Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: boundaries

Not knowing where and when to draw the line, part five

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This is yet another post about limits, boundaries, and when to push it and when to rest. In the last post, I touched on not knowing when to do the former and when to do the latter. I will delve further into that concept in this post. Let’s start with Bagua. I’m much more comfortable with keeping my weight back, but it still catches me off-guard from time to time. Early on, I asked my teacher how she remembered what she was doing when (Taiji versus Bagua). She said that she just got used to it and kept them separated in her mind. At the time, I didn’t understand, but now I do.

If I’m doing Taiji, then I’m doing Taiji. I’m primarily forward (meaning my weight is forward), and I’m being receptive of energy. I’m not trying to go hard or be in your face. In fact, I’m just chill and letting the energy flow through me. It’s very much vibes based and not doing too much. Most people can do Taiji (Yang-style, not Chen-style. The latter is really bad for your knees) as long as they just take it slowly and do not try to push themselves hard.

Bagua, on the other hand, I would not recommend to just anyone. If we’re just going by feel, Bagua feels dangerous. In fact, my teacher says that in CHina, people are wary of people who study Bagua. I don’t know how true that is, but I could see it being very true. There’s an aggression to Bagua that is completely absent in Taiji.

When I first started studying Bagua, I wondered how I would be able to make peace with how different they were. I had been studying Taiji up to that point, and the whole vibe of Taiji is to just be chill and not exert yourself too much. Empty step and never be double-weighted.

Bagua doesn’t care about any of that. The motto and mentality of Bagua are to do what it takes to ‘win’. Double-weighted? No matter. No empty stepping? Not a big deal! Take the aggression and run with it. In fact, start the aggression yourself. It’s explosive and a great way to rid myself of any anger I’m feeling (even if it’s only for a few seconds).

Like the yin-yang, Taiji and Bagua are polar opposites that complement each other. One is hot and one is cold. One is light and one is dark. One is day and one is night. They could not be more different from each other, and yet, tthey work really well together.


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When to push limits and when to CTFO, part four

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I’m back to write more about limits, boundaries, and toxic positivity–maybe. That’s what I wanted to write about in the last post, but then I wandered down the road of talking about my poor memory. I am going to get back on track now and write abotu what I said I wanted to write about, but we’ll see how long that lasts.

Despite all the blathering I’ve done about being negative about pushing too hard, I’m not totally against it. I know you have to push yourself at times to get shit done. I especially have to do so because I tend to lean towards inertia. When K used to live here, we got together maybe once a month, usually to go out dancing. It took me quite some time to get ready to go. We usually did it like this. Let’s say we were meeting at eight. I would think about getting ready about six-thirty, but I could not make myself do it until seven or seven-thirty. It only took me ten minutes to get ready to go (I didn’t weear makeup at all), so that made it easier for me to drag my feet.

I would leave at twenty to eight because it took fifteen to twenty minutes to make it to K’s house. Then, I would sit on her bed for fifteen to twenty minutes and watch as she agonizehd over what to wear. We were both depressed people, and it took a lot of effort to get us moving. She would usually ask her husband to help pick out an outfit because he had a great sense of style while I just sat there, amused. We would rarely leave her house before a half hour after we agreed to go out. I was fine with it once I realized it was just the way she was.

One of my funniest memories of us going out was the one rare time when we were going to something in St. Paul, which was closer to me than her. So we decided that she would come to my house rather than the other way around. At eight (when we were supposed to meet), just as I was thinking about getting dressed, my doorbell rang. I was flustered as I realized she had come early (for her). In fact, that’s what I blurted out to her as I opened the door–“You’re early!” I’m afraid I said it in an accusatory tone (though I did not mean it that way).

“I’m on time!” She said immediately. “Which is early for you!” It was a thoughtless reply on my part, but fortunately, she laughed. We had been besties for long enough to be able to joke like that.


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More about the anger inside, part five

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Let’s talk one more time about anger. I had my private lesson today, and I mentioned the argument with my mother that I recently had to my teacher. I was still upset with myself for letting it get as far as it did, but I totally did not see the trap in time. That’s what made me mad at myself, though. I’m usually really good at seeing the traps in time and neatly side-stepping them or jumping over them completely. Here’s my post on the subject from yesterday.

It’s been a lifelong study in patience when talking with my parents. I really hate when I lose my temper because what’s the point? In addition, I just don’t want to unleash it willy-nilly. I do believe in the power of anger, but I don’t want to let it run unleashed.

When I used to spend an inordinate amount of energy keeping it tamped down, it was so tiring. I was really afraid that if I let it out, it would just  explode everywhere. It was self-defeating behavior, but understandable. My therapist at the time asked me what I thought would actually happen if I let it out. I didn’t know for sure, but I did know that it would destroy the whole world.

I knew I wasn’t important at all, but I also was made to feel by my parents that every little mistake I made was the end of the world. They had no sense of proportion, which is one reason I don’t either. Another reason is because of my broken neuroatypical brain.

When I was a teenager, I was a hot mess–and deeply miserable. My parents were very much into saving face and maknig sure that we never appeared ‘wrong’ from the outside . We weren’t supposed to hint at anything other than a perfect family. One example that was seared in my brain happened when I was a teenager. My parents were out playing tennis with a few of their church friends. Another of their church friends (a woman) called, wanting to speak to my father. I told her that he was out playing tennis.

When my parents returned, I told them their friend called and that I told her they were out playing tennis. My father got mad at me for that. He said I shouldn’t have said it because it was family business. I didn’t understand that. Why was it such a big deal that he was out playing tennis with his friends? He did elaborate that she might feel bad because she wasn’t invited, but that didn’t feel like the whole reason.

It wasn’t until many years later that I figured it out. My father had a series of affairs since I was very little. I don’t know when I realized it, but he always had at least one sidechick–from the very conservative and sexist Taiwanese church we belong to. Everyone knew about it, and I was amazed that he didn’t get his teeth punched in. I guess that wasn’t the Taiwanese/Christian way. Anyway, the woman they were playing tennis with was a longtime side chick of my father’s. The woman who called from him was probably an ex or a future sidechick. That made much more sense to me than any of my father’s explanations. Yes, he was a highly secretive man, but that wasn’t an explanation in and of itself.

I try to be as compassionate as I can, but there’s a coldness at the very core of my heart/soul that I can’t quite explain. I’ve always known it’s there, and I’ve always tried to make sure that it stays where it belongs. I’ve been ashamed of it and thought it was my failing for so long.


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Taming the anger inside, part three

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Let’s talk more about rage. I could soften it and talk about it in the socially polite way. “I was having difficulty reining in my anger, and I needed to focus on my breathing to do so.” Here is  my post from yesterday in which I discuss all my struggles with my temper. I had it under control for the first twenty years of my life because I had to. It was psychological damaging, but I did what I had to do to get through it.

I had less of a grip on it through my thirties, and Taiji hepled me tap into my anger. Not in a bad way, but in a healthy way. It’s not healthy to hold back your temper to the point where you’re dead inside. Believe me, it isn’t.

For the majority of my life, I was numb. I could feel emotions way down deep, but they were very subdued–as if I was feeling them through a thick layer or twenty of gauze. This was positive emotions as well as negative ones–though I will admit that there were ten times the latter than the former.

I will point out that it’s also probably because I’m neuroatypical, which means I don’t feel things in the same way that other people do. However, I know it was more because of the emotional abuse I got whenever I showed any negative emotion in my family (I’ve mentioned more than once that only my parents were allowed to show their displeasure in any way).

Still. I felt I had a decent handle on it. With my parents, it was avoiding any topic that had the chance to go really wrong, and I could usually spot those within seconds. In general, I’m pretty good at spotting the pitfalls that will out me as a weirdo, alien, and/or freak. Or in the case of my family, just someone who’s completely wrong. Wrong at what? Everything. My mother wanted a daughter-shaped person who embodied the feminine ideals (even though she hated them herself) in order to repair her fractured relationship with her mother (don’t ask).

Somewhere in myy forties, I gave up on my relationship with my mother. (I knew there was no hope with my father and didn’t care at a much earlier age.) I knew that she was not going to change, and I knew that I wasn’t going to ever be the person she wanted me to be.

Side note: My father has dementia. It’s gotten progressively worse (as dementia does). When it first started, I was in a very difficult place with my parents. I have struggled with my relationship with them all my life. I did not know what to do. I mean, Taiji helped me a lot when I first started studying it, but there were limits to it.


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Trying to tame the rage inside, part two

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I’ve been writing about trying to control my temper beacuse I had an episode with my mother last night. It’s been a while beacuse normally, I’m really good at avoiding sensitive topics because normally, I just have to listen to her talk about my father for twenty minutes to a half hour and tell her I’m doing fine. I learned a long time agoo that it’s better not to talk about anything of substance with her.Most of the time, it’s easy beacuse she wants to talk obsessively about my father with an occasional complaint about her own health thrown in for good measure. Or what a tough time she is having with the live-in aide. (For helping with my father with his dementia.)

This was something my brother and I learned a long time ago. Not to tell our mother anything of real importance because one, she would worry about it; two, she would want to talk about it; and three, most likely, she would disapprove of it.

One time when my brother was traveling, he ran into a minor issue with his credentials (well, his girlfriend’s), and he had to go ahead of her. That meant that he spent one day alone in London. London, where, as you know, (most) people speak English as their first language. Where there are signs and everything in English. My mother told me she was really worried about him and prayed for him to be ok.

I told her that he would be just fine (mentioning all the English that happens there). I said I admired him for doing so much traveling and basically whatever he wanted. He’s an adventurer, and I really appreciate that about him.

Another thing my brother and I had agreed upon was that we would not tell our mother anything about each other. I have half-joked with him that I wished he hadn’t told them about my medical crisis. I wasn’t blaming him because I understand why he did it, but it would have been so much easier overall if they hadn’t been here. The only thing I really needed her for was to towel off after a shower, and I could have managed it myself if I had to.

It was really stressful, and I think I would have done better overall on my own. I told my brother he should have just told my parents I was visiting Ian for two weeks. I was joking, but I really wasn’t. I really prefer living on my own, and it was hard to hav ethem around 24/7 for three months. About a month-and-half into it, I was messaging with Ian and saying that I could not do it. I was so stressed and tense, and I was actually thinking I would rather have died than come back for this shit.

I was in a very dark place is what I’m trying to say. He had been in the army when he was younger, and he told me something I’ll never forget. When he was in basic training, he had a drill sergeant who told him, “Don’t think of how long you have to go. Just think of today. You can do one day. Anyone can do one day.”


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Private versus personal and reasonable boundaries

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When I was a kid, I was taught that there was nothing about the family that you could say to anyone not in the family. I’m not talking about big things like marital difficulties (though, that, of course, was also verboten), but about the little things. The story I tell over and over goes like this. My parents went to play tennis with their friends all the time. One time, they were out with a friend playing tennis. Another friend called and asked for my father. I said he was out playing tennis.

It didn’t seem like a big deal to me. When my parents came home, my father flipped his shit at me. He told me that I shouldn’t have said that to the other friend, which confused the hell out of me. I asked why because I truly didn’t undrestand. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk, but what was the big deal about going to play tennis with some friends. My father said that the other friend would feel left out, which didn’t make sense to me, either.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized the issue. My father was playing with his current special ladyfriend (and her husband. And my mather). My father has had a mistress since–well, probably since dating my mother. He certainly has had one since I was a little kid. My mother has been crying about it for fifty years. He always had one in the wings as well–a backup in case he got bored with the current one. Which he often did.

I wouldn’t have thought the other friend was his type because he liked really feminine women–but, on the other hand, he married my mother who was not a typically feminine woman. The other friend was more like my mother than my father’s usual type. At any rate, at some point, she cut herself off from the Taiwanese community, and I would not be surprised if my father was part of the reason why.

Anyway, he was mad that I had told his potential mistress that he was with his current mistress. He was by nature a very sly person. He kept things close to the vest and only doled out information as needed. As he deemed it to be so, I mean, not the more universal meaning of the word. It was impenetrable until you realize that it just meant what put him in the best light. That’s it.

My point is that I was taught that you don’t tell anyone anything. Period. No matter how seemingly innocuous it seemed, it was an outrage to say anything to anyone about anything. It was like his penny-pinching ways. He would scrutinize every penny spent (one time he was here recently, he complained about kiwis being two for a dollar), but then he’d spend a hundred bucks on a water pick he never used. It sat unopened on a shelf for years. It wasn’t even that it was a hundred bucks (which was a lot of money, but not excessive), but that he bought it on impulse and never used it.

In the same way, he hoarded information about himself, and in general was not happy with any of it being told to anyone unless he approved it first.

On the flip side, my mother told everyone everything. Not when it came to my father, maybe, but everything else was fair game. And even with my father, she could never keep her own dicta. For her fiftieth anniversary, she really wanted to go on a cruise. She told my brother to pay for it and tell my father that he had paid for it, while she would send him (my brother) the money. I found out later from my brother that my mother told my father that she had paid for it at some point.

That’s her to the core. She can’t keep a secret for the life of her. When I had my medical crisis, she was telling everyone and their sister about it. The Uber driver. The cleaner. Probably the mailman if she talked to him. She got mad at me when I said maybe she could dial it back.

“It’s my life, too!” She said heatedly. Well, yes. But it’s primarily my life. And I think I should get to decide who gets to know the details of what happened to me (outside of the medical system, of course).


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When I’m done, I’m done

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I am pretty patient in general. With people, I mean. Wait. That’s not true. I am impatient in my brain, but outwardly, I’m patient. I understand people’s foibles because I know the reasoning behind it. I’m not an empath for no reason.

Side note: There was someone at Ask A Manager (a commenter) who wrote, “Of course, there is no such thing as an empath.” She dropped it in like everyone knew this to be a fact.” I did not say but should have, “Just because YOU don’t believe in them, it doesn’t mean it’s not true.” But I didn’t because I know what people think of empaths. I don’t even really like the word, but I accept it’s the common nomeclature. I can understand why she did not want it to be true.

I have known since I was in college that people don’t like being told about themselves. I mean, I knew it before that, but it was when I was studying psychology that I realized that most people don’t know themselves and more to the point, don’t want to know themselves. Jung was spot on when he said that people didn’t want to see their shadow sides.

It’s funny to me because I’m all about my shadow side. For most of my life, I have freely admitted my flaws. I’m a slob and a procrastinator. I am quick to take offense being very thin-skinned and quicker to anger. I am sarcastic and I see the negative in people much more easily than I see the positive. I’m sarcastic, snide, and will always find the fault in everything.

For decades, I refused to look at any of my positives. I liked to joke that my shadow side comprised my positive aspects. This was collateral damage from a childhood in which I could not do anything right. I got it in my head that I would be punished if I said anything at all positive about myself. This was my Taiwanese culture at work, but it was also my parents being overwhelmingly negative people.

Other people, though, cannot bear to face their own flaws. In fact, many of them will go to any lengths not to acknowledge them. And then act up because they’re so ashamed of them. It’s fascinating as a student of psych to watch the defense mechanisms people use. There’s a saying in psychology. You don’t take away someone’s defense mechanism without giving them something to replace it with.


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Sharing is not always caring

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I’m obsessed with the idea of boundaries because my parents don’t have any. None. Nada. Zip. They don’t believe their children should have individual personalities. We are reflections of them and therefore must replicate their ideology identically. My brother is the favored child because he is a boy and the oldest. he also followed more of what my parents espouse, but he has come afoul across their beliefs more than once. The way they hold up their ideals makes it impossible to meet them. For example. my mom pushed my brother to have kids for years. Him and his wife. They didn’t have children until 6 years into marriage, which was unheard of in Taiwanese culture. They had three kids with a big gap between one and two, and during that time, my mom pushed me to have kids of my own.

At one point, she was talking to my brother on the phone about being upset that I wasn’t having children. Yes, she did it where I could hear her, probably unconsciously on purpose. She was saying there was a bond between mother and daughter when the daughter had a child. And, there was a saying in Taiwanese about the difference between a son having a child and a daughter having a child, and she was so sad that she wouldn’t get to have that. My brother joked that he could have more children, to which my mother quickly said that he had done enough.

See? You can’t win with her. She was upset that I didn’t have children and upset that my brother had too many.

Side note: my mother has a disconnect between what she thinks she wants and what she actually wants. She has said repeatedly that she always wanted children and being a mother was the most important thing to her from since she was young. She extended that to having grandchildren. It was so important to her, she had to nag me about it for fifteen years (and my brother for the first six of his marriage).

Here’s the rub. She never liked me as a person. She certainly did not like me as a child. I was fat, gawky, awkward, deeply depressed, and a bookworm. She made dresses for me to wear, which I hated. I liked to run around and climb trees, but that was looked down upon by her and the other women in our (Taiwanese) church. I was too boyish, which was not acceptable. Except for playing sports. For some reason, that was fine for women/girls to do, but only in strictly circumscribed circumstances. But I wasn’t supposed to run around, laughing, shouting, and climbing trees. I was supposed to be quiet, sit with my legs shut, and be small. Both physically and mentally.

I spent most of my childhood, miserable for so many reasons. I was fat. Well, I wasn’t really, but my mom was convinced I was. I was chubby. I was solid. I was thicc, yes. But when I look at pictures of me as a kid, I wasn’t grotesquely fat as my mother constantly made me feel I was. She put me on my first diet when I was seven and told me that I would be so pretty if only I lost weight. When I was seven.


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The meaning of life?

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Before I landed in the hospital, I was living a staid and probably boring to many people life. This was during the pandemic, which meant I was pretty much a shut-in. I went out once a month to the pharmacy to get my meds. I had been opening up a little bit because I was fully vaxxed, but that meant going to Cubs twice and to pick up lunch with my brother once. In other words, I wasn’t going wild, by any means, but I was taking baby steps.

Then I ended up in the hospital and I suddenly didn’t care about the pandemic any longer. Or rather, I should say, it was no longer at the top of my list of things to worry about. Understandably, I had other things on my mind. Also, while I was in the hospital, I was constantly around people and I was not wearing a mask. Everyone else was, of course, but I was not. I had a breathing tube shoved up my nose for the first week and a half and then an oxygen tube for the next few days. I had to wear a mask when I was taken from room to room, but other than that, the pandemic was not visible in any way.

It also made me realize that I was…not overreacting, but focusing too much on the pandemic in my daily life. I spent a year-and-a-half shut in my house, fearing to talk to or see anyone. I’m not saying that was the wrong reaction because it was a fucking pandemic. But now that I’m vaxxed and about to get my booster, I’m being more realistic about the endemic. It’s not going anywhere. We’re going to have to live with it. If I get it, it probably won’t be life-threatening. It’ll be like the flu–getting a shot every year with a couple thousand people dying and the rest just being miserable.

Side note: It’s funny how the same question asked by different people can get a vastly different response. It makes sense, really, as the relationship with different people are, well, different. So something that is innocuous from one person is invasive from another. It’s just difficult to explain. I was trying to elaborate on this on Twitter about my father, using the example of him asking if I’m cold. I painstakingly laid out all the reasons it’s not just an innocuous question from him and there was still someone who was dismissive of my experience.


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Mental health and boundaries

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no trespassing!
STAY OUT!

In American psychology, they talk about healthy boundaries and how to delineate them. In theory, it all sounds good. In reality, it’s not as clear cut as it appears. Maybe it’s because I have immigrant parents (Taiwanese), but it’s not as easy as it’s portrayed. I mentioned  in the last post how Asian boundaries are much softer than American ones are. It’s difficult for me because I’m at least 90% American, but the 10% that is Taiwanese is really, really, really persistent. In addition, my family is…dysfunctional at best when it comes to boundary. A small example.

I am not a morning person. At all. I used to go to bed at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. and get up at noon or 1 p.m. I’ve been trying to push it back to a more normal type because, well, I’m not exactly sure why. I think maybe because I’m a such a freak, and it’s a way of being more ‘normal’. In addition, I was sick a few months ago, and I could not stay up past midnight. I vowed to stick to it, but I have not. I haven’t gone all the way back to six in the morning, but it’s definitely not on the bright side of midnight. It’s been one or two before my parents came for their yearly visit–and now it’s creeping back again. Two, three, and sometimes four.

The worst part is that my father’s sleep schedule is all over the place, and I am not happy about it. He goes to bed around nine or ten, then he wakes up at three or four in the morning, which means he’s awake when I’m awake. I know that part of the reason I’m going to bed later is because I need my personal time. I need time when I don’t have to brace myself for someone talking to me at any moment of the day. It’s Skinner all over again. Briefly, if something happens consistently, then you expect it. So, if they were to talk to me, say, at the top of every hour, I would know when it was going to happen. Of course, on the converse side, if they never talked to me (my dream), then I wouldn’t have to be tense at all. But, the worst is that I never know when it’s going to come. It could be ten times an hour, or it might be at the end of the third hour.

I had to tell my mom yesterday that I needed a half hour in the morning to do my routine before she and my father dove straight into pelting me with questions or telling me irrelevant information that was of no interest to me. I’ve told her before, but she has selective memory. To be fair, she has a bad memory. To be unfair, it’s worse when she doesn’t care to remember something. I mean, we all have that problem, really.

Side note: She was complaining the other night about how she was saying something to my father about a a headache* she was having, and he jumped into say something about his headache, and she told him to keep the attention on her. he got mad (of course) and said he was going to say what worked for him. She then said with a straight face that he always turned everything back to himself. I pointed out that she did that as well. She’d ask how I was, and I’d say I had, say, a cold. She would then veered off that she had had a bad cold for weeks and in detail for fifteen minutes. She argued, but then carefully thanked me for pointing it out. And I’m sure she promptly forgot it.

Where was I? Oh, yes, boundaries. I was in the bathroom yesterday morning going to the bathroom, brushing my teeth, and doing my leg lifts. My mom knocked to ask me…I can’t even remember because it was so unimportant. Oh, right. She wanted to know where my cousin whom we met up with a few days ago taught. Which college. Seriously? That couldn’t wait fifteen minutes? Of course it couldn’t because it was my father who wanted to know, and when he wanted something, she hurries to do his bidding. I know why she does it. It’s because he’s extremely unpleasant when he doesn’t get his way. As in shouting at her or giving her the silent treatment for hours, and I clearly remember him doing that in my childhood. We could not tell my father this, that, or the other thing because it might upset him.

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