Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Family

Free to be me, part four

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I think I need a therapist. No, there’s no think about it, but I’m too overwhelmed to find what I need. Ideally, it would be someone who was genderqueer, Asian, areligious, to name a few. When I tried to find a therapist via an online therapy website, once I put in everything I’d like in a therapist (what they specialized in, I mean) and found nothing. Not o single therapist fit what I was looknig for.

When I looked it up on Google, I found one decent hit. And then promptly sat on it for months (maybe a year by now?).

Before I go on, I wanted to say that I wrote in yesterday’s post about things I have accepted about myself that other people are quick to deny. It’s because they think of these things as negative whereas I think of them as just factual. Fat. Wolud not be a good partner. Would not be a good mother.

The things I consider negatives are things I don’t talk about.

Side  note: it’s interesting to me that if I firmly believe in something, I don’t argue about it. Take, for example, abortion. I have been pro-choice since I could fully understand what being pro-choice meant. I started out as pro-choice for thee but not for me because I was nominally Christian. I say nominally because I never really believed in it, but I was raised fundie Evangelical.

Different side note: I don’t understand why people put so much investment in things that don’t matter. Such as height. And why being tall is a good thing for men, but a bad thing for women*? I’m rewatching a Stray Kids episode in which they are getting their yearly checkups, including measuring their heights. In addition to being totally chaotic (as they always are), they are freaking out over it because they are collectively the shortest male group in Kpop (or at least are treated as such).

The way people are fixated on their heights and use it as a way tto put them down is, while not surprising, very discouraging. I mean, who the fuck cares? It’s the same as calling someone fat, especially women (in America. Apparently, it’s an equal opportunity insult in Korea). It’s an easy way to deflat ean ego.

I still don’t know why it’s so important–height, I mean. It’s something your’e born with, and there’s not much you can do about it. I’m sure you can stretch yourself out a couple of inches, but why? To what purpose? Same with weight and looks, but that’s not the point of this post.

Back to abortion.


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Sleep, eat, overthink (part seven)

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My car would not start tonight. A month or two ago, it wouldn’t start and I charged it overnight with my battery charger (after talking to my brother about it). He said that I should start it every few months or drive it twenty minutes every few months to keep the battery juiced. I tried it a few days ago just to make sure it started. I was meeting a friend for dinner tonight–and the car would  not start. All the lights were lit up like it does when the battery is dead. My friend came to pick me up (the restaurant was only two or three minutes from my house), and when I got back home, I called put my car on the charger.

Then, I called my brother to tell him what happened. He immediately said that I needed a new battery; I was morbidly glad that I had properly diagonosed the siuation. But, then a weight settled on my shoulders because I hate doing car shit. Especially since I have a hybrid, so it’s a bit trickier than if I just had a gas car. Also, tomorrow/today is Friday. And I am single, which means I have to just do it myself. Or call my brother to help me. I don’t like to rely on him too much, though, because he’s very busy.

Oh, and the reason I was checking to see if my car worked was because I want to get one of my meds before the weekend. Sigh.

My sleep has been terrible the last two nights. I went to bed earlier for me, and I got three hours and four-and-a-half hours, respectively. Maybe closer to five the second night, but that’s still not enough. It’s so frustrating to actually try to do the right(ish) thing and still not get enough sleep. I’ve been snoozing on and off while I’m “awake”, which is very frustrating.

I need to get more than six hours of sleep tonight, but with the car woes on my mind, who knows?

I don’t think I’ll finish this tonight. I’m so tired, and I keep nodding off. I’ll write more tomorrow.

(Written the next day.) I managed to get over seven hours of sleep last night, so I feel a bit better. My car place wasn’t open past ten a.m., so I did not get to talk to them. But I was able to start my car and went to pick up my meds.

Still. I’m feeling pretty down for a variety of reasons. Some big, some small, but it’s just all adding up to me being pretty unhappy at the moment. And still exhausted from getting shitty sleep the last couple of days. I’ve been nodding on and off, and never feeling awake, really.


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Taking a risk–and my daily weather report

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I’m back with the daily weather report. It’s 50F right now, but got up to the sixties earlier. Here is my post from yesterday in which I talked about whatever was on my mind. We’re supposed to get up to 78F tomorrow. I have a private lesson, which we might actually be able to do outside if it doesn’t rain (afternoon showers are predicted). I don’t mind going outside in a drizzle as long as there are no flies/mosquitos/wasps/other bugs. If there are any bugs, I will not go outside.

Bugs love me so much. The last time I went out when there were bugs, I got bit by a wasp–and I couldn’t help but scratch it. Therefore, it got infected, and I had to go to the doctor for antibiotics. Fortunately, a ten-day regiment (started with seven and added three) worked–even though the first seven days didn’t completely do the job. My finger was swollen to approximately four times the regular size (only a slight exaggeration), and I feared that it was going to be worse than it actually was. Fortunately, the last three days of the treatment took care of it, otherwise, who knows what the fuck I would do?

My long-standing joke that isn’t really a joke is that I’m allergic to everything including air. Another is that I like the outdoors as long as there’s a door between it and me. The third is that I like the outdoors, but the outdoors hates me.None of these are really jokes, though. Everything outside affects me negatively, which means I stay inside as much as possible.

When I used to play tennis as a kid with my family and my parents’ friends, the mosquitoes would eat me alive while they left my father strictly alone. As a result, he did not believe that they bit me (anything that did not happen to him did not happen at all), which was doubly frustrating.

Honestly, it’s such a pain. Whenever I’m outside, I feel like I have to be on my guard. The problem is that I can’t really protect myself against things like wasps because they’re too fast for me. If I didn’t have to care about infection, then I wouldn’t worry so much. I don’t mind getting bit (I do) as long as the bites don’t blow up.

To wildly switch subjects, my mom told me about being audited by the regulatory board that governs the field she’s in. She needs to get 40 credits (which is common in many careers) a year, which she easily did because she taught/trained a lot. The problem was that she did not keep any records, so she has no proof that she did any of it.

She complained that the board had gotten so strict with the little laugh she did when she was annoyed/flustered/upset. She also has an issue doing anything online because she has an almost phobic response to it. She knows that it’s irrational, but she can’t do anything about it. Or rather, she won’t get the help she needs to get past it.


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I can’t believe it’s May

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Right now, it’s 40 degrees, but it ‘feels like’ 39. On May 5th. We are nearly halfway through the year, and we’re still having frost warnings. As anyone who knows anything about me knows, I love cold weather–the colder the better. The problem is that I do not love cold mixed with hot. Going from one to the other day to day is really fucking with my inner something or the other. Not sure what, but it’s really hard on my body. Even if it’s a steady 62 degrees in the house, my body is rebelling against the wild temperature swings. I mean, it was over seventy a few days ago, and now we’re almost below forty.

I switched the thermometer to AC once or twice in the past few weeks, but then I had to put it back to the heater for the rest of the time. It’s currently on heater and I’m just leaving it there because I don’t actually turn on the AC until it’s at least 75. It used to be even higher, but I’m living a little in my old age. Actually, I only keep it that low during my Taiji and Bagua routine and then bump it back up to 76.

I would not be unhappy if we did not go over eighty for the whole summer. not only do I hate hot weather, but I hate the bugs that the hot weather brings. Ants, flies, mosquitoes, wasps, and all the other jerks that I do not want to encounter. I rarely go outside for long stretches of time because all I see are enemies. One of the few times I had an outside private lesson with my teacher two years ago in the summer, I got bitten by a wasp. It got infected, and I had to go to the doctor.

Mosquitoes love me, too. I remember playing tennis with my father when I was younger. The mosquitoes would devour me while they left him strictly alone. It didn’t matter how much I drenched myself in mosquito repellant–I would be covered with bites by the time I got home.

When I was in my early twenties, I spent two months in Taiwan–in their summer. One time, the nurse at the house (long story) gave me a ride on her motorbike. Not a motorcycle–more like a scooter. When we got home, my legs were covered with mosquito bites–and I mean covered. There were upwards of forty of them on each leg. I didn’t know for sure because I lost count. Then, an hour later, they swelled up really badly. Each was about the size of a tangerine. I probably should have gone to the doctor, but I didn’t. I was lucky that nothing bad happened (other than massive itching), but it really underscored  how much the outdoors hated me. It didn’t matter whether I like the outdoors or not because it fucking wants to kill me.


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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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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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Covered in love for my birthday

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My birthday has come and gone. I bought myself some gluten-free/dairy-free whoopie pies. Chocolate cookies with whipped cream in the middle. So sweet and decadent, I have to eat it in tiny bites. I put some GF/BF peanut butter brownie ice ceram on it, and it was a great birthday treat. Here’s yesterday’s post with my musings about my birthday.

I also had a call scheduled with K. She wished me a happy birthday, and then we just ranted about the current state of our country. Waking up to the news that your president acutally said out loud in his outside voice that he was going to eliminate a civilization tonight was certainly a mood.

Here’s a distillation of what I said to her: This president frightens me beccause I can’t figure out what he’s thinking. I mean, I know he believes whatever he sys in the moment, but that changes from minute to minute. If this were any other president, I would believe that he was bluffing or pushing Iran to back down.

You know what? No. Fuck no. I wouldn’t because I would not fucking expect a president to ever say anything like that. The president was a loose cannon in his first term, and he’s gone completely off the rails now. I have no idea what he is going to say or do, which is not something I enjoy at all. I’m used to being able to read people accuurately, and he’s just–a hot mess.

Did I really think he was going to bomb Iran? I want to say no, but I can’t esay it with any confidence. And that’s a big reason I have such a hard time with this president. There are no limits to what he will or won’t do. I said he was chaotic evil to K, and I was not implying the chaotic was bad (I’m chaotic myself), but obviously, the evil part is bad.

We ranted for a good hour and a half. It’s a breath of fresh air to be able to do it with her. She sent me the most gorgeous bouquet of preserved live flowers in a vareity of shades of purple. They are supposed to last for a year to three years. As we were getting off the phone, she told me that it was a weird gift. I told her I loved her weird gifts because they fit me perfectly. She said it was weird even for her, and I insisted that I would love it.

Which I did. I both grinned and teared up at the same time. She always gives me the perfect gift, especially when they are weird. She gave me a candle that says, “Out of fucks to give.” She’s given me more conventional presents like books that she thinks I will ilke. When she was here, we went out on a date between our two birthdays.


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Thoughts on my birthday…on my birthday

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I have more to say about my birthday–on my birthday. Technically. It’ll be my actual birthday in roughly seven hours I’ll be…ah….fifty…..er……..five? Yeah, that’s right. I honestly had to think about it for several seconds because I don’t really think about it. Again, it’s not because I’m getting older–it’s just because my age doesn’t matter to me.

Fun fact: When I was younger, I used to say I was a year older on January 1st. No idea why I did that, but many East Asian countries start at age 1 or 2 at birth. Maybe it was osmosis. Anyway, I say I have no idea why I started doing it, but it helped me get use to my new age by the time my actual birthday rolled around. As a result, though, I don’t always know how old I am. And, more to the point, I don’t really care. As with everything else in my life, it’s just a detail that doesn’t matter. Age really is just a number, and what I can or can do isn’t defined by it.

Whatever. I find my birthday meaningless, but I’m ok with other people wanted to acknowledge it (to a certain extent). Like, I’m going to be talking to K tomorrow, just so she can wish me a happy birthday. Here’s the thing. We both have April birthdays (hers is a few weeks after mine). When she was here, we would go out sometime between our two birthdays to celebrate them together (or any time near them).

She’s one of two people I actually get a birthday present for, and she gets one for me, too. She’s my soul sister, and I have been friends with her longer than anyone else in my life. I have joked with her that when we are both old, we’re going to be in an old folks’ home together, waving our canes at other prisoners inhabitants. We will shout things at them and just let the  chaos rain down.

I love her with all my heart, and I know she feels the same way about me. A few decades ago, we were talking about the hoary conundrum of ‘your best friend and your spouse are both drowning ten feet away from each other. Who would you save first?’. I was the one who brought it up, though I don’t remember why. She got angry and heated about it (which is unlike her). She said she hated that question beacuse she loved me and her husband equally. I was skeptical, but she insisted it was true. Unlike me, she cannot lie with passion. If she said that, I knew she meant it.

She said that she really didn’t like how society portrayed romantic love as being above all other loves. I didn’t either, so it was something else we bonded over. It’s very specific to Western culture. Eastern culture had a very different view on that, obvioously.


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They say it’s your birthday; it’s (almost) my birthday, too

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It’s almost my birthay. My parents called me to wish me a happy birthday (among other things) because they’re going to be busy on my actual birthday. I don’t care beacuse my birthday means nothing to me, but I’ve gotten over hating it by now. If it makes my parents happy to wish me a happy birthday, well, then so be it.

In the past, I hated it. My birthday, I mean. Not because I was getting older; I don’t care about that. but because I hated being alive and that I’ve not done what I’ve wanted with my life. That’s drastically compressing  and simplifying what my deal was, but it’ll do for the purpose of this post. I hated it so much, I refused to tell people when it was. When I first joined Facebook, you had to give them your birthday. I just lied and put a random day in January as my birthday. Then, I would be surprised by dozens of happy birthday wishes on that day. It never failed to amuse me.

My mom used to get upset when I said I didn’t celebrate my birthday. She once cried and told me it was such an important day for her. I mean, I think it’s a more meaningful day for her than me, yes, because she was the one who did the work of giving birth to me. I was did nothing to ease the birthing process, and I was probably a poin (literally) in her ass whilst making that journey. Though, family lore says that it only too k half hour for me to slide out (I was in a hurry).

Look. I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t  want to be born. And I didn’t want to be alive for the first fifty years of my life (more or less). It took dying (twice!) to give me an appreciation for life, but now, that appreciation is draining from me. This president….this country…my countrypeople….Yeah, I’m not feeling it at all.

After I died and came back twice, I lost my hostility for my birthday. I had become ‘neutral’ to it in the decade before, but neutral was definitely in quotes. I said I did not mind it, but I still did not want to celebrate it. And I did not really want people mentioning it.

Here’s the thing, though. Once I came back to life and became as close to normal as I was going to get, I adopted the day I died and came back to life as my re-birthday. I realized much later that I should have made it when I could breathe on my own, but whatever. I’m keeping my original re-birthday. That meanss that I’m four-and-a-half. Not really, though. It’s not that kind of birthday.


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