Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Neurodivergency

Walking in a winter wonderland

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I’ve been fascinated with the weather in the last week or so (well, all “spring” really, and spring is in quotes because it’s been anything but)  because it’s as if winter is just refusing to leave. We Minnesotans are used to variant weather in March and April, but things are usually pretty settled by May. Here is what I wrote about it (amongst other things) in yesterday’s post.

I personally would not mind if we did not hit eighties or nineties at all during the spring/summer, but I know that would make most other people sad. Since I don’t go outside much, I should just suck it up and wish for eighties and nineties for other people. I have air con, too, which I try not to use. I am conscious that it’s bad for the environment, and while I prefer the cold to the heat, I’m fine up to 76*, but anything over that is unbearable.

Sometimes, I wish I had known shit about me when I was much younger. Such as the fact that I’m very sensitive to any external stimuli. Not just heat, which is my nemesis, but other things such as scents, light, and sounds. Not just loud sounds, but different kinds of sounds. For instance, I hate ASMR. So much. It’s like nails on a chalkboard for me. Even if it’s done by people I adore, I have to grit myy teeth to get through it. Basically, any kind of whispering is irritating to me.

Most fabrics bother me, too. My life is a series of irritating things–physically, I mean. Most of them are on the level of what irritates me in the literal sense, but there are some that just irritate me in colloquial sense, too.

My sleep is such a hot mess right now. I think it’s the worst it’s ever been. No wait. That’s not true. That’s recency bias. It was much worse when I was in college. At least I’m getting sleep now–six to eight hours. Back then, I got four if I was lucky.

I know what I have to do; I just really, really, really rebel against doing it. It really is me fighting my own brain, which is not easy to do. More than that, it’s nearly impossible. Sometimes, it’s physically uncomfortable when I do something that my brain doesn’t want me to do. That’s not an excuse, obviously. I need to do what I need to do, and I need to find a way to make it tolerable.

One thing I’ve decided to do is return to what I used to do that worked for me. There are many things that don’t, but one thing that did was making sure I did what I needed to do before allowing myself to chill out. I mean, this is probably what most people do on the regular, but it’s really hard for me to keep my brain on track.

I don’t want to use it as an excuse, but I really feel this to be true after my medical crisis. Before that, I had discipline to do what I needed to do before relaxing. Since my medical crisis, it’s really hard to keep my focus on one thing. The only exception is when I’m practicing my weapons. Even that, though, is done one form at a time (so a few minutes per form). I will say that when I’m teaching myself a new form, I can focus for up to a half hour or however long it takes me to teach myself the new posture.

Other than that, though, I have to really put my mind to something to focus for more than an hour.

Let me be clear that I’ve always had difficulty focusing unless I was hyperfocusing on something. It’s just that it’s gotten even harder now, and I feel likke it’s not completely my fault. Meaning, it’s not something that I can just fix by pure willpower.

It’s diffiuclt for me to say, but I’m feeling pretty hopeless right now. There is so much I want/need to do, but I have the hardest time doing any of it. My personal life is a mess as is the world around me. I don’t feel like anything I do matters. I came back to life four-and-a-half years ago, and what have I done with my bonus time? Not much of anything.

This is not me being hard on myself; this is me being real. I have wasted my bonus days just as I have wasted much of my previous life. I know that the only answer to that is to actually start doing something–but that’s so much easier said than done. With all that is broken in my brain, it’s hard to think of a way to fix even a portion of it.

It’s the same with the country around me. It’s all fucked. It’s so fucked. We are living in the worst time, and I don’t have the energy to deal with it, honestly. I’m feeling pretty low at this moment, and I’m not sure if I want to claw my way out.

I’ve always suffered from depression and anxiety, and it’s been up and down all my life. Both were bad up until my medical crisis, and then,  it was drastically different. My deperession decreased by 90% and my anxiety went down by 60%. These are rough estimates. I would say that my depression has ratcheted back up to be about 90% of what it originally was (so still a 10% decrease) and my anxiety is maybe 80% of what it was pre-medical crisis.

So overall, it’s not quite as bad as it once was, but it’s still bad. I think the worst part of it is that I just don’t have the energy/wherewithal to do anything about it. Each day passes as an imitation of the one before, and I feel helpless to do anything to make it better. I know that one thing that may help is seeing a therapist, but it’s cruelly ironic that the thing that may help the most is often somethnig that seems so far out of reach.

I really am at my wit’s end. I don’t know what to do.

*Fine, of course, is relative. I mean fine as long as I don’t have to move much. Bearable is the better word.  And as long as I’m shielded from the elements.

Gender redux; gender reflex

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One more post about gender? Yes, sadly. Here is the post from yesterday in which I talked about how I just did not feel gender at all or get it.

I was reading a question and (answers)  about gender (eh, kind of. It’s good enough for the purpose of what I want to write in this post)–well, in a way. It was a work blog, and the question was from a woman who had been at her work for sixteen months, but only recently started getting complaints about the skirts she was wearing. She stated that she was having bloating issues and did not wear tight clothing/belts that would bother her stomach (paraphrasing). She stressed that the skirts fell to just above her knee, which was acceptable at her job.

Other women wore the same kind of skirts, including her boss–the person who reprimanded her about her (the letter writer’s (LW) attire), and there were men who wore hoodies and were fine while the LW’s bare shoulders were not. She was in a customer-facing position, and she wondered if that was part of the difference. But she was frustrated, embarrassed, and did not want to have to buy a whole new wardrobe.

I want to say that this has been a left-leaning blog for as long as I’ve been reading it (which is seven or eight years, I think?) with a lot of self-proclaimed feminists. The amount of commenters who came up with an embarrassing amount of reasons why this was reasonable on the part of the boss was discouraging. Very sexist reasons, I may add. I was glad to see a few people call it out, but for the most part, the commentariat went all-in on the sexism.

Including one woman who was really ugly with it–saying older women needed to be told when they looked ugly. No, not in those exact words, but close enough. She may not have meant it, but that’s how it came across, and she doubled down on it when questioned.

What really got to me was what always happens with questions like this–the desperate search for anything other than sexism as the reason the sexist thing is happening. “She’s wearing a too-tight skirt” (despite her saying she had uncomfortable bloating and wore nothing too tight); “Maybe it’s rolling up/she doesn’t realize how it looks on her”, which got a distressing amount of similar comments, etc. “Maybe the sleeveless arms are considered unprofessional” (but not the hoodies?).

Very few of them remembered or addressed the fact that the LW had been at her current job for sixteen months, but the comments had only started recently. None of the comments took that into account, which was frustrating AF. In the year 2026, we have gone backwards with feminism, I feel. A commentor actually wrote with all their fingers that a woman not shaving her legs in America was considered “gross”. Again, in the year 2026. I haven’t shaved anything in thirty years and have never gotten any shit for it. Then again, I’m Asian. And I live in a very progressive area.


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One last post about sleep–and a plan! (Maybe)

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I’m back to talk about sleep one more time. Here is the post from yesterday in which I talked about sleep, the lack thereof, and how hard it is for me to get said sleep. I’m still getting over my unwise decision to try to stay up 72 hours without researching what could happen if I had actually managed it. I mean, sleep deprivation is considered a method of torture for a reason. I will say I think it’s really funny that I was mainlining coffee when Ian messaged me asking if it was dangerous for me to stay awake for that long. I quickly looked it up and realized it was, then went directly to bed. I fell asleep in less than a minute.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: caffeine does not affect me. I can drink it up to the point of going to bed, and I’ll still be able to fall asleep. As I just noted. In fact, I don’t know why I drink it in the ‘morning’ except that’s what you’re supposed to do.

I have realized that there is just no quick solution. Nor is there any easy solution. I can’t just snap fingers and suddenly be able to sleep well and at the proper time. It’s wishful thinking. I also can’t simply force myself to go to bed at a better time. I’ve proven that that isn’t going to happen, either.

It’s the worst feeling in the world to sit there watching the clock inch forward, knowing I should be in bed, but not doing anything to actually move towards that goal. It doesn’t help that I’m chanting in my brain that I should be going to bed. The other weird thing is how time seems to draaaaag and then suddenly leaps ahead. Time is weird. It just is.

I think another reason I’m having a hard time is that I’m just tired (no pun intended) of dealing with my sleep. I’ve been doing it all my life, and while it’s gotten slightly better and then got a whole lot better after my medical crisis (before slowly sliding back into bad territory). I am resentful that I’ve put so much effort into it for so little return.

On the third hand, it’s been at pretty disparate times, and I may not have put enough concentrated effort into it. I’m a pretty impatient person in some ways, and me trying to find ways to sleep was one of those ways. I did try so many things, but I don’t know if I gave any of them enough time to stick. The problem was that there were some negative results to many of the options, which made me reluctant to keep trying. For instance:


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I’m all about the (lack of) sleep

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Before I start, let me just link to my post about sleep from yesterday here. I don’t want to stress about it, so here it is. When I was in college, I used to sleep four hours a night and then crash for fifteen hours my first night home. It was as if my body was saying, “Oh, I can sleep now? I’ll show you sleep then!” I’m sure it’s quite common–the body breaknig down when it’s safe to do so. I mean, you HAVE to sleep at some point or the body will rebel.

I bring this up because I woke up at 5:30 p.m. today. I was very disoriented and shocked. That was ten hours of sleep–which does not happen to me unless I’m sick. But I’ve really been skimping on my sleep the past month or so, and this was my body’s way of saying that it needed more.

I did not know why my alarm did not ring because I had set it before I went to bed. Or rather, I turned it on and just assumed it was set correctly because it was the day before. I’m talking about an ancient manual clock that I’ve had for probably three decades. I have no idea how it went from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Side Note: I have this weird thing that I do–I set all my manual clocks in the house (and my car) to different times. I have no idea why or how that started, but I’ve been doing it for decades. So the fact that my alarm clock was set at 8 p.m. meant that it was acttually set for 7:17 p.m. Why? No clue. I’ve been doing it forever, and it’s something I consider a harmless idiosyncrasy.

Side Note to the side note: One could spend their whole life trying to fix their flaws. The list is endless, and there’s always something that can be improved. However, something I learned a while back was that there’s a difference between an indiosyncrasy and a flaw. The latter should be worked on whereas the former is fine. Really, it is. We all have things that make us unique, and many of those things are harmless. My having my manual clocks at different times is one of those things.

Another thing I used to do was if I saw one of my clocks being on the quarter hour, I had to count to twenty-five as quickly as possible. Even as I was doing it, I realized that it was silly and not something I should be doing. My therapist at the time asked me what I thought would happen if I didn’t count. I didn’t know, but I was sure it would be terrible.


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One last (hah) post about sleep

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I have one more post to write about sleep. That’s a lie , of course. I’ll probably dealing with this all my life. Let’s just say I want to write another post especially because I foolishly decided to try staying awake for 72 hours. I had done it before at my then-therapist’s suggestion. I only lasted 62 hours before I succumbed to sleep. This time, I had reached 46 hours and told Ian I was trying for 72 hours. He said, “That sounds dangerous.”

Fortunately, I listened to him and Googled it. Of course it was dangerous–or at least ill-advised. Sleep deprivation was used as a torture method, for fuck’s sake. I thanked him for saying that and told him I’d go right to bed–which I did. Despite having drank around 15 oz of coffee and washed my hair. As I’ve said before, caffeine doesn’t do anything to me.

I woke up to a few messages from Ian asking me to let him know I was ok when I got up. I was going to do that, anyway, and I was touched that he was concerned about me.

I had already done most of my Taiji/Bagua before going to bed so it was an interesting day. I actually felt pretty good. I got roughly six hours of sleep, but it was solid. I did not wake up, which was unusual for me. And I felt pretty invigorated when I woke up. I will not be doing that again. I should have researched it before I tried it, but I was desperate. I put up with something for far too long and then when I do decide to do something about it, I rush in when I should maybe tread cautiously.

I am already up way too late. Ideally, I would like to go from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. K and I have talked about it in the past. Both of us are night owls (or at least were), but she had to get up at normal people time because she was a teacher. I, on the other hand, worked flexible hours at home, so I could go to bed and get up whenever I wanted. I’m not sure that’s a good thing because maybe if I wsa forced to get up, I would be more inclined to do it on time.

I’m lying. Or at the very least, I’m fooling myself. That was not what happened whenI was on a more rigid schedule. I’m talking about being in college and having classes at certain times. In my first year, I had a 7:45 a.m. class, which was torture to me. I did not go to bed until 3:30or 4 a.m., which meant I got about 3 1/2 hours sleep a night. Which was not even barely enough. Back  then, I was getting an average of five hours a night, which also wasn’t enough–but it was more than 3 1/2.


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Let’s talk more about sleep

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I have started my journey to stay awake for quite some time. Originally, it was going to be 72 hours, but I decided that was unreasonable. I was already so tired, and I didn’t think I could make it 72 hours. I will say the first 24 hours were easy. I got up around 10:30 a.m. yesterday morning because I had Taiji (Zoom) class at noon. Lately, I’m been going to bed anywhere from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. so staying up two more hours past the latter limit wasn’t that big a deal.

Oh, and around five in the morning,  I went to shut the curtains, and what did I see outside? A noticeable dusting of snow! In late April! My bestie’s birthday is coming up soon, and her metric for snow is that it has to fall before her birthday to be allowed. I messaged her letting her now that a light dusting just squeaked by her legal limit.

I love joking with her about snow and heat v. cold. She is a hot weather person (though that has changed since she hit menopause), and I am a freezing cold weather person (though that has changed somewhat since I hit menopause). Back when she used to live in Minneapolis, we would go out once a month or so. If it was in the winter, I would be happy as a clam while she was shivering (as we smoked outside. This was after smoking was banned indoors. I do not smoke any longer). She would look at me incredulously and demand to know if my spine was scrunching up.

“Nope!” I would say happily. In my youth, I played the fun (to me) game of seeing how long it would take me in the winter to roll up my window. Usually it was around -5F to 0 degrees. And then another ten degrees lower until I actually turned on the heat. In other words, I really fucking loved the cold.

My bestie, on the other hand, grew up in Miami. She thrived in the heat and humidity, and when we went to the beach in the summer, I would moan and groan like I was being asked to drag myself across the Gobi Desert. My other bestie lived in Raleigh for some years and visiting him in summer was the worst. Even after immediately taking a shower, I would be dripping in sweat once again.Ugh. I’m sweating just thinking of it right now.

How the hell did I–oh yeah. Back to sleep.


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Still sketching out my sleep agenda

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I’m back to talk more about sleep. Here is my post from yesterday in which I did talk about sleep and what I was planning to do (for once! I kind of stuck to the topic). I ended by saying I was planning on staying up for 48 hours, and the minute I typed that, I was so exhausted. I mean, I’m fatigued all the time, but there are spurts of extreme tiredness that lasts a day or two.

There are two ways I can go with this. One is to try the 48 hours staying up and no sleeping route. That is a very hard route. Going down that path would be me trying to keep adding to it and reaching 72 hours. That would be pretty difficult, but I think I could do the 48 hours. Maybe not right now because I’m so tired, but at some point.

The other route is just to sleep whenever I’m about to fall over without regard as to what time it is, which would be easier. I sometimes fall asleep in my chair at my computer, and then I do this weird (and aggravating) thing of sleeping for ten minutes, being awake for ten minutes, sleeping for ten minutes, being awake for ten minutes, and repeat.

I’ve also had it where I was watching a video on my laptop (lying on my couch), and I would have to repeat the same section several times because I kept falling asleep in ten-minute chunks. I was too stubborn to actually take a nap, though, because…my brain is broke? I joke, but not really. I would not say my brain is broken, but I would say that’s the way my brain works.

It’s so frustrating. I’m trying to accept that it’s not me being stubborn or a contrarian. It’s not me deliberately sabotaging myself. It’s how my brain works. That’s not to say that I have to just throw up my hands and say there’s nothing I can do about it, but I do think it would help if I didn’t view it as me being deliberately ‘bad’.

It’s difficult because that’s how I was viewed in my family–and how that kind of behavior is viewed by society in general. There is a narrow range of behavior that is considered acceptable, and woe be to the people who strayed too far outside those lines. These days, there seemed to be a little more tolerance of some divergence, but not much. It’s still a very narrow band of what kind of oddness is acceptable, and it’s rarely much.

I have mentioned the double empathy problem before, which is that it’s hard when autistic people and allistic non-autistic) people talk because of the very different mindset. Usually, it’s up to the autistic person to adapt and try to be ‘normal’ in order to fit into society. And if the autistic person doesn’t mask enough, they are excoriated for being weird, not trying, being rebellious, etc.


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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 comfortable 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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