Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Mental Health

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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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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Accepting my brain as it is

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I’m fifty-five years old.

Waits and thinks.

Yes, that’s right. I tend to add a year to my age on January 1st every year so by the time I make it to my actual birthday, I’m confused as to hold old I am. I think it’s because it’s an Asian thing? I’m not sure, but I’m sticking to it as my reason for doing it. I don’t care about my actual age because it’s always seem so random to me to celebrate one day for being a year older.

I mean, I get it on the basic level of it’s the day you were born, so yay for you! And then the next year on the same day, you add a year to that number. In reality, though, we’re aging every day. It’s not like aging is put on hold for 364 days and then you suddenly get a year older on one day. Oh, by the way, here’s my post from yesterday.

I know I’m thinking too literally about it, but that’s how my brain works. I am very literal in most ways and then I’ll be theoretical in some random sudden circumstance. I am terrible with people who are deadpan jokers beacuse I can’t read their tone properly. This is ten times worse over text/email because I can’t get any verbal/visual cues as to how I should react.

Here is how I react to any comment.

Other person (OP): Comments on something happening in their life.

Neurotypical person: Immediately responds.


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More about my brain and if it’s broken

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Let’s talk more about my brain. In the last post, I talked about how a friend helped me realize that maybe my brain wasn’t broken–rather, that I had autism. When she suggested it to me, it was as if a fog cleared up in my head. I have mentioned that I was the one who clued my brother in about his autism a few months before I ended up in the hospital.

About eigt months ago, I was talking to a friend of mine. She’s very frank about herself, so I knew she was autistic. What’s more, she has no problem with talking about it. She will answer any questions I have about it, just as I will answer any questions she has about anything about me. We met in a Discord for a content creator we both watch, but oun friendship quickly progressed past that.

We’re both queer (bisexual for lack of a better term), genderqueer, poly/ENM, and, apparently, autistic. She’s also ADHD, which I may have as well. Neither of us are religious, either. She’s a math person whereas I am not, but that’s probably the biggest difference between us. I like math and I’m good at it, but it’s not a passion for me as it is for her.

We bonded over the fact that we were both magicks-based in Elden Ring (FromSoft), though she was a sorceress, andI was into faith-based magicks. We laughed over having 18 Vigor for the first 100 hours of the game (which means getting one-shot). To put it in perspective, it’s suggested that you have 60 Vigor as soon as you can. I had 38 by the end of the game.

We quickly took our friendship offline (as it were. We took it to DMs), and we sent long messages back and forth. It has been a delight getting to know her, and I would call her a true friend now. I really appreciate that she brought up the possibility that I might have autism because I never would have thought of it myself.

I took an online test, and it was borderline. My friend told me to try to take off the mask, as it were, as I took the test. In other words, she wanted me to ansnwer on impulse rather than think about it at all. Because if I thought about it, then I got trapped. Why? Because I have been heavily masking since I was a young kid. My mother made me her emotional support person when I was eleven, but she had trained me for the job for several years prior.


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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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Last post about labels; no, really, part five

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I have one last (ha) post about labels in me. The ha is beacuse I have way more than that in me, but that’s what I’m going to limit myself to fro now*. I’m so tired of talking about labels, but I feel I have to as long as they have such an outsized effect on on society and what happens to marginalized people.

Side note: I’m playing a demo, a walking sim/graphic novel/something along that line, and it asked me for my gender. I sighed in hopelessness because  I have never–wait, what? I can put in my own pronouns? And I can just put in my name (my character name–mulan rogue. I always use that name as my character name), mulan when need be? The only one that tripped me up was possessive because it’s not an easy one to get around. I mean possessive as in “Dana said the house was _____ (hers, yours, his, theirs). I just put a period. Or maybe I just put ‘mulan’ again. Plus Mx. for a honorific. I considered not putting any (which I assume you could also do), but I like Mx. as a honorific. I mean like as in I would actually choose it, and not reluctantly.

Of course, it’s not used very much and most people don’t seem to like it. Story of my life, really. Me choosing the thing that people don’t like. Or being a part of a group that is most overlooked. I wish I was doing it on purpsoe because then it wouldn’t frustrate me as much–or at all. Instead, I just sigh quietly to myself–or not so quietly because I live alone–and just go about my day.

I have tried all my life to find labels that I didn’t hate with all my heart. I mean, at first I wanted to find labels that actually described me, but I tamped down my expectations after struggling for so many years. I just gave up on even trying after a while. It was less frustration, that way, believe me. Except bisexual/bi. That one still annoys me enough that I revisit it now and again.

I keep thinking I can find a better term, but I can’t. I would love to just leave it at ‘queer’, but as I have said, that’s been taken to mean gay. Yes, I could explain every time I used it that I hdidn’t mean gay, but that’s not something I want to do. I really dislike pansexual (common) and omnisexual (not common). I can’t think of anything else, sadly, so I reluctantly keep bi. I use it to mean those like me and those not like me. I have said that I would just like to use ‘sexual’, but we all know that would not work out well. At all.


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More about labels and why I fucking hate them, part two

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In my last post, I was going to talk about why I didn’t like labels, but pretty much only talked about Guess vs. Ask culture and sexism. Both of those are very important and related to the topic at hand, but they weren’t what I wanted to focus on; I’m going to try again. Oh, and I wanted to include why labels are important, but I never even got close to that.

Here are the lablels I have reluctantly chosen for myself: Asian/Taiwanese American; PoC; bisexual/queer; agender; areligious; and ENM. I would also say I’m aromantic, but that’s not something I consider a necessary part of my identity. Let’s add neurospicy to that list.

I don’t like PoC. I don’t know what I would use instead, though, as I have not liked any of the other terms for minorities. Multicultural was fine, but not really an apt description. Plus, I don’t feel an alliance with other PoC because when people use that term, they usually just mean Black people. Taiwanese American is the best fit here.

Sexual identity: queer is my first choice. But, again, unfortunately most people assume it means gay. We leave in such a binary world; it’s really disheartening to me. I still call myself queer, but if I need to be more specific, I will reluctantly use bi. I’m not happy about it, and I’ve never really liked it. Especially now that there are more than two genders, it’s not the best. I and other bi people tend to use it as ‘people like me and people not like me’, but that’s a lot of explaining to do when talking with nonqueers about it. I used to joke that I would rather just call myself sexual and be done with it.

Also, when I first came out thirty years ago, there was a strong push to emphasize that bis didn’t want to fuck everyone just because we could, in theory, do so. I get it. Respectability was a big issue back then (still is, but in a different way). Queer people really wanted to emphasisze being just like straight people except for who we loved.

Which, yeah, I get it. Racial minorities also have that strong impulse. It makes sensre to a certain extent. You want to emphasize the similarities because that’s a good way to create bonds. This has always been the tension within a minority group–to try to be as like the majority as possible or outright rebel.

There are people who can pass and people who can’t. There are people who could pass, but choose not to. It’s a spectrum, really, and I fall more on the ‘can pass’ side as long as I don’t act up. Heh. This is in gender identity. People assume I’m a woman because of my big boobs and long hair. At this point because of the terrible mess that is my country, I’m just going to leave it at that.


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Me and my temper, part seven

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I’m back to talk more about anger and my difficulty in controlling it since my medical crisis. I do have to consider that some of it is purely biological. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve found out that it’s a common side effect of having as stroke. And the war I had in my brain and body the last time I was arguing with my mother felt almost physically impossible to stop. I wrote about it at length in my last post, but I want to talk more about it in this one.

When you’re a weirdo as I am (neurodivergent), it’s difficult to know what is a flaw and what is just partof my personality and does not need to be changed.

For example. When I was younger, I had a really hard time going anywhere because I felt like all my senses were being assaulted all the time. Smells, sounds, and sights that I couldn’t just mute. If someone had told me that I wasn’t being oversensitive or too fussy, but that my brain was just wired differently, that would have helped a great deal. I got scolded often by my mother when I would protest about my environment.

She told me a story about how when I was two or three and my brother was five or six and upwards, she would take us to the State Fair every year. She told me I would be crying and screaming, and I asked why she continued to do it. She said because my brother loved it, and she could not afford a babysitter.

That was my standing in the family in a nutshell.  My brother was always more important than I was for several reasons. The first and biggest reason is beacuse he’s the son. Boys were much better than girls. girls were less than useless, and their only worth was to be married off to procreate. Oh, and in my case, to be my mother’s therapist. That’s it. I had no use as a person in and of myself, and I was treated accordingly.

Two. My brother was/is on the spectrum. He was never diagnosed with it (hell, it was barely acknowledged back in the eighties), but he has the classic symptoms. I was the one who clued him into the fact that he was on the spectrum, and this was a few months before I had my medical crisis. He said it changed his life, and it made so many things make sense. My only regret was that I didn’t tell him earlier because I knew decades earlier. It’s just that he displayed such stereotypical behavior for an autistic person, and he knew his son was autistic that I assumed he knew it about himself.

One of the most strenuous arguments K and I have ever (and it was really mild, but we don’t argue0 was about how talking about mental health was so much more open now than when we were younger. Neither of us was saying we should go back to the old days of not talking about it at all, but she was concerned that there was too heavy a reliance on medication. But, also, was there a need to label everything? Both she and her husband deal/have dealt with mental health issues. She pointed out that they got through it with some therapy, yes (on her part), but that was it.


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