Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: health

Health, gender, and kung-fu fighting

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I have still more to say about gender and martial arts. That should not surprise anyone because once I get stuck on something, I go on and on and on about it. Yesterday, I talked about gender and what I think of it (not much). I’m so tired of talking about it, but it’s a big deal right now given the state of my country at the moment.

I have been voting for thirty years. I have voted Democratic almost every time*. I have not been happy about it most of the time because it’s just the least worst of two evils. The only times I’ve felt joyful about voting was for Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. Take from that what you will. I dutifully voted for whoever had the D by his (and yes, it was overwhelmingly male which says a lot about the Democratic Party, but taht is not what this post is about) name, but I never felt good about it. Or rather, rarely.

I know that I don’t belong to this time or place, but I also don’t think I would have fit in any time or place. And I don’t know how much fight I have in me to try to change the world for the better. I realize that I’m slipping back to where I used to be, more and more each day.

I know it’s because of inertia and because we tend to go back to homeostasis. In other words, we don’t move in a positive direction without being deliberate about it. Some people like my brother do it almost effortlessly. I envy that about him, by the way. If he thinks something sounds fun, he just does it.

When he was here a few days ago, he was telling me about his adventures in Taiwan and Thailand with his GF. Each day, they had a plan, but then they changed it on a whim if something else looked better. I remembered that from when we went to Taiwan together, and it was a nightmare for me.

I digress.

I tend to stick to my routines, and they work until they don’t. One big example is my sleep. I have always had shitty sleep, starting from when I was a kid. When I was six or seven, my mother would put me to bed at seven or eight, and I would put a t-shirt in the crack under the door so I could read until midnight. I have always liked the night better than the day.

When I went to college, I could not go to bed until 3:30 a.m, even though I had a class that was a quarter to eight in the morning. I would get up at 7:30 a.m. and race to class. I was so sleep-deprived that I could not find my portable alarm clock one morning. I looked for it for five minutes, and it was nowhere to be found.


Continue Reading

More about health and identity

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I am musing more about health, gender, and how I wish the world would be. Here is my post from yesterday in which I wrote about why I opted out of the ‘woman’ label–reluctantly and with some regret. As I said, in my previous post, I have no problems with the label itself or being called a woman in an ideal world.

Alas, we do not live in an ideal world, especially not now. And I am not a material girl living in a material world.

I want to be totally honest this post. I do not understand gender and why people are so wedded to it. This is not me saying I don’t believe that most people are very wedded to their gender–I know they are. I am just not one of those people. I wish we could just not talk about it, but I realize that this is not realistic.

In this society (and maybe others, but I cannot speak to that), we place so much emphasis on gender. It’s baked into so many things that even the mildest push back is considered radical, disruptive, and threatening.

Seriously. I cannot say how shocked I was at the pushback I’ve gotten from supposedly feminist women for…not wearing a bra. For quietly deciding not to have children. For stating the fact that calling someone by the wrong gendered ttitle is misgendering. For simply saying I’m agender. All of these in a very bland way because I know better than to be at all positive about it. Or for saying I don’t use pronouns.

I’m constantly reminded that me quietly living my life is a big shock to some people.

I mentioned this is an earlier post (I think), but I need to repeat it. Last year, I had to renew my license. When I went to the DMV to do so, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had nonbinary as a choice. They didn’t have it when I nenewed (online) four years prior (early pandemic), so I was not expecting it.

And  I didn’t choose it. Why? One, I don’t consider myself nonbinary. As I’ve said many times–if I was thirty years younger, that’s probably what I would call myself. Not because I vibe with it, but because it’s the least-worst of the options. Much like I chose bisexual, reluctantly, because there’s just no better label. Well, bi.

The biggest reason I did not choose nonbinary, though, was because I looked at the political climate around me. I knew the possibility of a repeat of the orange menace, and I knew that no matter what, the Republicans were going to make hate of queer/genderqueer people a major point of their platform. So, I swallowed hard and went back in the closet. I shut the door behind me, and sighed in sadness.


Continue Reading

Health in relation to identity

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Here’s the thing I learned from my debacle about not wanting/not having children. And this took me a decade into my thirties at least to fully suss out. I had no idea why women would be angry at me for not wanting children and being vocal about it. It’s beacuse they had bought into the societal message that they were supposed to have children and they could not tolerate anybody who indicated the lie in that statement. Because if they did,, then they would have to examine the choices they had made in their life. And they did not want to do that. Oh, they did not want to do that.

I must stress as I always do that I did not crow about it or say that anyone who wanted/had children were stupid/ignorant/out-of-pocket or anything like that. I never brought it up because I didn’t think about it except when people asked me about it. I used to explain it like this. I would never bring up not not having a dog because it was not a part of my life. Same with kids. I would never bring them up because I didn’t have them, didn’t want them, and did not have them as a part of my life.

Anyway. I was not ashamed of not having kids nor for not wanting them. I did not apologize or act as if it was a failing on my part. Because it wasn’t. That was my first step to distancing myself from being a woman, though I did not yet know it. If I was going to get so much shit from not doing my womanly duty (including from my mother, oh so much so), then I did not want to be a woman.

The bra thing is the same. Here’s my post from yesterday. Most women/AFAB people do not like wearing bras. Many wear them simply because they’re supposed to.. It’s a societal expectation, and when some people opt out, it triggers the crabs in a bucket mentality/martyr complex in others. “If I have to suffer, so do you!” It’s a terrible way to live life, but many people have that mentality.

So these oh-so-feminist and progressive women could not explain why they were so upset that some women and AFAB people did not want to wear bras. But even more so, they were upset that we weren’t apologetic about it. There were a half-dozen other women/AFAB people who unabashedly declared they would never wear a bra again without a hint of apologia in their statements.

And some women got so mad. SO MAD. Like, you would have thought we came and took their bras so they couldn’t wear them, mad. Just for saying we preferred not to wear bras or wouldn’t wear them.


Continue Reading

Talking more about gender and health

Posted on by • 0 Comments

In the last several posts, I have been musing about health. In general, yes, but also more specific aspects of it. I want to do better with my health, and I have been thinking of ways to do so without going overboard. In the last post, I was talking about how I would be OK with being called a woman if there wasn’t so much damn sexism that came with it. It’s everywhere, and while I don’t think I can escape it simply by quitting out of the gender assigned to me, I don’t want to engage with it, either.

I’m not going to get into anyone’s face about it because it’s not a hill I want to die on, but it’s just tiring to have to think about it at all. In an Ask A Manager thread I was reading, someone mentioned that it took longer for women to get ready because they had to do their makeup and dressing was more elaborate/difficult for men than women. I am not disputing that in general, but I didn’t relate to it, either. I haven’t worn makeup on a regular basis since I was in my twenties, and even then it was even more because I thought  I was supposed to than anything else.

I didn’t even try makeup until I was in my late teens. I hated it because I was allergic to everything and makeup was made of really bad shit at the time. This was nearly forty years ago. I would get rashes from it, and it would itch and make me want to take it off. when I gave it up, it was such a relief. I will fully admit that I was terrible at putting it on, too. Whatever girl gene (and yes that’s fully ironic) there was for putting on makeup, I did not get it at all. I looked like someone had punched me in the face whenever I tried to wear makeup, which is not a good look. Or it could just be me being self-conscious because it felt so fake.

I will say that now, knowing that my motor skills are not great, it makes a lot of sense that I had a hard time putting on makeup. You need a steady hand for that, which I did not have. I was always in fear of poking myself in the eye when putting on mascara, and I never could do it evenly.

I have read/heard so many women talk about why they feel a need to wear it, and I cannot relate to any of them. I can get them on a cognitive level, but not on a visceral one. Besides the sensation issue, I just don’t get why it would be a positive to wear makeup. Again, I’m not talking about in a social sense because I get why someone would do it for that reason, but on a personal level.

This is one of the reasosn I eschewed the ‘woman’ label. Along with wearing a bra. Which, much to my surprise, some women have very strong feelings about it being WRONG for a woman to go out in public without one. This was on a work blog, and the question was about can an AFAB person be considered professional at work if they didn’t wear a bra. They made sure to clarify that they were covering their nipples so the nipples were not poking through their shirt and they were double-covering (with blazers and such). They had taken the bra off for the pandemic (if I remember correctly) and did not want to put it back on again.

Naively, I thought that there would be a robust discussion, but that people would be ‘live and let live’ about it. These were progressive (mostly) women who declared themselves to be feminists. Yes, they may wear bras themselves, but they would probably support someone who didn’t want to wear one. Right?


Continue Reading

Gender identity, weapons, and femininity

Posted on by • 0 Comments

In talking about my health, I went way off the rails as is my wont. But, it’s related to my health in a way. Yesterday’s post was about gender identity and how I have been shunned by womanhood all my life. Here’s the reason I call myself agender for now. In an ideal world that did not care what a person did in regards to their gender, I would be fine with being labeled a woman. My issues with my body are solely societally-based and not anything to do with my body itself. I love my boobs and my ass (now that I have one!), and I’m fine with my pussy. I like having curves, and the mixture of hard and soft that is my body. I have no issues with the fact that I am not feminine at all (except for my long hair and the shape of my body, the latter which I have no control over). I have mostly masculine interests (weapons, video games, and I used to be very into sports), which bothers me not a whit. I don’t wear makeup or a bra, and I strride rather than walk.

I am more comfortable–let me put it this way. I have been mistaken on the phone for a man–well, all the time. I’m called sir, and I’m fine with that. It’s usually me calling customer service so it did not matter in the least. I have an exceptionally low voice–double alto–and I like it that way.

This is the thing. I like myself for the most part. At least the parts of me that are considered problematic for other people. I am perfectly fine with not wearing a bra, with not wearing makeup, and with being ‘masculine’. If I didn’t find the word androgynous to be stifling (basically, it’s like unisex–it means like a man. Why can’t androgynous include parts of the feminine? Fortunately, it seems to begoing more in that direction these days), I would embrace it.

Side note: This is one of my problems with the English language and the way I think. There really is juust no way for me to explain myself in the common vernacular without sounding precious/pretentious. There’s a group in America (don’t know if they’re still around) called ‘No Labels’. They tried to claim that they wanted to move away from the Republican/Democrat binary, but it was just billionaires who wanted to head an oligarchy.

I really don’t like labels, though, because none of them fit for me. Asian American? Sure, in the technical sense. My heritage is Taiwanese, and I was born in America. But I’m more American who looks Asian. Religion-wise, I’m areligious in that I just don’t give a shit. Sexuality? I would like to just say I’m queer, but that’s been coopted to mean gay. Same with BIPOC meaning black. I always preferred minority, anyway.


Continue Reading

Two steps forward, two steps back

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I was going to write about something other than health/weapons today–

By the way. I find it highly amusing that I just wrote health and weapons back to back like they are equal things. Heh. Well, in my mind, they are, of course. Weapons equal health to me–or rather, the former leads to the latter.

A friend of mine asked how I was able to learn more than one form at a time. My very dissatisfying answer was that it’s a vibe thing.. Each wepaon feels different to me so that I do’nt mix up the forms. Not even after my medical crisis. My memory is shit in general, yes. I have to relearn movements from the forms I have most recently learned. Yes. But I don’t mix up forms, which I’m very grateful for.

I mentioned in previous posts that–oh, here’s yesterday’s post. Do with it what you will. I’ve mentioned in previouus posts that I have had trouble loving the saber and the cane, separately. With the saber, it’s because I expected to be the sword–and it wasn’t.Then, when I accepted it for what it was, I grew to be fond of it. Quite fond. But I never felt passionate about it until I started doing the Cane Form with the saber.

Coincidentally, I also didn’t care much for the cane when I first learned it. I think that’s partly because the pandemic interrupted my learning of it, which made it a very fractured experience. Buut, again, it was much different than the sword–which was the benchmark for weapons in general back in the day. I judged everything by the sword, and it was not a smart thing to do. Every weapon is different, and I needed to remind myself of that whenever I got frustrated with one of the weapons.

I love the sword. It is near and dear to my heart for many reasons. One, it opened me up to something that I never would have imagined would be so important to me. I can’t imagine my life without the weapons, and it all started with my teacher’s persistence in insisting that I just hold the sword.

I can still remember the scene as clear as day. I have recounted it several times because it was so important to me. It literally changed my life, and I would not be here without it. So I’m going to tell it again.

A few years after I started taking Taiji classes from my teacher, she mentioned weapons. She said it was time for me to learn the Sword Form. I protested. Vehemently. I was a pacifist at the time, and while I wanted to learn Taiji for self-defense, I could not imagine doing anything as violent* as weapons.

*I have also ranted at length about how women and AFAB people in this culture (and my heritage culture, Taiwanese, as well–even more so, actually) are brainwashed into thinking that the worst thing we could do is dare to be angry at someone. We were supposed to be selflessly (heh. I wrote selfishly at first. Freudian slip) giving to everyone with nary a murmur of protest.

In case you can’t tell, I’m still bitter and angry about this. I’m still unpacking the damage this has done to me, and this is one way I am healing that damage. I don’t talk about it much because most people misunderstand. Whenever I mentioned it on Twitter (back when I acutally used it and it wasn’t a trash heap of shit), I would get responses from men and women that were vastly different–but equally upsetting/annoying/irritating.


Continue Reading

More on health in general, and in specific

Posted on by • 0 Comments

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.


Continue Reading

Let’s talk about health, bay-bee

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I’m going to talk more about taking care of myself. Here is the post from yesterday in which I explained why I did not care for the Instapot. I think one of the things that I have accepted about myself is that I am not going to do more than the bare minimum when it comes to feeding myself; I just am not. I am not going to cook more than pasta and premade sauce or rice and steamed veggies with rotisserie chicken from Cubs.

I wish I could find joy in cooking; I really do. It seems like something that would be great to get into, and you have a delicious result at the end. The problem is that–well, there are more than one issue with cooking for me.

One. I have so many food restrictions, and while substitutions are better now than they have ever been, it can be hard to find them in my local Cubs. And they’re more expensive than the regular items. I used to buy Lactaid cottage cheese, but for some reason, it’s not made any longer. I can’t find it at Cubs or online. I looked up recipes for something similar and easy to make. I tried it (out of tofu), and it was horrid. It did not taste like cottage cheese at all.

I knew better. Fake food items rarely taste like the real thing. They are better these days than thirty years ago, but you have to keep in mind that they are not the real thing. In other words, you have to try to appreciate them for what they are. There are some that are delicious in and of themselves, and there are some that are really close to what the original tastes like.

The one exception is cheese. Daiya is the closest I’ve found to the real thing, but I still wouldn’t eat it on its own. It has to be on something and melted. It has the right consistency and that boingy spring that cheese has when melted. Eat it on its own and cold, though? Hell, no.

I’m really grooving on the doing the Cane Form with the saber. It’s amazing how much it’s changed my feelings about both the cane and the saber. Before this, I would have put them both at the bottom of my weapons. Now, I have to say I love practicing with them. Would I put them at the top of my faves list? I wouldn’t go that far, but I have a new appreciation for them. I’m including the video of my teacher’s teacher doing it below. Yes, again, because it’s that amazing.


Continue Reading

More about health, mental and physical

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I’m writing more about health, and I’m going to try to stay on topic today. That’s probably not going to happen, but I like to have goals. Hope springs eternal and all that. Here is my post from yesterday.

I will say before I get started that I’m still working on the Cane Form with my new shiny saber. I polished up the second row (out of four) because there’s a move that I was having issues with while using the cane. It’s a simple block the leg move, but you can add a twirl to it. I like to add the twirl, but I felt as if I was doing it wrong. Watching my teacher’s teacher do it with the saber clarified what I was doing wrrong, and now I can do it with relative ease.

I gave myself a week to learn the third and fourth rows because they are a bit mor ecomplicated than the first two (especially the fourth row), but I don’t think that will be necessary. I got the third row with ease in two or three goes, and I’m optimistic about the fourth.

My god. My biceps are getting really hard. I have always been proud of my guns, and that pride has only grown now. My new saber is hefty, and it feels so good in my hand. I still don’t love the Saber Form, but I’m more positive about it than I have been in the past.

Back to health in general. I am trynig to cut down on how much I DoorDash, but it’s hard when it’s right there. In fair disclosure, I ordered tonight, but I did not feel good about it. I hate cooking. I hate it so much. There is nothing enjoyable about it to me, and if I never have to do it again, that will be way too soon.

I can do simple things like cooking pasta and throwing sauce, cheese, and veggies on it. I can bake a pizza, too, but that doesn’t mean I can make one. I have thought about going back to baking, but I’m not sure I want to do that if I’m trying to be healthier.

I think I have to go back to the basics. I can get a rotisserie chicken a week and then make salads and sandwiches to eat. Along with the pasta. These are very simple dishes, and I can throw any manner of veggies on top of them. I don’t mind eating the same food several days in a row, either. It’s just that when it’s six or seven, my lizard brain says, “Hey. I can just order from DoorDash, and it’ll be here in twenty minutes.”


Continue Reading

Let’s talk more about health in general

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Let’s talk more about health in general. Here is yesterday’s post filled with ranting and ravings about life in general. Despite my best intentions, I went off the rails as usual. Let me try to focus on the point I want to make. Which is that family dysfunction sucks. No, wait! That’s not the point I was trying to make. My point was that it’s hard to tackle health/diet without slipping back into thinking about the eating disordered thinking that my mother has exhibited all her life.

I’m trying to be healthier withouth becoming disordered. I have not been able to do this all my life, so what makes me thinkk that I can do it now?

I think it because I have fifteen years of Taiji under my belt. I think it because I still am thankful to my body for carrying me through my medical crisis–something I should not have survived. Here’s something that many people don’t know; it’s better to be ten pounds overweight than underweight if you suffer a medical crisis. I knew this before my own medical crisis, and it’s something I tell people whenever I can. I feel like a broken record, and most people don’t want to listen. It is so engrained in us that being fat is the worst thing in the world, many people can’t fathom that maybe it’s not true.

I remember several decades ago, I was listening to NPR (or MPR. I’m pretty sure it was NPR, though), and they had a doctor on. She was saying that as you got older, you should GAIN weight, not lose it. Partly for the reason I already said (it cushions your body if anything happens to it), but also for other reasons. Which I don’t quite remember. This reason, though, is the one that stuck in my head. That it’s better to gain weight as you get older to cushion your organs in case something really bad happens to them.

Anyway. I don’t like being fat. I am being truthful in saying that while I can still appreciate what my body has done for me, I don’t like how it looks. There are several reasons for that which I’m not going to get into at this moment. I’ve done it so many times in the past and that, while relevant, is not the point of this post.

I’m trying, yet again, to be healthier without falling into the trap of only carrying about being fat. I’m doing things like walking on the hour when I remember (as I mentioned yesterday). I’m trying to be more consistent with my fruits and veggies, and I think this is a good start.


Continue Reading