against queer people of all different stripes*.

Nonbinary is not my chosen term, but if I were twenty years younger and if *gestures helplessly at the world around me*, I probably would use it instead of woman. Or maybe not. It doesn’t really fit me, but it’ll do in a pinch. I default to not calling myself anything, really. I don’t mind so much when others call me ‘she’ or a woman, but it’s not how I think of myself.


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The way my brain works

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My brain is weird. I’ve known this ever since I wsa a kid, but back then, I just thought it was that my brain was broken. My mom was a psychologist, but she also had very traditional Taiwanese ideas about, well, everything. She had definite ideas of what a girl child should be, and I failed miserably in every aspect. A girl should be demure, quiet, acquiescent, nurturing, always thinking of others, docile, and most importantly, she should never ever EVER be noticed. Ever!

It’s ironic because she was everything she told me not to be. Opinionated, athletic, sporty, and more masculine than not. She was just continuing the dysfunction that she learned in her own home, from her own mother who was also a raging hypocrite when it came to what she espoused girls/women should do and what she actually did.

If my mother had been able to break away from the idea that she had to be a wife and a mother, her life would have been so much better. Instead, she bought it hook, line, and sinker, and did her level best to make me as miserable as she was. I’m grateful that I realized at a fairly early age that I did not have to get married and/or have children. I’ve never wavered from that, and I’m profoundly glad that I, the most indecisisve and pushover of people, stood firm for once in my life.

What does this have to do with today’s post? Not much, but I just wanted to muse about it for a bit. Also, part of what I consider my broken brain is that I can’t for the life of me go from point A to point B in a straight line. I like to joke that I don’t do anything straight, but it’s true. Everything is interconnected in my brain, so I can’t just focus on one thing or the other.

I started teaching myself the Bagua Knife Form yesterday. I wasn’t going to do it until I finished teaching myself the left side of the Swimming Dragon Form, but, well, my brain said, “Here me out. What about now?”

I have taught myself roughhly three-fourths of the left side of the Swimming Dragon Form. I am pleased with how fast I’m learning it, but not entirely surprised. This is one of my favorite forms, and it was fairly easy for me to learn.

It’s the same as the Sword Form. That was the first weapon form I learned, and I stormed through it. I was so eager to learn the whole thing, and once I was done, I taught myself the left side in short order. I do need to do a bit of clean up on it, though.


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Figuring out I was neurodivergent

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I’m in my mid-fifties and just coming to grips with me being neurodivergent. I spent most of my early days thinking there was something seriously wrong with me, which I touched on in past posts. In the last one, I talked about how my mother’s very old-fashioned Taiwanese expectations of gender really messed me up. Add to that the fact that I was a weirdo to begin with, and my childhood was miserable.

I remember when I was six or seven, I was on the playground at school during recess. I looked around me and realized that I felt like an alien amongst the humans. Everyone else seemed like they knew what they were supposed to do whereas I was floundering at everything. My parents had no interest in American culture, which meant I was clueless about it as well.

I was also whip smart, which was not a good thing when I was trying to fit in.
I may have been book smart, but I was very people ignorant. I did not know what to say to the other kids, and I was miserable all the time. I had two teachers, one in the fifth grade and one in the sixth, who were really kind to me. I didn’t like the attention at the time, but in retrospect, they were examples of good men.

I had no friends as a kid. I didn’t know how to talk to American kids, and they did not know what to do with me. I got teased for being Asian, and when I brought food to school, I got made fun of for that as well. I was one of maybe three Asian kids in my grade, and that did nothing to help my low self-esteem.

I was good at school, and I was beaten down emotionally by the time I was in school, so most teachers just ignored me. Except the two I mentioned above. I was also bored because I learned very quickly, and back in those days, no one paid much attention to the smart kids.

I did have a reading class in the first grade that was just me and another kid–a boy who was also very smart. We read books that were way above our grade level, and that was my one refuge during the day. I was a voracious reader and tackled War and Peace in the sixth grade because it was the biggest book I knew of. I made it halfway through before realizing I had no clue what was going on because everyone had so many nicknames, so I gave up.

I also read The Scarlet Letter around that time, and even though I did not know much about sex and gender, I was appalled that Hester Prynne took the brunt of the blame. That never made sense to me, and it makes even less sense to me now.

I wasted so much time as a child and teen filing off all my rough edges, watching the others around me, and trying desperately to fit in. I didn’t realize that it was a fool’s errand because no matter how blunted I made myself, it was not going to matter in the long run. I could not twist myself into a tight enough pretzel to fool the normies.


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Thinking more about love, part two

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Yesterday, I wrote about love in the context of family. Here is the post in which I mused about how complicated it can get and how we don’t talk about the fact that some parents don’t love their children. When I state plainly that my parents don’t love me, even my closest friends have a hard time not rushing in to assure me it’s not the case.

Here’s the thing. I don’t say it to get pity or in an emo way. I’m saying it as factual. My parents don’t love me because they don’t know me. What’s more, they never wanted to know the true me, and at this point in my life, there is no positive to trying to share anything of importance with them.

As I mentioned in the last post, my mother became a mother because it was what was expected of her. Also, she never felt loved in her family, and I think she believed this was the way to earn that love. It didn’t work. My grandmother was also a self-centered, unloving person who bought into the sexist bullshit that boy children were more important/valuable than girl children. She had no interest in me at all. The three or four times I saw her, I don’t think she said one single word to me.

My mother never felt loved by her mother, and I think part of her rabid obsession with being a mother was to create a bond with her mother. The day I turned 26, my mother commented that she had my brother at that age. Which, fine. Whatever. I tucked it away as a fun little fact, but little did I know that was going to be my mother’s mantra for the next fifteen years–trying to get me pregnant, I mean.

By this time, she had moved back to Taiwan. Almost every time we talked, she brought up me having children. When my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, my mother commented that she (my grandmother) would love to be a great-grandmother before she died. She heavily implied that I, as the oldest granddaughter, should be the one to have the child. I jokingly said that it would take too long for me to get married and have a child, but I could do it on my own if she liked.

I was only joking because my family on my mother’s side is deeply evangelical/conservative Christian. The idea of having children outside of marriage (to a person of the opposite gender) was unthinkable. Much to my shock, my mother said she thought her mother would be fine with that. I didn’t say anything, but I thought, “Wow, nice to know her morals are so easily discarded.”


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Thinking about love again

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I was reading random Ask A Manager posts as is my wont. One was from a woman whose mother was telling her that the reason she could not get hired is because she (the writer) was fat. The writer was also multiracial (black and white) and gay. So, of course, I instantly felt a kinship. People were rightly indignant on her behalf, and it got me thinking about my relationship with my mother (again). I had read the post before and usually ignored it when it came up again (when I hit the random post button) because it really touched a nerve. For whatever reason, I read it this time, and I am musing about my relationship with my mother.

That’s not unusual–me thinking about my relationship with my mother, I mean. It’s been tumultuous (at best) for my entire life. She called me a few hours ago atnd is her wont, dumped all her big feelings on me. She does this every time we talk. In fact, that’s the reason she calls me. I know it; she knows it; and it’s worse when she tries to pretend it’s not true.

The reason I was thinking about this post was because of one particular comment. This comment about how the commenter’s mother would have said something similar, but it would have come from a place of love. The commenter mentioned how she would deal with it, then acknowledged it would be harder if someone’s mom was deeply insecure or did not have the OP’s best interest at heart (paraphrased).

She could not bring herself to write down the obvious (or didn’t even think of it): maybe the mother does not love the writer. Now, in that particular case, I don’t think it’s necessarily true. However, there are plenty of mothers who do not love their children. And fathers. I am ‘lucky’ in that I have both a father and mother who do not love me as a person.

In ome ways, it’s easier to deal with my father. He has always been a deeply self-centered person who did not give two figs about anyone else. He was dependent upon my mother to make his life run smoothly (and his secretary when he was the president of an ecoonomic research center), but he did not love her as a person. In fact, his only use for people is what they can do for him.

Right now, deep in his dementia, he is fixated with me going to visit them. It’s not because he misses me as a person, though, but because as an insatiable extrovert, he’s desperately lonely. And one thing a child should be doing for him is paying him undivided attention. He has no inteerst in me as a person; he never has. He could not name five facts about me–even before he got dementia.


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More (you know) about mental health

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I’m still trying to get my shit togetehr and my sleep back on track. I managed to go to bed by 2:30 a.m. last night–well, a quarter to three, which is miles better than what I’ve been doing in the past few weeks. I god a decent amount of sleep, but I’m still so tired. Oh, we got two to three inches of snow last night, but only an inch or so stuck around. Winter is not leaving without a fight this year. So, once again, I’m including a video of Prince singing Sometimes It Snows In April because homeboy (he was from here) knows about winter in April. It’s such a beautiful and melancholic song.

I don’t know if I–well, let me put it this way. I’m so tired. Physically and emotionally. I feel defeated and like there’s no reason to live. What’s the point? This country is fucked. Even if there is a country after this president is gone, it’s going to be unrecognizable. The first time he was president, iI had a bad feeling, but nothing like this time. Why? Because he has a chip on his shoulder and nothing to lose. He can do whatever he wants with very little consquences. Yes, the Supreme Court is doing some checking of him, but it feels very much like they’re slowing the bleeding–not stopping it.

This election showed a really ugly side of this country, and it has just broken me. I have never been a patriot, especially not since 9/11 and the aftermath. But I have never despised my fellow countrypeople as I do righrt now nor have I wished so much ill on them. I want them to feel the pain of all the shit this president is doing, even if they will never admit/know/acknowledge it’s his fault. He doesn’t care about them in the least, which is such a maddening thing. He’s like a cult leader in that they would do anything for him. He accepts this as his due and does not care if they get hurt in return.

My empathy has run out. I want his supporters to hurt the way he’s been hurting minorities in this country. I hate that I feel this way, but I can’t deny I do. I know they will be affected by many of his batshit decisions, but it’s not enough. I want them to know he is the reason for their pain.

It heartens me that there has been pushback by both Dems and Reps, but it feels like too little too late. Because here’s the thing. In order to have a reasonable discussion, both sides have to agree as to the parameters of said discussion. That’s not possible with this president because he’s in a world of his own. If the Republicans are willing to try to put a stop to some of his ideas, well, then that’s a step in the right direction.

It doesn’t help that the family dysfunction is what it is. I talked to my mother tonight, and I realized that I’m back to feeling depressed every time I talk to her. This was actually a not-bad converastion (in comparison to several other talks we’ve had recently), but I still brace myself every time I talk to her because there’s a chance that something will come up that I have to brace myself for.


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Mental health and more

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I am really working on my sleep, which has gone haywire since changing the time. THis is one of my pet rants, but can we please stop changing the time? I don’t care which we choose, but let’s just leave it the same all year round. My god. We have fake lighting. We don’t need to be beholden to the whims of the sun any longer. For fuck’s sake.

On the bright side, I’ve been getting a decent amount of sleep. On the not-so-bright side, it’s been at all hours of the day/night/morning. I am concerned. I am trying to drag my sleep schedule back to going to bed by 2 a.m. and getting up at 10. It’s not happening, though, and I’m just not happy with myself.

Let’s talk Taiji a bit. And Bagua. I’m focusing on those because they are my lifeline. Without them, I don’t know if I could .

Side note: There’s a new game out called The First Berserker: Khazan (Neople). It’s a soulslike, though the combat is likened more to Sekiro. I tried the demo for an hour, and I quit before even getting to the first boss. Hm. There’s an easy mode (someone mentioned it in the Discord), which I had not known. But I did play the demo, and I presume there was an easy mode in the demo? If so, wouldn’t I have chosen that? I don’t know.

Anyway. I am so sick and tired of soulslike relying on the parry and having bosses taht are brutal. It’s like they took the least-interesting thing from From games (to me) and made them the focus of the game. When I tried the demo, the scrubs could kill me in three hits or so. It took three hits to kill a scrub. This is actually something  people mentioned about the game–that the enemy difficulty is badly calibrated. Andy Cortez from Kinda Funny said that he dumped all his points into Strength to get the max with as little health as he could get away with, but it still took him two or three hits to kill the scrubs.

I found the combat to be grueling and not satisfying. I think I went with the greatsword because the other options are dual-daggers and dex. As we all know by now, I don’t do either. So it’s greatsword by default. I don’t know if there is any kind of magic in the game, but my hunch is no.

Every fucking review talks about how brutal the bosses are, but how they came to love the drutality. Here’s one from IGN that typifies that sentiment. Meanwhile, I’m summoning humans for Shadow of the Erdtree because I do not want to struggle for hours with a boss. I did that with the final boss of the DLC the first time around. Five hours over two days after getting the boss down four or five hits on my second try. Did I feel exhilirated after beating the boss? Yes. But it was so fleeting and then exhaustion set in. I was so numb by that point, I was mostly just glad it was over.


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The good and the bad

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Here we are at two in the morning once again, and I’m just starting this post. I have gotten into a bad rut with my sleep (and awake time), and while I know what the problem is, I can’t make myself change it. I end up frittering away so many hours during the day, and then only when I should be sleeping, do I buckle down to do what I should be doing.

Sigh.

I know this is part of my depression. I know my mental health is really shaky right now. I know I should be doing something about it (therapy), but I just can’t make myself. Much like the other issues in my life. I know what needs to be done, but I have such a hard time making myself do it.  Even when I know each step, I can’t make myself do it. I’m fighting myself, and it’s so hard.

Plus, my brain is having intrusive thoughts. Nothing too bad, but just thoughts that make it harder for me to sleep. The last thing I need is to have my sleep be more difficult than it already is. Oh, we did hav an inch or two of snow yesterday. That was nice. It was so light and fluffy. Most of it didn’t stick, and it’s all gone now, but it was a nice respite. We’re supposed to get flurries tomorrow, too.

I just feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders. And that no one loves me. I know the latter is not true as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, but it’s still in my brain. Again, I know it’s lies. I know it’s the brain weasels. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel real.

I just looked at one of my issues with Comcast. And how it could actually be something I’m doing. Sigh. The solution (if it’s truly what I think it is) isn’t that big a deal, but it’s still a shift in my thinking and behavior. And it feels burdesome, even if it doesn’t end up being so. I’ll have to wait and see because it’s a billing thing, and I won’t know for sure for at least a week.I need enough time to gauge whether my efforts are working or not.

I am still working on my weapons, and it’s the one good thing in my life on the  daily. I mean apart from the people I love. It’s so damn hard, though. I just have this voice in the back of my head berating me for all sorts of things. It’s not as bad as it used to be, and I know it’s talking shit, but it’s still diffifult to ignore.


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Leap into the unknown

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One of the things I wanted to do in the new year (which is now a quarter done) is to widen my circle of, not friends, exactly, but acquaintances/cohorts/etc. Oh, yesterday’s post was a shambling mess. Expect more of the same today. I have not done this. Instead, I have just keenly felt more and more alone. I know my brain is broken (and my depression is getting worse) because I feel like no one loves me. And I objectively know this is not true. Yet, my brain weasels are whispering that maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t come back from dying (twice!).

By the way, I find it hilarious to say it that way. That I had died (twice!) with twice in parenths and an exclamation point following it. I can recite all the reasons why I know it’s not true (there are at least a half-dozen people whom I know love me and about a dozen more who would be sad if I were to disappear. That’s not many, but it’s still some.

And yet. I feel sad and lonely. It’s partly because I can’t comfortably drive. Not that I went out that much even before my medical crisis. But it’s hard not to look back and think that I should be further than I am now. Before I ended up in the hospital, things were opening up after the haze of the pandemic. I got my first vax and optimistically thought that I could go out and do things. Within the first month or two of going out, I caught walking (non-COVID-related pneumonia) and ended up in the hospital. That’s the short version.

Once the vax was available, I had high hopes. Right before the pandemic hit, I wanted to start dating. Or rather, I wanted to find a fuck buddy. Netflix and chill without the Netflix. I looked at my OKCupid profile, intending to clean it up and maybe  get my bro to take new pics of me. And then I had my medical crisis and that took care of that.

A little over a year ago, I started thinking about it again. Then I had a personal tragedy (which I’m still not over yet), and I put it on the backburner yet again. While I would love to find someone to have sex with, it’s not at the top of my list of thinghs to do. I can tell because I’m not doing anything to find someone. There are many reasons for that, but the main one is that while I would like to have sex again, I don’t w ant to go through all the shit to find someone. I have other things that are more important to me.

One is to find a community of other genderqueer Asian queers, as I mentioned yesterday. One of my problems is that I tend to start adding all the things I want, which are basically people like me. Narcissistic? Yes. But also, it’s because I feel so unseen. This is putting aside the medical crisis because there is literally no one else w ho has gone thorugh what I have. People like to say there are no unique experiences, but this is simply not true.


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Hanging on by a thread

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I’m tired. And depressed. And anxious. I know that I am in a bad way for several reasons. One, my sleep is terrible. I mean, it’s nearly the worst it’s ever been, and that’s saying something. I am trying to claw my way back to not completely off the rails, but it’s so hard. Here is my post from yesterday, meandering all over the place.

Another thing is that I’m wasting too much time not doing anything productive. It’s fine to spend some time playing video games, but not as much as I’ve been doing. I know that’s one way I self-medicate, so to speak, because it’s easy to numb myself out by doing another run (Balatro) or going a bit farther (Shadow of the Erdtree) and taking on one more boss (ditto).

By the way, I’m pleased that there are still people playing the DLC. I mean, I should not be surprised as there are still people playing every other From game I play. I can summon for any of the games, though not for every boss. And I get invaded with some regularity as well. Today, I was able to summon humans for most of the bosses I fought. This has been the case for the past few days as I’ve been cleaning up the DLC. Today, there’s only been one dungeon boss I’ve wanted to summon a human for and could not, but I do not blame people for not wanting to be summoned for that boss.

I am surprised that there was a summon for a boss I consider really blah, and it’s not easy to find. I’ve only had trouble with this boss on my melee character–none at all with my casters. It’s an interesting storyline, but, sadly, the two places you have to go to blow whistles in order to get to this boss are shit.

Briefly, there are these snake-like creatures that fall from the sky. One is a mage who can freeze you in place for several seconds while the others spawn and munch on you. The range is insane, and it homes so you have to ride/walk/run out of its reach. Which is impossible to do for me because I can’t gauge how far it’ll go. What did I do instead? Use the invisibility spell, Unsseen Form in order not to be seen by them. I’m wearing an armor set that muffles my footsteps so I don’t have to waste a talisman slot on the muffled footsteps talisman.

I zipped by all the munchy snakes, got to the whistle (eventually. It’s a maze and difficult to navigate), and blew it. Then I teleported back to the NPC/church so I could take on the boss. I got a human summon, and we managed to do it in one try. The human summon died right before the end of the fight, sadly, but I got the last blow as they died. So, once again, this was an easy fight as a caster.


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