I have been talking about the three main goals I want to reach in 2026. In the last post, I wrote about wanting to find an online Asian genderqueer/queer group, and I’ll get back to that in a future post. In this one, I want to talk about some of the other goals I have for this year. They are not quite as immediate or as important as the big three, but they are prominent in my mind.
1. Finding a therapist. I know that my mental health is slipping. It’s in a large part because of the world around me (especially as an American), but it’s also my prior mental health issues coming rearing their ugly heads once again. By that I mean depression and anxiety. I have suffered from them all my life–well for as long as I can remember, which is seven or so. Depression was the main one when I was a kid with anxiety blossoming sometime in my early teens.
I will say that a lot of it is environmental with a (unhealthy) dose of of upbringing. Being a fat, smart, undiagnosed neurospicy Asian American kid in a time when diversity wasn’t even a twinkle in the eye of the social consciousness, let alone the bogeyman it’s been made into today.
Side note: It’s so hard for me to accept that diversity is in a worse place today than it was when I was a kid forty to fifty years ago. It makes me profoundly sad and defeated–like what is the point? We’re supposed to make the world better for the generations after us, and yet, we’re leaving it worse. Then, I get mad. I did not come back from death (twice!) for this, damn it. What the ever-loving fuck is going on?
One positive result of my medical crisis was that my depression and anxiety disappeared almost completely. My depression vanished by 90% and my anxiety lessened by 60%. My body hatred disappeared completely. In fact, I was positively arrogant in my body appreciation. It saw me through death (twice!) without even blinking. For real. I was in a coma for a week, and I woke up angry and redy to fight someone. But I passed all my tests with flying colors, and I was released a week later. A week! After literally dying twice and being in a coma for a week. I walked out on my own–well, leaning on my brother, but on my own two feet to his car.
Just to give you an idea of how wild this was, on the fifth day, the physical therapist came to me with a walker. She told me that she was gonig to walk with me down the hall. She explained how to walk (in case I forgot) and said I should only use the walker if I really needed it.
I did not. I was tired and slow, but I managed to walk down the hall of my own volition. I went up three steps and back down, then rested in the lobby for five minutes before returning to my room. She came back the next day to have me do the same tihng. She had one correction for me in the way I was walking, but after we did the same trek again, she said she had nothing for me. I was allowed to walk wherever I wanted whenever I wanted.
This was the fifth day after I woke up. One of the things that happened to me in my medical crisis was that I had an ischemic stroke. Another physical therapist (or maybe occupational) had told me earlier that it would take a year for me to get back to anything approaching normal. She quickly added that it might be closer to two years.
When I left the hospital two weeks after I entered it, I would say that I was 90% of what I was when I was wheeled in unconscious. And the only reason I put it as low as that is because I was drugged out of my mind the entire time I was in the hospital.
Now, over four years later, I would say the only lingering harm is my short-term memory is shit now where it was once stellar. I may have a little trouble doing math in my head, but it’s better then where it was when I first got out of the hospital. I came out of that traumatic experience in the best possible way.
However, I’m not sure that there aren’t subtle effects that I haven’t fully comprehended. I know my reflexes, which have always been terrible, are worse than ever. I’ve accepted that because what can I do about it? Nothing. I’m not happy about it, of course, but I have accepted it as a trade-off for being alive.
Honestly, I ‘ll accept anything as a trade-off, even my struggles with writing. In the early days afeter my medical drama, I said to myself that if being alive meant I could no longer write, I would accept that trade-off. Well, have been accepting it, but I don’t like it. At all. I have been writing since I was seven, and I feel bereft without it.
I have tried on and off since I returned from the hospital. I managed to do NaNoWriMo in 2021 (to some degree) and 2022 to continue my streak. But it was all trash. I was struggling with my novel, and I cringed as I wrote it. I tried several different ways to write the novel, but none of them worked. I ended up with roughly a hundred pages of crap each time. I felt like I was writing the thousands of words a day by rote.
Changing it to writing for an hour a day has been great. Granted, it’s only beet two days, but it’s taken the pressure off me while still keeping me accountable. I have an idea in my head that I really want to make work. I started it on November 1st, but gave up after three or four weeks. So, I’m back to it, and I’ve had to skim over it to see what I’ve written so far. It’s not singing to me yet, but it’s also not making me wince in embarrassment.
The goal is to write the rough draft of my novemoir in the new year, including some of my experiences in the hospital. Or rather, well, I’ll get to that in tomorrow’s post.