Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Personal Life

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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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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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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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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Patting myself on the back, part three

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When I look back on the person I was in my twenties, I want to give that person a hug. That person was so emotionally fragile that a single negative word could crush that person into a (not-so-fine) dust. To be fair to that person, the home life was very rough. I don’t like thinking about it because it still hurts. I think about how lost and utterly miserable I was. I felt like an alien, like I didn’t belong in this world–and what’s more, the world would be better without me. Oh, here’s my post from yesterday.

When I was in my early twenties, I had a break from reality. I was very lucky to make my way back without any mental health support, but I never came all the way back. Someone once said that you when you broke something, yes, you could put it back together, but it would never be as good as new again. They were using the metaphor as a way to explain how difficult it was to deal with mental health issues, and I had never felt more seen.

Yes, I have spent decades trying to fix the cracks and breaks in me. I’ve gotten good at plastering over them, but I have yet to truly fix them. And while I am much easier on myself than I was back then, I still have lingering thoughts of self-hatred that flair up now and again. While I can talk myself down most of the times, once in a while, it just runs all the way through me. And if it reaches that point, I have a hard time getting out of that dark place.

All my life, I’ve been fighting (or not) the feeling of ‘why bother?’. Why should I try when life is, in the end, worthless? Eh. That’s not the right word for it. It’s nothing like pointless or meaningless. I guess it’s more that the world is so grim, I do not know what to with it. Every time I check the news, this president is doing something else that is so terribly bad. Just awful. It was bad during his last terms, and yet, he managed to make things even worst.

Wait. Why the hell am I going down that path?

Oh, I know why. Because I have a hard time thinking that anything matters. Or more specifically that I don’t matter. And again, I don’t mean that in a negative way (this time). I really don’t matter as a person.  Believe me that this is a better mentality than thinking I was the absolute worst as a person (that I made the world a worser place just by existing). I still cringe at things I say and do on the daily, but I can get over it more easily.

I give much thanks to Taiji (and now Bagua) for helping me become mentally stronger. I once told my teacher that while I  wasrn’t expecting to get into a fight nor did I want to, I did want to be able to use Taiji to help with relationships on an emotional level.

Since I’m terrible with boundaries, that was what I was mostly hoping for–that Taiji would help me set them. Has it? Yeah. I’m still prone to being a people-pleaser and am pretty easy to push, but when it matters, I can stiffen my spine and not give in.


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Why the fuck am I like this?

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I have sleep issues; I’ve had them since I was a kid. I still remember when I was six or seven, I would stay up until midnight to read. How? I would place a t-shirt in the crack under my door and then just use a flashlight to read under my covers. Ever since I was seven, I did not go to bed before midnight. I couldn’t. That’s just what I did. That’s always been my sleep pattern, and it’s not something that I can easily change. Any time I try to make a substantial change, I just find myself draaaaaaaagging myself back to my normal time.

The only time I slept a normal people schedule was when I was in the hospital for my medical crisis and for a few months after. Then, I was going to bed at 10 p.m. and getting up at 6 a.m. By a year after I had my medical crisis, I had reverted to going to bed around 2 or 3 and getting up eight hours later. I was the most rested I’ve been in my life. Granted, it took a major medical trauma to get me to that point AND tons of powerful drugs, but still.

I have tried to rein it in and go to bed at a more reasonable time. It has failed miserably every time. I have given up on it, but I’m trying to make sure I don’t go too much further in the sleeping late at night realm. Then again, I have toyed with the idea of pushing my sleep schedule forward to lap back to a normal people decent time.

I just can’t do it. I have tried and tried, but I just haven’t been able to do it. I can pull it back bit by bit, but then I’ll lose it all plus a couple of hours in the next night. So, let’s say I was going to bed at 4 a.m. I would be able to pull it back to 3:30 a.m. for a couple nights, then 3 a.m. for the next couple. I might be able to inch it to 2 a.m., but then a few nights later, it would be up to 5 a.m. again.

I am currently going to bed around 7 a.m. I’m setting myself a limit of 2:30 p.m. to get up, which means I’m not getting a full eight hours. Today, I had an appointment at 10 a.m., so I tried to go to bed early; I really did. I wanted to get to bed by 3 a.m. I think I managed five a.m, but just. I was going to get up at 9:30 a.m., but I woke up at ten to 9 a.m. That’s how I do when I absolutely have to get up at at any given time. And I’m still up. Why? because that’s just how the fuck I am.


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When to push limits and when to CTFO, part four

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I’m back to write more about limits, boundaries, and toxic positivity–maybe. That’s what I wanted to write about in the last post, but then I wandered down the road of talking about my poor memory. I am going to get back on track now and write abotu what I said I wanted to write about, but we’ll see how long that lasts.

Despite all the blathering I’ve done about being negative about pushing too hard, I’m not totally against it. I know you have to push yourself at times to get shit done. I especially have to do so because I tend to lean towards inertia. When K used to live here, we got together maybe once a month, usually to go out dancing. It took me quite some time to get ready to go. We usually did it like this. Let’s say we were meeting at eight. I would think about getting ready about six-thirty, but I could not make myself do it until seven or seven-thirty. It only took me ten minutes to get ready to go (I didn’t weear makeup at all), so that made it easier for me to drag my feet.

I would leave at twenty to eight because it took fifteen to twenty minutes to make it to K’s house. Then, I would sit on her bed for fifteen to twenty minutes and watch as she agonizehd over what to wear. We were both depressed people, and it took a lot of effort to get us moving. She would usually ask her husband to help pick out an outfit because he had a great sense of style while I just sat there, amused. We would rarely leave her house before a half hour after we agreed to go out. I was fine with it once I realized it was just the way she was.

One of my funniest memories of us going out was the one rare time when we were going to something in St. Paul, which was closer to me than her. So we decided that she would come to my house rather than the other way around. At eight (when we were supposed to meet), just as I was thinking about getting dressed, my doorbell rang. I was flustered as I realized she had come early (for her). In fact, that’s what I blurted out to her as I opened the door–“You’re early!” I’m afraid I said it in an accusatory tone (though I did not mean it that way).

“I’m on time!” She said immediately. “Which is early for you!” It was a thoughtless reply on my part, but fortunately, she laughed. We had been besties for long enough to be able to joke like that.


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More about the anger inside, part five

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Let’s talk one more time about anger. I had my private lesson today, and I mentioned the argument with my mother that I recently had to my teacher. I was still upset with myself for letting it get as far as it did, but I totally did not see the trap in time. That’s what made me mad at myself, though. I’m usually really good at seeing the traps in time and neatly side-stepping them or jumping over them completely. Here’s my post on the subject from yesterday.

It’s been a lifelong study in patience when talking with my parents. I really hate when I lose my temper because what’s the point? In addition, I just don’t want to unleash it willy-nilly. I do believe in the power of anger, but I don’t want to let it run unleashed.

When I used to spend an inordinate amount of energy keeping it tamped down, it was so tiring. I was really afraid that if I let it out, it would just  explode everywhere. It was self-defeating behavior, but understandable. My therapist at the time asked me what I thought would actually happen if I let it out. I didn’t know for sure, but I did know that it would destroy the whole world.

I knew I wasn’t important at all, but I also was made to feel by my parents that every little mistake I made was the end of the world. They had no sense of proportion, which is one reason I don’t either. Another reason is because of my broken neuroatypical brain.

When I was a teenager, I was a hot mess–and deeply miserable. My parents were very much into saving face and maknig sure that we never appeared ‘wrong’ from the outside . We weren’t supposed to hint at anything other than a perfect family. One example that was seared in my brain happened when I was a teenager. My parents were out playing tennis with a few of their church friends. Another of their church friends (a woman) called, wanting to speak to my father. I told her that he was out playing tennis.

When my parents returned, I told them their friend called and that I told her they were out playing tennis. My father got mad at me for that. He said I shouldn’t have said it because it was family business. I didn’t understand that. Why was it such a big deal that he was out playing tennis with his friends? He did elaborate that she might feel bad because she wasn’t invited, but that didn’t feel like the whole reason.

It wasn’t until many years later that I figured it out. My father had a series of affairs since I was very little. I don’t know when I realized it, but he always had at least one sidechick–from the very conservative and sexist Taiwanese church we belong to. Everyone knew about it, and I was amazed that he didn’t get his teeth punched in. I guess that wasn’t the Taiwanese/Christian way. Anyway, the woman they were playing tennis with was a longtime side chick of my father’s. The woman who called from him was probably an ex or a future sidechick. That made much more sense to me than any of my father’s explanations. Yes, he was a highly secretive man, but that wasn’t an explanation in and of itself.

I try to be as compassionate as I can, but there’s a coldness at the very core of my heart/soul that I can’t quite explain. I’ve always known it’s there, and I’ve always tried to make sure that it stays where it belongs. I’ve been ashamed of it and thought it was my failing for so long.


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A freak like me

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I’ve been talking about gender for the last few posts and how I don’t get it. Now, I want to get more broad (heh) in general because that’s how I feel about so many things.

A few years ago, I started chatting with someone in a Discord I’m in out of the main forums. In private messages, in other words. She and I have a lot in common, and we clicked once we started DMing each other.

She and I got to talking about neurodivergency because I had struggled with fitting in all my life. After we messaged back and forth for a length of time, she asked if I had ever thought that I might be autistic. That never occurred to me because I had the stereotypical image of autism in my mind. My brother? Yeah, he was on the spectrum. Me? Hell, no!

It was only after talking with her and simultanuously watching a few videos on autism that I slowly realized the stereotypes weren’t right. Or rather, they only depicted a very narrow kind of autism, which, not coincidentally, centered on young white boys.

(Lengthy rant on sexism in health issues inserted here.)

The biggest thing that shocked me to learn was that it’s not true that autistic people are not empathetic/don’t feel emotions. I mean, there are autistic people like this, true (like my brother), but there are also plenty of autistic people who feel too much emotions. Or, they feel other people’s emotions, but don’t know what to do with them or misinterpret what those emotions are.

There’s a saying when it comes to autism–if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism. There are throughlines and shared traits, yes, but every autistic person is diferent. In my case, I had to deconstruct the image of a person with autism because it was getting in the way.

There are some common traits, of course, such as hyperfocus on certain interests, stimming, and  uncomfortableness in social situations, to name a few. The problem is that for non-male people (women and others), those traits are liable to get overlooked, chalked up to something else like anxiety, or used against said people more harshly than they are against autistic men (which is already harsh).

How often do you now hear about men acting badly, “Oh, maybe he’s on the spectrum” as a way of excusing his appalling behavior? And yet, you don’t hear it about women and other non-male people hardly at all if ever. They don’t get the same grace and/or amused tolerance.

Side note: By the way, you want to know if someone is acting badly on purpose or if he’s ignorant about it? Look to see if he’s acting the same way with people who have power over him or with men in general. If he’s trulyy autistic, then he’ll be awkward around everyone–not just grossly so around the women he wants to fuck.


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