Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Bagua

Sleep is as sleep does, (my brain), part seven

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Let’s talk more about burnout, sleep, and how the hell I can do better with both. I’m pretty sure the lack of the middle one is causing the first one, but I feel helpless to do anything about it. My sleep is wild these days. I had to get up before noon for my class, and I went to bed fairly early for me (5 a.m.), and I planned on getting up a quarter to twelve. Instead, I fell asleep, snoozed, and got up several times. At eleven or so, I woke up and just could not go back to sleep.

I have a weird thing in which if I have to get up at a certain time, then I’ll wake up early and keep on waking up until I give up and get up for good. It’s so frustrating because I could get an extra hour of sleep if  Iwould just stay asleep, but my anxiety does me in every time.

When I used to fly frequently, I would often get an early morning flight because it was the cheapest. If i had to be at the airport at, say, four in the morning, I just was not going to sleep that night. Even as I’m writing this, I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. I’ve nodded off, slept for a few minutes, started awake, and repeated the cycle.

There’s no reason I couldn’t just go to bed now, but I won’t for whatever reason. I know what will happen, though. If I stay awake for ten more minutes, I’ll be up until five or six. This is just the way my brain works for whatever reason.

I’m exhausted, and then I can’t sleep. This cycle is the worst, and I know that I don’t help myself. I think the thing I need to do if I can is take out the self-judgment. I was talking to A about how hard it is not to be negative about oneself in addition to the actual problem. After all, we’ve been told all our lives that we’re lazy; that our brains were broken; that we just needed to try harder.

I can’t tell you how many different things I have tried to get better sleep. In fact, I listed several ways I tried to get better sleep in my post from yesterday. Every time, I had hope in my heart that this would be the answer, it wasn’t. There is nothing that has worked–except Taiji. And that took several years before it helped in the sleep department. Before I studied Taiji, I got four to five hours of sleep a night. Afterwards, I pushed it up to six, maybe six-and-a-half, inch by inch. Now, I get six to eight, depending, and it’s mostly on me if it’s less because I set my alarm for the same time no matter when I go to sleep (unless I have to get up earlier).

Why? Because I’m hoping in vain that it’ll spur me to go to bed earlier. I have mentioned that I would like to go to bed by 3 a.m. Now, it’s more than  half hour past that. 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. is my ideal schedule, but I have rarely been able to stay on that schedule. After I got out of the hospital (after my medical crisis), I was sleeping 10 p.m. to 6 p.m. I never did that even when I was a kid. I have never gone to bed before midnight–even when I had a 7:45 a.m. class in college. In fact, during that time, I rarely went to bed before 3:30 a.m.


Continue Reading

The importance of sleep (and braiiiiins), part six

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Let’s talk about sleep. Again. Forever. I struggle so much with it on so many level. Before I get into it, here’s my post from yesterday about how autism and ‘socially awkward’ are often used as an excuse for creepiness.

I’m mad thinking about it again. Why are we so quick to excuse bad behavior from men*? Or to say “that’s just the way he is”? Or, even worse when little boys pulled the hair of little girls, “He’s just showing that he likes you”?

By the way, stop that bullshit. Seriously. Stop it the fuck right now. We do not need to be teaching little girls that abuse is acceptable. And, no, I don’t think that’s being hyperbolic. A boy hurts a girl, and she’s just supposed to accept it because he “likes” her? No. Not appropriate and not acceptable.

In the same vein, don’t make kids accept hug or force them to hug anybody. Bodily autonomy is important. I have heard because it excuse it because faaaaaamily. But family can do bad things, too. The vast majority of abuse of children is by family members.

I have very few absolute opinions–one of them is that kids should never be made to hug anyone they don’t want to hug. I have read the reasons why people are for it, and none of them make one whit of an impression on me. They just sound like noise in my ears and mere excuses. “You want to make Granny feel welcome!” A warm smile and a “so glad to see you” can do that.

Hm. I just thought of something. I am very much someone who doesn’t are about labels in general. Male, female, Christian, Jew, Muslim, age, etc. I understand that it’s important to most people, and I can respect that. I mean, if those aspects are clearly important to someone, then I’ll be respectful.

I vould add familial labels into that basket. This is heresy as an Asian person, but I don’t think someone should be accorded more respect just because of their position in the family. To make it clear, I think everyone is deserving of a base level of respect as a human being. But I do not and never will agree that someone deserves more respect because they’re a day older or a man.

I think it’s because of my mindset that I am so absolute about not making kids kiss and/or hug anyone they don’t want to, regardless of family connection. And partly my neurodivergence, too. If you would not make your kid hug a total stranger, then why make them hug someone they see once a year? Or even more often than that.

Kids have such little autonomy as it is; they should not be forced to give up even more of it. This is a hill I would die on.


Continue Reading

Brain brain go away, part five

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Talking more about how my brain (doesn’t) works. Here is my post from yesterday toxic positivity, toxic gender stereotypes, and why both of these things have made me struggle with burnout.

I started out this series by wainting to talk about how my neurodivergence led to my current threat of burnout, but then, as usual it exploded out of control from that point. By the way, I tend to use neurodivergence rather than autism because I know that my brain is wired differently, but I’m not sure in what specific way. I’m pretty sure it’s autism, but i have not been tested for it.

I am still kicking myself for not thinking it was even possible, but that’s really not on me. The stereotype of autism ever since it’s really entered society’s conscience is of an adolescent (or now, kid) white male who has no social skills, doesn’t like to be held or maintain eye contact, and is constantly stimming.

Side note: I am so tired of ‘but have you thought that maybe he’s just socially awkward?’ bullshit when a guy does something creepy. All the endless excuses that maybe he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But, no such grace that maybe the woman (and it’s almost always a woman) he’s creeping on is autistic herself and doesn’t need that shit.

Also, you can tell when someone is socially awkward in general versus them targeting a select  few. Someone who is socially awkward is that way in general (as I said), and the level doesn’t change too much from person to person. When it’s a creeper, it’s much different and done with a laser-sharp focus.

Side note to the side note: This is one of the most frustrating things about being harassed–feeling like you have to prove it over and over again. There’s never enough evidence that it was harassment and not something else, short of broken bones (or broken other parts)–and sometimes not even then. When #MeToo was happening, so many men were making it about them. How they were scared to approach women and say anything to them.

I mean…what?! That’s your takeaway from #MeToo? How hard it is to be a man? But of course it was. It’s always about the man. That was the whole fucking problem in the first place. When there’s a shooting these days, my immediate thought is, “What pissed off man shot a place up again?” Because it is overwhelmingly men–and most of the time, white cis het men.

Yet, we never talk about it because…why?  (Holds in a 2,000 word rant about patriarchy because I just cannot.)


Continue Reading

Just me and my brain, part four

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Let’s actually talk about burnout today (as it relates to my neurodivergence). Here’s my post from yesterday where I talked about burnout, toxic positivity, and other things. It’s been interesting to go through it, to actually realize it’s burnout in real time, and then to deal with my warring sides about it. One side of me thinks, “Just push through it. It’s no big deal. You idiot.” The other side recognizes that if I do that, I’m just going to feel worse and worse about it.

Back when I first started Taiji, I had to force myself to practice five minutes a day, and I did it by tricking my brain. First, I added two classes a week so I was going to a total of three a week. Then, I told myself than I would just do five minutes of stretching a day. I slowly started adding pieces to it, and it’s up to an hour-and-a-half now. Stretching/warmups for both Taiji and Bagua; one part of the Solo Form (Taiji) and the Swimming Dragon Form, alternating right side and left side (Bagua); then weapons for both disciplines. The stretching, warmups, and Solo Form/Swimming Dragon Form take forty-five minutes to fifty minutes, depending. The weapons take about a half hour to forty-five minutes because I’m teaching myself the Bagua Knives Form.

I’m always teaching myself  a new weapon form these days, so that takes up a big part of my practice when I’m actively teaching myself a new movement or three. I’m almost done with the Bagua Knives Form, and I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I would like it to be Double Swords, but I cannot find one that is based in Taiji.

Today, for the first time, I decided not to do the Swimming Dragon Form or the Bagua Knives Form. I was exhausted because my sleep has been really shitty, and I mean really shitty. I’m always baseline tired, but I’ve been having even worse sleep problems lately. I’m trying to make sure that I get up at 2 p.m. consistently in the vain hope that it would spur me to get to bed at a consisten hour as well. So far, that has not happened, and it’s in part because I keep doing the same habits.

The last time I talked to my Taiji teacher, she was very encouraging of me varying my practice so that I wouldn’t get burnout. This is one of the things I like about her–she never pushes people to do things harder, faster, better. She encourages us to take our time and to take as much time as we need to learn things.

She likes to say that we have all the time in the world, meaning that we don’t have to get anything in any set amount of time. She will gently push people to try new things when she feels they’re ready, and in my case, not-so-gently push. That’s a plus, by the way, because I tend to drag my heels in trying something new. This is very much a part of me, and it’s not something I like about myself.


Continue Reading

Combatting burnout and my weirdo brain, part three

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Let’s talk more about burnout.

Not yet, though. Park that thought as I start off with something that might seem not related, but it is. Oh, before that, here’s the post I wrote yesterday about how I found out that there might be a link between neurodivergence and not eating breakfast.

There is a toxic positivity mentality in American culture that is tiresome. This spills over into exercising. Every time I hear, “Give 110%” or any other percentage that is about 100, I scream (either out loud or internally). Not only is it physically impossible to give that much, it wouldn’t be healthy if you could give even, say, 100% all the time.

The way people take pride in pushing themselves past their limit baffles me. Then, some of them seem to want a cookie for it as well. Look, you do you. If you want to break your body, that’s your right. But don’t expect me to applaud you for it.

Side note: This is similar to how I feel about dieting. I don’t buy into dieting culture, and I find it deeply harmful. Personally, yes, but also just in general. (Resists impulse to go on a 2,000-word diatribe about dieting.) I have dealt with eating disorders in my late teens/early twenties. Anorexia and bulimia combined–twice.

The second time, I got so many people gushing about my weight loss and asking how I did it. Beside the fact that I really didn’t want to talk about it, I couldn’t even tell them anything that they didn’t already know. Exercise and cutting down on portions. Except I took it to extremes–which was the part I most definitely would not say out loud.

I wanted to shout at them for being so positive about something that was very negative. And, yes, I knew at the time that it was negative–even if I wasn’t convinced it was a real eating disorder. Why? Because as I used to darkly joke with myself, “I didn’t have the will power to have an actual eating disorder.”

But I knew, deep down, that what I was doing wasn’t healthy at the very least. I would spend hours looking at pictures of food as a way to push off cravings. And it would be the same food, like tiramisu. Hours.

Back to burnout and toxic positivity/pushing yourself too hard.

I’ve been able to push back on the ‘give 125%’ mostly. In part it’s because I’m lazy by nature. I’m saying that with a wink and a smirk, but also a wry smile. It’s what people have told me because I don’t seem very ambitious on the outside .My mom once asked me in exasperation (after questioning me what I wanted to do with my life): “You want to work, don’t you?”


Continue Reading

Refining my Taiji/Bagua practice, part two

Posted on by • 0 Comments

In yesterday’s post, I was going to talk about why I don’t do groups–and I’ll get to that (eventually)–but I went waaaaay off the rails as I ended up talking about burnout instead. I decided to go with it because it’s obviously on my mind, and I want to get it under control before I completely lose my shit.

It’s ironic. Weapons have saved me, and now weapons are my burden. I am being completely honest. I can do the warmups/stretches with no problem. Then, my brain goes, “Uhhhhhh”, and I procrastinate. I have to force myself to go through it all. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it as I’m doing it–I do. It’s just a small (or not so small) part of my brain going, “I’m soooooo tired.” To be fair, my sleep has been really shitty lately. I don’t think it’s pneumonia again (hopefully), but I can’t rule it out. I’m not as tired as I was when I had it, but I’m pretty groggy.

Also, it’s not that I physically can’t do it; I can. It’s my mind saying it doesn’t want to. And, yes, my body is tired (as I usually am), but I’m not in any distress while practicing.

Here’s how this relates to my neurodivergence. I tend to go overboard when I’m into something. Way overboard. I don’t know where the ‘this is an appropriate amount of effort and time to put into this’ line is.

Here’s a related tidbit about me. My hunger gauge is completely broken. I struggled with anorexia and bulimia when I was younger. Remember, my mother put me on my first diet when I was seven and hounded me about my weight until I put my foot down in my thirties. It was too late by then, though.

Ok. I had a hunch about neurodivergence and not recognizing internal body signals, and I was right. The ability to know what is going on in your body is called interoception. It’s how you know you’re hungry, tired, thirsty, etc. People with neurodivergence (I could find more about ADHD than autism) have a harder time recognizing their internal signals. Whether it’s because of hyperfocus or just bodily issues in general, people who  are neurodivergent tend to be more susceptible to eating disorders as well.

I say this because I cannot tell when I’m hungry or thirsty. I’m pretty good about drinking regularly, but I’m very bad at eating. I don’t like breakfast, so I don’t eat when I first get up. I like to do my Taiji/Bagua practice before I eat, which means I don’t eat my first full meal* until two or three hours after I wake up.


Continue Reading

Let’s talk more about sleep

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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.


Continue Reading

More about sleep, martial arts, and whatever else

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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.


Continue Reading

Radically rethinking my sleep–and martial arts

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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.


Continue Reading

Patting myself on the back, part three

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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.


Continue Reading