Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Self-Care

All martial arts all the time

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Yes, I have more to say about weapons because of course I do. Here is my post from yesterday in which I was comparing Taiji and Bagua. Or rather, how it’s been a journey to switch from Taiji mentality to Bagua thinking.

Taiji is about deliberation, taking your time, reacting, and taking what your opponent gives you.  Ideally, you are not the aggressor. You’re not trying to hurt anyone, but if someone happens to get hurt in the process, well, then so be it. You’re calm and chill, and you do just enough to get you out of the situation.

Bagua, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. It’s aggressive, fast, and meant to do damage. As my teacher has told me more than once, in China, if it was known that you studied Bagua, people would side-eye you and consider you dangerous.

I know I talk about vibes a lot, but it really is about the feel of the weapon. Or the discipline (meaning the martial art, not the will it takes to do something) . I was doing the Sword Form (left side) today, and it’s so different from the Saber Form. Or the Cane Form–which I did on both sides with both the cane and the saber.

By the way, let’s talk about how deceptively heavy the weapons are. Not in and of themselves, but moving them through the air takes muscles. Not all of them, of course. The fan isn’t heavy at all, nor is the karambit. The sword is medium, but that saber, though. I bought a nice one after using a wooden one for over a decade, and it is hefty.

I do the right side of the Saber Form every Monday, and the left side on Wednesday. Now, I’m doing the Cane Form with the saber every day. And today, I reinforced the left side of the Cane Form with the saber, which means that…wait. Was it today that I did both the Saber Form and the Cane Form, right and left side? I think so, even though it’s Friday. That is work, yo.

I am including the Karambit Form with this post as that is the next form I want to learn. I have been messing around more with the karambit and the fan at the same time, and I’m actually trying to do it in a methodical way.

It’s thrilling, but I’m a bit amazed at my audacity. How could I even dare to think I could make up a weapon form? I have mentioned before that there are plenty of my teacher’s teacher’s (Sifu) students who have made up weapon forms. Mostly men, much to my dismay. Some of them are solid and some, not so much. But it never occurred to me that I of all people could make my own weapon form.


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More on health in general, and in specific

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I’m talking about health. Let’s talk morea bout it. In yesterday’s post, I talked at length about eating disorders–namely, my disordered thinking. I don’t know how to go about being healthy in a healthy way. Well, that’s not exactly true. Taiji and bagua are healthy for me, and when I do them, they short-circuit that part of my brain that is constantly telling me that I have to do better and juust be better.

I don’t know how to get out of that mindset, quite frankly. Any time I try to be sensibel abouut my diet, I go off the rails in one way or another. I need to find a thearpist, but it’s so daunting. Not just because it’s hard to find a therapist in general, but because what I’m looking for seems to be the unicorn of therapists.

I took the questionnaire on Better Help, and by the time I put in everything  I was looking for, they told me they had no match. That’s not surprising, but it was depressing. Here’s what I was looking for. Someone East Asian and queer. Someone who was comfortable with gender issuues, trauma, and grief. Oh, and family dysfunction.  And was in Minnesota (or aware of the Minnesota ethos). There was nobody.

Of course, this was just one (lshady, I later confirmed) website, so that means nothing. I went to the Psychology Today website and had a hard time finding anyone who fit my criteria, either. I had to toss out two or three of these criteria, which didn’t feel good. I decided I really wanted someone who was East Asian, non-male, and skilled in Minnesotan mentality, family dysfunction, and grief. Oh, and a psychologist. That last one was a killer.

I really don’t think that’s too much to ask for, but it’s like looking for a needle in the haystack. I gave up in discouragement, especially given how the election went and what is going on now in this country.

I need to get back to it, though. I can tell that my depression is deepening and my anxiety is getting worst. There is a hopelessness in my soul that is not going away. It’s sad because when I died (twice), I got a renewed lease on life–and then frittered it away. Now, I’m back to where I was before my medical crisis. Well, not quite as bad, but I’m fighting the same fight. It’s not surprising because I am the same person in general, but I wish I could have held ontto that better me for a longer time.

Back to health.

Eating is my bugaboo for several reasons. I don’t know if I will ever come to grips with it. I want to be at ease with eating, but I teeter from binging to starving. I can barely taste food as I eat it, and I don’t know when I’m hungry unless I haven’t eaten for, say, ten hours. I fucked up the mechanism that is supposed to tell me when I’m hungry while dealing with my two eating disorder eras, and I have never fixed it since.

In my sixth decade on this earth, I would like to finally be free of the disordered thinking that has plagued me since I was seven. It’s gotten better over the years, bit by agonizing bit, but it’s still not where I would like it to be.


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More talking about my health in general

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In yesterday’s post, I was talking planning on talking about health in general, but I quickly derailed myself to talking about family dysfunction instead. It’s related to health, though, so  I don’t feel completely bad about it. Let’s face it–family dysfunction is baked into so many things, I could unpack it forever. I’m also still ignoring *waves at the world around me* everything because I have to figure out how to deal with it in a not rage-inducing way.

In yesterday’s post, my intent was to talk about eating more healthily and doing things to better my health in general. That’s not the way it went, but that was my intent. Instead, I went on a rant about how my mother made me feel like shit about my body from thet time of seven and sent me down a very dark and painful path because of her obsession with how the ideal girl/woman should look like.

It got so bad that after my last visit to Taiwan (gotta update my passport ASAP, just a side thought), I had to put my foot down and tell my mother that she could not mention my health ever  again. I had forbade her from talking about my weight at some point, which meant she just changed from talking about my weight to talking about my health–but she meant my weight.

How do I know? Well, first of all, I know her very well. Secondly, when I was in college and anorexic, my junior counselors called her in to talk to her about it. They did it out of good intentions, but it was not a good thing for them to do. Why? Because it embarrassed the hell out of her, and she gets nasty when she’s shown up. Not in the any typical way, but in underhanded, manipulative, guiltt-induucing ways.

I remember my mother sitting there with her face sour. I could tell she was upset–at me. Not for being anorexic and bulimic, but for making it look like she was a bad mother.

Did she have anything to say about me being anorexic and bulimic? No. Did she have any concern to show about my health? No. In fact, the only time she ever said anything about me when I was skinny was during my second dance with anorexia. She looked at me for several long seconds and then said, “Your waist is tinier than mine.” She said it with such hate and jealousy, I internally recoiled.

This is how I know that her concern abouut my health is bullshit. If she were really concerned about my health, she would be worried that my thighs didn’t touch, and I could not make it up a flight of stairs without gasping for breath. Do you want to know how distorted her thinking was on the subject? Before I went to college, I used to blast my boombox (yes, I’m that old) and dance on the living room floor for hours as my exercise. My mother once said, “Should you be doing that? I’m worried that the floor will collapse.”


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Depression sucks, part four

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Let’s keep talking about depression. Here is the previous post I wrote about it. I’ve had it all my life, and in the past, I had just accepted that it was part of my life. Which it was. Until I had my medical crisis and my depression went away. Not all of it, mind, but 90% of it–which is amazing. For the first year after my medical crisis, I was so grateful to be alive. I felt peace in a way that I haven’t in any other time of my life.

I would look out the window and just marvel at being alive. That’s not something I have ever done in my life before. Every cup of coffee tasted extra-strong, and every weapon form was extra-meaningful (once I could do the weapons again). I’m not being flip when I say that dying puts a different perspective on life.

However (and you knew that I was going to qualify it), that state of mind can’t last forever. It’s simply not possible to not revert to the mean over time. What I’m saying is that, even the miraculous becomes normal over time. Yes, it’s still amazing that I’m alive when I should have stayed dead. Yes, I still feel that in my bones, deeply. But it’s not on the forefront of my mind as it was for the first two years.

Now, for the first time since my medical crisis, I had the thought that maybe it would have been better if I had died for good. It was fleeting, and I was able to dismiss it, but it shook me that it’s happening at all.

Life is hard right now. And with depresion, it’s a slippery slope. For me, anyway. It starts out mild and then before you know it, I’m on the couch and can’t get off it. At least that’s how my old depression worked. Plus, my sleep gets even suckier than normal, and I’m jsut blah all over the place.

Now, it’s different. I’m not on the couch, but I’m not any more productive. My brain feels fracture, and my life is so gray (as I said in the last post).

In the past, depression was just a part of me. There was no rhyme or reason to it. This time, however, there are specific reasons for it. In late February, I had a major tragedy happen to me. It was expected, but still sudden. What made it weirder was that it happened the day (and the day after) the Elden Ring DLC trailer dropped. Which was…a thing. And cast a pall on something  I had been anticipating for literal years.

I dealt with the tragedy at the time surprisingly well. As I said, I was expecting it to happen–just not at that particular time and so quickly. I still don’t want to say anything publically about it, though I have written several unpublished posts about it.

I say surprisingly, but it’s not surprising at all. One, ah, positive of having PTSD is that I’m very calm and cool in a crisis. See, I’m alwayst imagining the worst-case scenario, so when I’m in one, it’s my time to shine. Nothing can be worse than my brain, you see, not even dying. Twice. It’s when the outside matches the inside of my brain, and there’s a certain quietness and solidness to it that calms the fires of my brain.


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The lying lies of depression, part three

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In the last post, I talked about family dysfunction, mental health, and talked about a few more points on my list of ways I can tell I’m feeling depressed. Here’s the thing. Depression is a lying liar who lies. But, it’s also sneaky in its lies. It doesn’t just hit you in the face with its presence (at least not with me). It slowly creeps up on me bit by bit until I realize that I’m depressed.

In a way, it would be so much easier if it did just announce itself and say, “Hey, I’m here, bitch. What are you going to do about it?” But, no. It slides in a toe and wiggles it around a bit. Then, once you’re accepeted that, it shows you a knee. It keeps going until it’s fully in the room, which is when you (I) know it’s going to be a problem.

I get so frustrated when it takes me time to realize I’m depressed. And even more frustrated when I don’t do anything about it. I am glad, howeve,r that I’m more able to talk about it now than twenty years ago. I’ve been messaging with K and it occured to me and–look. It went down like this. She asked me how I was doing. I immediately started to message back–fine.

Then I stopped. I was not fine. Why was I about to lie to her? She is my oldest and dearest friend.She’s been there for me through thick and thin. We have shared the good times and the bad. She’s been by my side through so much. Why was I pretending to be ok?

I took a deep breath and wrote an honest answer. And got an equally honest answer in return that she was struggling, too. And I felt much better in the instant. Not because she was suffering, but because I was frank with her and she with me.

We have always been open with each other. Twenty years ago, though, I just would not have talked to her when I was depressed. Not in a negative way, mind, but we didn’t talk that often, and I could have shined her on if we did talk during that period.


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Waiting it out

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Today, for the first time in a long time, I did not do any weapon form practice. Why? Because the last COVID booster kicked. my. ass. I mean, it happens every time, but I always forget how bad it is. Or maybe it’s the worst this time. I will try to do some weapons later, but I was breaking out int a a sweat, and I seem to remember my teacher telling me that if you’re lightly sweating, it’s fine, but if it’s a heavy sweat , to stop. When you’re sick, I mean. Not in general.

I’ve been sweating profusely the last two days. Alternating with having the chills. I don’t get the chills unless I’m sick, and I do not like it. I like the sweating even less, though. It’s just gross. I feel weird not having done any weapons. I think I’ll sprinkle them throughout the day. I haven’t gone a day without doing the weapons forms since about a month after coming home from the hospital. Intellectually, I know that I’m not going to forget everything I know if I don’t practice for a day or two, but it’s suc a big part of my daily routine and of me, I don’t want to not do it.

But I’m worn out. When I did the stretches and the bagua, I started sweating. Now, I’m chilled. I know that it’s important to get the booster. I was planning on getting my flu shot in a few days as well, but if I do that, then the chances that I’ll be in good enough shape to go to my brother’s for Thanksgiving are slim to none. Here is my post from yesterday about me and shots.

The first time I got a Covid shot, the welt lasted until next time I got the shot. That was three weeks and a day later. Yes, they shot me again on the small bump that was still there. That is not an exaggeration. Today is day four and my arm is still hot, burny, and swollen. I have no energy, and I keep flashing cold and hot. I am actually more weirded out by being cold because I don’t get cold. In fact, that’s how I know I’m sick–when I actually feel cold. Chills, to be more precise. It’s a very strange feeling, and if I weren’t sick, I would actually find it interesting.

I hate being sick. That’s not a controversial statement or even that observant, I know. But I especially hate it when I intentionally did it to myself. I know it’s better to be boosted. I know that I should get my flu shot. But it would help if the powers that be would acknowledge that for some people, it comes at a cost. by powers that be, I mean doctors.

I really feel like it’s worse this time. I wonder if it’s because it’s a different brand. I got the Pfizer in the past, but this time it was the Moderna. Apparently, it’s fine to mix-and-match, but maybe the Moderna is particularly potent.


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My journey in Taiji

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I hated Taiji when I first started studying it. I had a teacher before my current one, and he was terrible. Flat-out terrible. I only went to him because a friend of mine was enamored with him (he has a very cultlike personality, and my friend needed a father-figure desperately as his own had been very abusive). All my narcissist/predator vibes were pinging, but I tamped them down because I trusted my friend. And because I have my own extreme biases against narcissists that made me wonder if I was blowing things out of proportion.

I wasn’t. He was sleeping with a student. They  were in a relationship but as he was the teacher in his fifties and she was 27 and the student, could it truly be equal? In short, no. Not only was he scummy enough to sleep with a student, but he was very sleazy in his interactions with other women. He made a big deal about respecting personal space and not touching anyone without their consent, but that was a big, fat lie.

I gritted my teeth the entire time I studied with him which was probably a year or so, but I did not trust him one whit. That’s not a good relationship in Taiji, but I was young and stupid at the time. This was around the time The Matrix came out, and he raved about what a revolutionary movie it was. He said it was the essence of Taiji and removing yourself from the system. The message I got from him was that he was justified in being intensely selfish because nothing he did could help anyone else, anyway. Or rather, what was going to happen would happen regardless of what he did. It was such self-serving twaddle, I internally sneered even though I hadn’t seen the movie. Just by watching the trailer, I was sure that he was spouting bullshit, and when I watched the movie years later, I had my confirmation.

The Matrix is a good action movie, but unconventional and going against the norm? Not hardly. I watched it in a theater with my then-boyfriend who liked the movie and wanted me to see it. That was problematic in and of itself because I had a boyfriend dump me when I told him my views on Pulp Fiction, so after that, I kept my opinions to myself. While watching The Matrix, I kept thinking how hot Keanu was and how hot Carrie-Anne was. I did think back to what my ex-Taiji teacher had said about the movie and rolled my eyes because the movie had very predictable and conventional story beats. Then, Neo died and Trinity kissed him to bring him back to life.


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A dangerous time

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I’m full of energy today, which is a change for me. Since I got out of the hospital, I’ve gotten a solid eight hours a night, waking up only once during the night. I’ve woken  up and not been exhausted, but my body is still mending. All that sleep is going into the deficit I’ve carried with me for decades. I know that’s not how sleep works, but that’s how I think of it, anyway. I’ve had a lifetime of not getting enough sleep and then I had a very traumatic day followed by two weeks in the hospital. The first two weeks at home, my body was just mending itself and recovering from the trauma. The next two weeks, the sedation and narcotic meds were (finally) completely leaving my body, which meant I could feel all the little aches and pains that a body has.

Then, I hit a plateau of frustration because I wasn’t getting any better. Intellectually, I know that it can’t always be peaks. There are going to be plateaus, and, yes, valleys. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. Part of Taiji is accepting things as they are, which is not my strong point. I come by it honestly as my parents are both major worriers (in vastly different ways). I used to joke with K that her mother was very much, “Whatever choice you make, you’ll be fine” whereas my mother is more, “Whatever choice you make, it’ll go drastically wrong”. We both laughed at the time, albeit ruefully. In my case, it meant that no matter what I did, I always regretted it and thought about how different life would be if I had done x, y, or z. This is more my mother than my father, but he’s prone to it, too. When I had a minor car accident several years ago, I was clearly in the right. The witnesses and the cops agreed with this. So did the young woman who was driving the other car. I, too, knew there was absolutely nothing I could do. I was going straight on a local road when she suddenly turned left and slammed into my car. I saw her coming, instantly thought, “There’s nothing I can do” and instinctively relaxed. I walked away from it with a massive bruise on my stomach from the seat belt, probably, and nothing else. My car was totaled, but I was fine. Later, my father started questioning if there was anything I could have done to avoid it. I was getting pissed because there really was nothing I could do. I picked up a stuffed soccer ball my father had made in Home Ec and threw it suddenly at my father. He didn’t even flinch as it hit him. I asked why he didn’t try to catch it and he didn’t even register that I had thrown something at him. It wasn’t nice of me and I felt like shit afterwards, but it made my point–at least to me.


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Sleep, but at what cost?

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I hate sleep. I’ve always hated the sleep. I remember when I was very young, I’d stuff a towel in the crack under the door when I was supposed to be in bed. Then, I would read until midnight or later, rinse, lather, and repeat. There were several reasons for this and it set me up for a lifetime of not being able to sleep before midnight. There are other reasons including a mischievous thyroid, but it set me up for a lifetime struggle with Lord Morpheus. In fact, it’s such a big part of me, I really identified hard with The Sandman, a graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman. A friend hooked me up with the compendiums and I devoured them with an eagerness that was almost frightening. I was immediately antagonized by Dream (Morpheus) and wanted to punch his moody lights out. Desire both intrigued me and repulsed me as desire was so oft wont to do. Death was amazing, of course, and Delirium broke my heart. Despair was grotesque and scary, whereas Destruction was hot as fuck. I was so enamored by them, I wrote a novel with them as main characters.

When I was in college, I slept maybe four hours a night. By this point, my thyroid was destroyed so I was hypo instead of hyper. I was also deep in an eating disorder my first year in college, which did not help my metabolism at all. When I went home from college for breaks, I would crash for fifteen hours the first night and get sick. Every time. There was one day that stands out in sharp relief. I had a portable alarm clock that I kept on my desk by my bed. One day, I got up and couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked all around the room several times and it was nowhere to be seen. After ten minutes, I shrugged and gave up, still befuddled. I opened the mini-fridge to grab a Diet Pepsi and there was my alarm clock. I had no recollection of putting it in there. After that, I put it on the sink across the room so I wouldn’t do that again.

In my late twenties, I had nightmares upon nightmares every night. Four or five was not unheard of and they were incredibly graphic. There was a stretch of time where my friends were dying in my dreams on the regular. It became a joke that if you hadn’t died in one of my dreams, then you weren’t really my friend. It was funny in retrospect, but at the time, it was exhausting. I also had a nightmare in which I actually died. I  was lying in bed (in my dream) when a Snuffleupagus-like creature comes up to me. Hey, I know that doesn’t sound bad in the light of day, but in my dream, it was terrifying. It crept up to me as I was rooted to the spot and then it started stealing my breath. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but lie there. It kept stealing my breath until I couldn’t breathe any longer–and then I died.

So, yeah, the adage that you can’t die in a dream isn’t true. It wasn’t fun at all. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t fun, either.


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How to deal with my broken mind

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I have a broken mind. This has been true since I was a kid. Or rather, I’ve always been different. I loved to read and always had my nose in a book. I devoured them rapidly, moving from one to the next the second I was done with the first. A part of the reason why was because I hated life with every fiber of my being. I can’t remember a time when I thought it was a good thing to be alive and is it nature? Is it nurture? I don’t know. Or, more to the point, it’s a complex mixture of both. By my mother’s account, I was a happy and cheerful toddler–though she is an unreliable narrator. She looks at things in the past through rose-colored glasses, mostly so she doesn’t have to deal with the negative ramifications that linger.

I am pretty sure this is one of her coping mechanisms in dealing with my father because he’s pretty unrelentingly negative. I also know that her childhood wasn’t the happiest and that she never felt like she was loved by her mother. Who, by the way, was a real piece of work. Probably shouldn’t have been a mother, but it was expected of women of her generation and culture (Taiwanese). She definitely favored her sons over her daughters and for whatever reason, my mother was her least-favorite.

All that is to say that my mother came into parenting with some faulty ideas as to what it takes to be a parent and what it meant to be a parent. More specifically, a mother. I also think one of the reasons she decided to have children was to have someone to love her unquestioningly, which was destined to fail. You don’t have kids for what they can do for you–ideally, that is. Many people do, much to their own detriment.

Ever since I can remember, I was not happy in my own skin. My mom made dresses for me, which is so not my jam. I like a long flowy skirt and I wore a dress now and again in my twenties, but it never felt right. It wasn’t a gender thing, but a sensory thing. I hate clothing and try to wear as little as possible. Dresses generally cover more than other clothing and is restrictive to boot. I liked to climb trees when I was a kid–which was also something that I was told I shouldn’t do as a girl–and that’s really hard to do in a dress. I was considered a tomboy and frowned upon for being, well, too much.


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