My father has dementia. He’s had it for roughly twenty years. He’s nearly 85 now, so it was early-onset back then, but it’s just dementia now. Since I only see him once a year or so, it’s easy to see the decline from year to year. In addition, they could not come the summer of 2020 or 2021 for obvious reasons, so when they came in the autumn/winter of 2021, the decline was stark.
To be clear,he still had most of his faculties most of the time. By the way, I always mix up faculties and facilities. Every time. But, even when he was in his right mind, he was still…just a bit…off. It’s like a Vaseline smear on a lens. Not all his synapses were firing, and you could not assume he knew what you were saying/doing.
Here’s the thing, though. He was still himself, even when he was deep in his dementia. That made it difficult to tell when he was being a jerk because of his dementia and when he was being a jerk because, well, he’s a jerk.
I know you’re not supposed to say that about someone with dementia, but it’s true. My father has always been a self-absorbed, bitter, calculating man who cared not a whit about anyone else around him. Or rather, he only cared about other people as it pertained to himself.
Related: it’s really difficult to be honest with people about my parents. The Great American Myth is that families are everything and that parents will do anything for their children. Well, that’s what people give lip service to, but don’t actually support. Still, the belief that parents LOVE THEIR CHILDREN AND WILL DO ANYTHING FOR THEM runs deeeeeeeep.
It’s not true, by the way. I mean, most parents love their children, I presume, as best theey can. Most parents will do what they can for their children. But to say that every parent loves their kid more than anything in the world? Nah, I don’t believe that. In fact, in the United States, roughly 600,000 cases of child abuse were reported in 2021 (I’m sure that’s vastly underreported), and that was the lowest number of reported cases in five years (prior). This was according to the Children’s Bureau at the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Administration for Children and Families (ACF), which is a governmental agency.
We are back with another post about my goals for the new year. In my last post, I was talking about Taiji and how much it’s helped me in my life. It’s not hyperbole to say that it’s saved my life, both during the medical crisis (literally) and before it (emotionally).
My family dysfunction runs deep. Of course, as a kid, I did not realize how dysfunctional it was. That’s the thing about being a kid–you think your life is normal because you have no touchstones to anchor yourself to. In addition, my father was a Taiwanese nationalist and did not want to be in America. I did not realize this until maybe two years ago.
He went back to Taiwan when I was twenty-two or twenty-three. I have a feeling that he resented not being able to go back earlier. This is what I figured out. My parents both came to America for grad school (individually)–in Tennessee. My moather for her MA in psychology and my father for his MA in economics. They went to different schools, but met…not exactly sure. Probably at a Taiwanese event? (More likely, called Chinese something or other. I am not going to get into tho complicated politics of Taiwan.) My father did the hard press on my mother, and she fell for his charms.
After a year, my mother was done with her program. That meant she had to go back to Taiwan because her visa ran out. My father wasn’t done with his degree yet. Much gnashing of teeth was had. My father’s housemother told them that in America, people just got married in their situation.
I really wish she hadn’t told them that. My parents should never have gotten married, and they most certainly should not have had children. Sometimes, I wonder how different their lives would have been (individually) if they hadn’t married. My mother was engaged to someone in Taiwan when she met my father (long, misogynistic, archaic story), and she might have gone back to him if she hadn’t become besotted with my father.
My father got his degree after another year. They moved to Minnesota so he could go to the U of M to get his PhD, and my brother was born soon after. I was born 2 1/2 years later.
I think this was the point when my father got really bitter. I’m working with the assumption that he wanted to return to Taiwan. With that knowledge, everything afterwards makes sense. Well, not all of it, but it at least puts things into perspective.
I’ve been writing posts about my medical crisis, my re-birthday, and my goals for the upcoming year. I have written one goal per post (as is my wont to talk endlessly about the smallest minutiae), and we’ll see if I continue that in this post. Yesterday, I talked about learning new weapons forms in Taiji because I haven’t in some time.
Today, I want to talk about my mental health (Taiji and Bagua would fit here as well). It has been on a slow, but steady decline since the second anniversary of my re-birth. In the last post, I outlined some of the reasons why, but I want to dive more deeply into that.
One of the biggest issues is that while I had a life-changing event, that didn’t stop life from happening. It also didn’t completely change me. I mean, there was a change to my core. How could there not be when I died twice? That leaves a stamp on your soul that you can’t erase. At least, I cannot. Nor would I want to erase it. I have said that while it was traumatic (of course), it was also the best thing to happen to me.
Side note: This is one of the books I’ve toyed with writing. A joke self-help book in which the only advice is to try dying and coming back again. I just don’t know if I have enough to make it last for a whole book. I can carry a joke far, but how far?
Back to my mental health. My depression is probably back up to 60% of what it used to be.
Interjection: I have struggled with chronic and deep depression since I was seven. It lifted by roughhly 90% when I died. Twice. And came back twice. Then it steadily went up again. (My anxiety dropped to 40% and is now back up to 60% or so.) Here’s the thing, though. As I mentioned in a recent post, I had a shitty run of several months in which there was a steady drip of negative things happening to me–ranging from trivial and irritating to devastating and heartbreaking.
Which brings me back to my mental health.
Taiji (and now Bagua) has kept my mental health issues under control for fifteen years. Taiji has saved my life, even if it’s metaphorical. I mean, it literally saved my life during my medical crisis, but it metaphorically did it for years before that.
It’s my third re-birthday, which means it’s been three years since my medical crisis. That is wild for me because for the first year or two, I was just living day by day. I didn’t really have a plan for the future. I did last year, but I didn’t really get onto it as a slow trickle of bad things happened to me, ranging from irritating to tragic/traumatic. The traumatic thing happened in late February of this year, and it wiped me out. I was barely functional for months, and it’s only been in the last month or so that I’ve started to come back.
I want to explore what I will do in this year. I feel like it’s my year to shine. I wrote a bit about my goals in my last post, but of course wandered all over the place. I also included the same video in the last post, but it’s my meditation for the year, so I’m including it again. It’s MILCK’s musitation, Metamorphosis. Here are the lyrics that really hit home for me:
Give it a little more time, a little more time Meant for greater heights A little more time, a little more time Wet wings, they will dry Ooh, I was born for this
I’ve been in a cocoon, and it’s time for me to emerge. I also like that she mentions death in the song. And it’s just a gorgeous song in general. So it’s my meditation and my muse for the upcoming year.
I mentioned yesterday that I want to get back to writing. I still write a post a day, but I also want to write my memoir and/or a murder mystery. Or a novel that is loosely based on my time in the hospital. Why? Because I was high as a kite the whole time, but did not realize it. I had so many delusions that I just took for granted were real. I’ve asked my brother about a few things, and he’s confirmed the ones he remembered.
I told him stories about things that I thought happened. One example is that I thought there was a young woman (around 22 years old) on my floor who had died from Covid. I overheard the nurses talking about her. It was clear they knew her as more than a recent patient. Her family had a ranch and a popular website about that ranch. They ware also conservatives who did not believe in vaccinations. (And by extension, taking appropriate measures to not get Covid.) It turned out that the mother had Covid as well, and died, too.
The day this is posted is my actual re-birthday. That is, the anniversary of the day of my medical crisis, September 3rd, 2021. Here is yesterday’s post leading up to this post. In yesterday’s post, I rambled about this and that as is my wont. Today, I want to list my goals for my fourth year in my rebirth. I’m going to try to stick to that in this post, but we’ll see how it goes.
1. Finally write my damn memoir/murder mystery/novel about my medical experience. I have loosely held this goal in my head ever since I got back home from the hospital. I have tried to write both a memoir and a murder mystery (several times), but I just could not do it. Not that I couldn’t write; I could do that. But…
How do I explain this? Before my medical crisis, I wrote several murder mysteries. The way I would do it is I would come up with an idea in my head. Within a day or so, I would have the perp, the victim, and the general circumstances surrounding the murder. In another couple days, I would have the chronological events (the important ones) lined out in my head. Then, I would start writing and not stop until I was done.
I know the conventional wisdom is to write an outline before you actually start writing. I don’t do that. Nor have I ever held to a writing schedule. Well, I mean, I have a rough one–I write at night. That’s a whole nother topic, how I come alive at night. I do my best writing after midnight. But I don’t set a certain time to write. I feel constricted when I do this. I write when I feel like writing, and that’s worked for me in the past.
Now, however, it’s time to admit that my own ways don’t work for me any longer. I did NaNoWriMo last year (I’ve done it every year for a decade or more. I think I might have skipped 2021 or done editing, but I don’t remember). I had a good idea for…2022 or 2023? Again, I don’t remember which one because my memory is shit now, but one of them. It was a rom-com/murder mystery mash-up.
I knew the perp, the victim, and the other main people. I knew how I wanted to have the meet-cute. I just couldn’t make it work. In part because I hate rom-coms. I probably should have taken that more into account when I started writing, but I thought that made it the perfect thing for me to try.
My third re-birthday is coming up. It’s the third anniversary of my medical crisis–well, it will be the day after the day this is posted. September 3rd, 2021. That was the day I died–twice. And came back to life–twice. Sometimes, I think I should have chosen the day I woke up as my re-birthday, but to me, this was the more impactful day. Even if I don’t remember it.
That’s the weird part to me. Such a momentous day in my life is one I don’t remember at all. I’ve made my peace with it (and that I’m missing most of the week prior to it), but it’s still something I muse about from time to time. I woke up (or was still up) at three in the morning and could not breathe. I had the wherewithal to get up and get the cordless phone, to call 9-1-1, and to follow what they told me to do. Which was to go to the front door and unlock it. Then, I promptly passed out in the front hallway, which is how the cops found me.
I rarely think about it any longer, but when I do, it never ceases to amaze me. I did all that while being unable to breathe. The cops arrived in time to bag me (with oxygen) and keep me alive until the EMTs came. That the cops knew they had to bag me and had the ability to do so was a miracle in and of itself. It helped that where I live is a sleepy little suburb and they could get to me in two minutes was a big plus. Had they taken any longer, I would have been permanently dead. The brain cannot do without oxygen for very long. Brain damage starts in less than a minute, and you will not live past fifteen minutes. (Ten minutes is very dicey.)
I have very little brain damage (at least that I can tell), so they probably got to my house in less than a minute. It was helpful that I was able to open the door before passingh out because otherwise, that would have added several valuable minutes to the time it would have taken for them to respond.
This is what gets to me when I think about it. So many things had to go right in order for me to survive. Let me recap.
First of all, I had to call 9-1-1 and tell them that I could not breathe. I had to listen to the operator, get to the first door, and then unlock the door (before passing out). Then, the cops had to get there in less than a few minutes. Then they had to know what to do when they found out I was not breathing (bag me with oxygen). Then, the EMTs had to come there in a hurry as well. Following that, they did their thing in dealing with my two cardiac arrests and stroke.
In my last post, I was going to talk about my goals for this year, but mostly went on and on about what my medical crisis was like. Which is in part because it’s the most important thing that happened to me. It changed my life in many ways, even though in some ways, it didn’t change a thing.
It’s not something I talk about much or often, which is part of the problem. Someone can’t really know me if they don’t know about that experience because it has left an indelible mark on me. At the same time, I hesitate bringing it up because no one can relate to it. This is not hyperbole. I researched situtions like mine, and I could not find a single one. It’s hard to find someone who has survived one cardiac arrest and/or stroke without side effects, let alone two cardiac arrests, an ischemic stroke, and walking (non-COVID-related) pneumonia.
I could not find any groups for people like me–not even close. K suggested I go to a group for people who went through any kind of medical crisis, but I would not want to make other people feel bad. My issue is not dealing with the ramifications of the crisis itself (difficulty walking, talking, thinking, etc.), but dealing with the fact that I’m still alive when I shouldn’t be.
The chaplain I talked to in the hospital asked if I ever asked, “Why me?” about the experience. I told him candidly no because why not me? I didn’t take great care of myself, smoked a few cigarettes a day, was fairly sedentary except for my Taiji routine, and had bronchial/immune system issues. For whatever reason, I have never thught of myself as exempt from bad things happening to me the way other people seem to do.
I did mention that I hoad some survivor’s guilt. At the time, I thought there was a young woman–in her early twenties–who was on my same floor and had COVID. Her family did not believe in thevaccine and she died from it–along with her mother. I realized months later that this never happened, but at the time when I was talking with the chaplain (which I’m pretty sure did happen), it was a reality to me.
I told him that I thought she should have lived instead of me because she was young and had so much of her life ahead of her. I, on the other hand, was nearer to the end of my life than the start and hadn’t really contributed anything to the world. I wasn’t being self-deprecating; it’s true. In a global sense, I mean. Whether I live or die doesn’t really matter. Especially now.
I want to change that now. I’m in my 53rd rotation on this earth. I probably have less than that left in me. If I’m going to do anything with my life, the time is now. I have had a few ideas in my mind for writing projects, and I’m not getting any younger.
Side note: I’m a very good writer. I am shitty at editing and holdinwg myself accountable. I said this yesterday. I have never had a problem with NaNoWriMo because 50,000 words a month is a sneevze to me. I can do that in my sleep. Again, that’s not a humblebrag or a brag–it just is.
When I had my medical crisis, I had some arguments with my mother about–well, many things. In this post, however, I want to focus on one thing. She has a brother who is a doctor. Maybe. even a heart doctor. He is the oldest of eight children in an Asian family. A very traditional family in which the boys are treated like rock stars and the girls are treated like shit–even by the mother (my grandmother). She had some strong internalized misogyny, which I have talked about at length before.
Anyway, my oldest uncle is self-centered, self-aggrandizing, and thinks he should get more than anyone else because he is the oldest son. When his father died, he insisted that his oldest son get a bigger portion of the pie because he was the first grandson. The daughters and granddaughters got nothing.
Same uncle, at his second son’s engagement party (which was a whole nothing thing), we all gave them money. I jokingly said I expected the same when I got engaged and this uncle said very seriously that I would no longer be part of the family, so I would not be getting anything from them. I looked at him and said that he would not be invited to the wedding, then, if we were no longer family. He had nothing to say to that.
Anyway. When I was out of the hospital, my mother told me that she had shared what happened to me with her brother. And he told her what he would have done if he were my doctor. Without seeing x-rays, or me, even. I told her I didn’t really care what ho had to say because of these reasons. She tried to say in Taiwanese culture, this was normal. Fine. Dandy, even. But I was not in Taiwanese culture and in my very American culture, someone who has not even seen me does not get to tell me what meds to take.
Then again, my mother lets her pharmacist prescribe things for her and my father without actually doing a check-up, so there’s that.
She got mad and defensive, but I didn’t care. I am not letting someone who hasn’t even examine me prescribe me anything. Oh, and he’s retired. He’s been so for a few years. So he’s not even up to date on the newest medical discoveries, but, sure. I’m going to listen to what he has to say about my heart–and not the doctors who kept me alive.
My parents have a friend who is also a doctor (and a major asshole). Apparently, he got my brother to allow him (let’s call him Bob) to see me. Bob told my brother that I was not going to recover. WHO LOOKS SILLY NOW, BOB?? I am not happy that he was allowed in, but there’s not much I can do about that. Obviously. Anyway, afterwards, when I was home, he made a ‘joke’ about people in my situation useally leaving the hospital by the back door (meaning dead), which I did not appreciate at all.
I can joke about me dying because it happened to me, but he cannot. It really is a ‘know your audience’ thing. And a ‘you are not a friend of mine’ thing. I really dislike this person. A great deal. He is insufferable. He is like the Platonic Ideal of smug cishet white man, and I have intensely disliked him since I was a kid. Funnily, I used to like his wife (Taiwanese), but during this last visit (after my medical crisis), she said several offensive things. I don’t know if she moved more towards the right or if she had always been this way, but I hadn’t realized it when I was a kid.
My brother’s new girlfriend was making comments about how the stroke I had didn’t affect the areas of the brain that control memory and spatial differentiation. Again. You are not my doctor. Granted, she was right about it in general. I had my stroke in the area of my brain that deals with motor skills. Gross I think? Maybe fine? Anyway. Not memory. But, she is not my doctor. She did not see my x-rays. She did not see my brain itself. So, while she knows in general how this works (she’s not a doctor at all, but does work with the brain), she is not my doctor.
I know this is a thing for people who deal with any kind of injury, disability, medical thing. Tons of people who want to offer advice or comments without actually knowing anything about the individual case. It’s worse when it’s people who are doctors or in those fields because they have general knowledge, which makes them think they know more than they do about your specific case.
You don’t know me. More to the point, you are not my doctor. If I have issues with what my actual doctors are doing, I will get a second opinion. Igf I had a good friend who was a heart doctor, I would be more apt to listen to them if they couched it in terms of what is to be expected in general. In fact, Ian’s dad is a doctor, and that’s what he did. His father, I mean. He told Ian that the signs weren’t good, but he wasn’t trying to tell Ian what my doctors should do about it.
To me, that’s the difference. It’s one thing to offer general advice or counsel based on what you generally know. But to state with confidence that this, that, or the other thing should be done to a specific patient whom you have never examined in a clinical setting? Nope. So not here for that. It’s such a recurring thing that there’s a meme about being told to try kale and/or yoga no matter what your problem is.
It’s actually similar to when I was in a minor car accident and my mother kept telling me about all the people she knew who got whiplash from being in a car accident. I would tell her I didn’t want to hear it, but she could not help herself, apparently. By the way, I did not get whiplash.
Hm. Come to think of it, it might just be a ‘my mother’ thing. She does not trust herself on anything and will listen to anyone who states something with authority. Throw on ‘MD’ at the end of their name, and, surely, they must be the authority on all things medical! There’.s a complicated reason for that, but I don’t want to talk about it in this post.
The bottom line is that my medical crisis was handled brilliantly by my medical test. I got my heart and brain loked at three months after my medical crisis. I walked out of the hospital a week after I woke up and needed no rehab or physical therapy. None. Zero. I. Walked. Out. On my own two feet. Well, I was wheeled to the entrance, but I got into my brother’s car on my own and into my house in the same way.
In other words, my medical team knew what they were doing. They did not need any input from anyone else, thank you very much. Nor do I. Honestly. People can keep their opinions to themselves and just let me happily live my life.
That’s doing my head in at the moment. It’s been two years since I died twice and came back again twice. At least it will be by the time you’re reading this.
My mindset is so different since then, even if my life itself is similar. I went from hating almost everything about myself to no one being able to say shit about me. Now, I’ve calmed down with my egoism a bit, but I’m still left with a better self-esteem than I had before I ended up in the hospital.
That’s not hard to do given that my self-esteem was nearly nonexistent beforehand. Taiji helped drag it up to low rather than negligible, and I was able to project that I was not as negative about myself as I was.
Now, however, my self-esteem is what I would call healthy. I think my body is wonderful because it got me through death twice. And, as I always say, that’s walking (non-Covid-related) pneumonia, two cardiac arrests, and an ischemic stroke. My body took all that, laughed, and said, “Is that all you got?”
Seriously. I should be dead. For real, I mean. I should not be here, and I stil consider every day a bonus day. I am writing this the day before my rebirthday, and I just ordered a whole mess of Thai food to enjoy as I watch the early access episode of Elden Ring Retry from RKG. This is my Saturday afternoon, by the way. I have Taiji class at noon for an hour and a half. I watch a bit of the Retry episode before class, but then I have to leave the rest for later.
This episode is over two hours–which is nice and juicy. The lads have been really spoiling us with all the content. People can be such assholes, though. I was reading the comments on the Patreon page, and people were complaining because A) Rory is too OP; B) Rory is so bad at the game; C) Rory is spreading his points too much; D) Rory is using too much magic, and that’s just the start of it.
I understand that everyone has different expectations, but so much of it is just unnecessary gatekeeping. Retry is meant to be for hard games, but I just want Rory to enjoy the game. I love Elden Ring so much; I want him to experience the joy as well. I get that everyone thinks they know the one true way, but to be blunt, they don’t.Just because something works for them, it doesn’t mean it’ll work for someone else.
I’ve had depression, anxiety, and body issues for most of my life. I realized I was going to die when I was seven, and that did weird things to my brain. I wav both fascinated by it and repulsed by it–which probably isn’t that weird, come to think about it. When I got my MA in writing, we had to write roughly a hundred pages of fiction around a theme. Mine was death. I was emo goth, which is who I am at heart.
I wrote roughly 150 pages of death-related stories, and the one I remember the most was about a Taiwanese American female serial killer. I remember it because it was basically a revenge fantasy in which I went to very dark places. My advisor said I should make her white because people would get fixated on her race–in a negative way. They would think it was representnative of all Asian women. He was Mexican American, and I understood his thought process.
I rejected it, though. I hated the whole model minority bullshit (especially because it was used for Asian people as a way to poke at black people) because it still didn’t acknowledge the humanity of the person. Real people are flawed and complex–neither wholly bad or wholly good (for the most part).
It’s a weird kind of pressure. Asian kids in college kill themselves at an alarming rate because of it. They get it from their homes (East Asian cultures are very big on education) and from American culture (which promotes the idea that Asian people are preternaturally smart. There was one time when I was in my twenties and doing one-person performances. An Asian group did a book of themed essays every year and one year, it was focused on sexuality. Then, we had a reading, and it was really fascinating. At the end of the reading, a white dude walked on stage and proceeded to trash us all. He started by saying he had an ex-girlfriend who was Korean (not Korean-American), and any time a white dude starts like that, it’s not going to be pretty.
Yes, because he had once fucked a Korean woman, he was an expert of all things Asian. He pompously said that he wanted to talk about Eastern spirituality, which was very common for white dudes, too. They always want to talk about how mystical ‘The Orient’ is. Which, I mean….there are a lot of venal assholes in Asia. I’ve been there. But that’s another kind of racism–thinking all people of any one race or even worse, a continent, were all the same.
Who the hell was this asshole to dictate what we were allowed to talk about? He took what had been a lovely evening and shit all over it. Several people went up after him to rebut him, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth.
Back to the story I had written. It was about a Taiwanese American woman who was disatistfied with her life. She was watching the news when there was a report of a sexual predator (white dude) who had had sex with a woman and then killed her. Then did it again and again. The protagonist became obsessed with this guy and other serial killers who disposed of their victims in particularly gruesome ways. For one reason or another, each of them eluded justice, so she deicded to get all of them back with the same method they had used to kill the women they killed.