Underneath my yellow skin

More about sleep, martial arts, and whatever else

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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 comforable 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.


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Radically rethinking my sleep–and martial arts

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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.


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Brain, brain, go away….

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Yes, I’m writing more about my brain and how I’ve thought it was broken for most of my life. When I was talking to my autistic friend (endless gratitude to her for making me realize that I miiiiiight be on the spectrum) about my childhood, I used the phrase, “felt like an alien”. She said that was exactly how she felt as a child and so many autistic people felt the same way. I also said that I always felt as if I was never given the manual for humanning. I really thought everyone else got some kind of instruction on how to be a human being.

“Turn to page 54 for complete instructions as to how to interact with humans at a party.” “And here on page 90, we see how to make small talk when you’re picking up your medicine.”

What I really wanted was David Attenborough to guide me through human life as if he was watching a rare species of, say, wild cat and describing their daily life to people who have never seen them before. I could have really used someone telling me how to be human before I was released into the general public. I used to joke that I was raised by wolves, but it was not really a joke. What I mean is that my parents had no idea what life in America was like, so they weren’t able to guide me. More to the point, they had no desire to integrate themselves into American culture, so they had no interest in teaching me about it.

It was the perfect storm of several negative things that made it so my entry into American society (school) scarred me. 1. I wsa a weirdo. I just was. Now I know there’s a reason for it, but back then, I just thought I was a sad and broken human being who should not have been born. And I was deeply depressed by the time I was seven. 2. My parents had no interest in American society and passed that down to me. We did not watch TV or go to movies or listen to the radio. I like to the apocryphal story of how the first pop song I heard was Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant in 1983 when I was 12. That’s pretty late in life, but it was indicative of how little my family cared about such things.

My parents were very conservative/traditional, which meant I was raised with a lot of restrictive ideas. I’m talking religious rather than politically, but I would not be surprised if the latter was true as well.


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Accepting my brain as it is

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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.


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More about my brain and if it’s broken

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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.


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Trying to be gentle with myself

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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.


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Unbreak my braaaaaaain

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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.


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How to fix my brain or at least ride the waves better

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My post from yesterday. Lots of musing. Many years ago, my last therapist told me, “Your brain got you into trouble; it’s not going to be what gets you out.” I can’t remmeber the exact problem we were talking about, but it’s true just in general. One of my autistic friends and I have had several converastions about how our brains work. She just shared with me that she thinks of her brain as a separate entity, which really resonated with me. And it lines up with the aforementioned aphorism from my therapist.

It doesn’t help with fixing the problem, of course, but it may help with me changing the way I think about it. For most of my life, I have really harangued myself for not being able to make myself do things that I know I should do. As I said to my friend, it’s so hard when I’m sitting at my computer and literally telling myself to go to bed. And then I just…don’t. I will be staring at the screen, not doing anything particularly important, chanting to myself, “Go to bed; go to bed; go to bed,” and then I don’t. For hours. While getting progressively madder at myself.

My Taiji/Bagua teacher gave me a suggestion, which is to do the Solo (Long) Form slowly until I’m bored and then go to bed. Like, really slowly. She had me practice doing the first section in five minutes–I can usually do it in about two. When she timed me, I did it with about 17 seconds to spare, which wasn’t bad. And, yes, the theory is that it’s so boring, it’ll put you to sleep. Which it is.

Look. The Solo (Long) Form is the basis for everything we do in Taiji, so I know I should treat it with respect. If I do it at normal speed, I feel good about it. Or rather, I feel as if I’m getting something out of it. But If I’m going to be brutally honest, I feel slightly bored as I do it. It’s never been my favorite, and it still isn’t. I hated it when I first started Taiji; I’m not going to lie. Then, I became studiedly neutral about it. Now, I’m warm about it because it has had such a positive effect on me, but is it my favorite thing in Taiji? No. Is it the thing I would first choose to ppractice? Also no. Or even the fifth? Once again, no.

But. And this is very important for me to emphasize. It’s the basis for everything we do, and I do at least once section of it every day. But that doesn’t mean that I love it or want to practice it. I don’t, and I don’t. It’s like veggies (if you don’t like them). You eat them because you know they’re good for you, even if you don’t like the taste of them.


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A birthday resolution (of sorts)

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My sleep schedule is completely off the rails. This is the worst it’s ever been. Well, not quite, but very close. As with many things in life, it didn’t happen at once, of course. But bit by bit, it’s gotten worse. It’s fifteen minutes here and fifteen minutes there. And “suddenly”, I’m going to bed after the sun rises.

I tell myself that I’m going to go to bed by a reasonable hour, but before I know it, it’s past dawn once again. I try not to be too mean to myself, but it’s so damn frustrating. Why the fuck can’t I just do what I say I’m going to do?  I know it’s part of my neurospiciness, but that doesn’t make it any easier to accept that I’m doing it.

In addition, I’m not sleeping well. I think thats’ because of what’s happening in the world. It’s pretty bleak right now, and I don’t see it getting better. When I talked to K a few days ago, I mentioned that I don’t remember a time in our life that has felt as bad and bleak as this. She agreed with me, and we both just hate what’s happening. She’s talked about the frustration she feels with activivsm. She has acrtively done activism all her life. Protests, calling her congressperson, and such. Plus, she’s worked as a teacher/principal for disadvantaged youth for almost as long as I’ve known her.

She confessed to me that she’s just burnt out, and I do not blame her one bit. She has been working tirelessly for society’s good for thirty years, and I do not blame her for laying down the mantle. I have not been as diligent as I mostly just donate money. I’ve been to a protest here and there, but that is very much outside my comfort zone. And these days, I definitely cannot go where e there is a group of people.

I give money to several organizations that would be considered political. I know people say that money is not everything–it’s not. But, it is something. And it does help. And for someone like me who lives in a very blue neighborhood and cacnnot go out much, it’s the best I can do. I still do it, even though I feel it’s hopeless.

I haven’t felt this kind of hopelessness for some time, honestly. I mean, I felt pretty bleak during the W. years for many reasons. They were dark times, and I feared what that president would do. However, I never for a moment thought he would casually blow up a country. That’s not to say I didn’t fear he would use nuclear weaponry–I did. It just never occurred to me that he would do it simply because he felt like it*.


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More thoughts on my birthday, evolution of

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We are well past my birthday, but I have more to say about it. It’s partly because I am surprised at how much my hatred/disdain/disgust of it has vanished. It’s funny how I went from hating my birthday when I was a kid to becoming ‘neutral’ about it in my thirties to becoming truly neutral about it in my fifties. Yes, it’s been a long journey, but I’m glad I’m finally here. This is the post I wrote yesterday about being happy for all the love sent my way on my birthday.

What  I did not expect was that beacuse of all the love and warm wishes, I actually feel slightly positive towards my birthday itself. Not a huge amount, but it’s noticeable.

I cannot tell you what made the difference this year because I have no idea. I’ve had a lot of love on my birthdays before. Several people always acknowledge it so it’s not that it just goes by without notice. I usually talk to my parents and K on my birthday, too, so it wasn’t that.

Also, it wasn’t like things were going peachy in the world, either. Life in America is grim right now. Like, really grim. Because of the US being so powerful, all the terriblie and terrifying things that this president does has tremors that shake the entire world. Everything sucks right now, quite frankly.

Side note: The president saying those awful things about Iran yesterday and then pulling out a two-week ceasefire did something to my brain. I was saying yesterday that I truly had no idea what he was going to do, and it’s true. I still don’t know what he’s going to do. But.

Once the unthinkable didn’t happen and instead it ended up in a two week ceasefire. This is when, ironically, I became more cynical and uneasy about the situation. And angrier. Why? Because that’s when it became clear that even though this president says whatever the fuck he wants–he had no intention of bombing Iran. In this particular instance, it was a calculated move to–what? Terrify Iran and the world? Flex his muscles? Show what he could do if he wanted?

I’m not sure, but it felt so calculated in a way that most things he does doesn’t feel. I mean, I’m sure what he threatened to do was all him–but for whatever reason, I feel like he was encouraged to make a hard stance by his team (though probably not in those specific words) so he could look even better when he called the ceasefire.

Do not get me wrong. I did not want him ta bomb Iran. AT ALL. I want to make that excessively clear. I just find the way he casually uses the possibility as a flex to be morally repugnant.


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