Living With ADHD

It's been a year and a half since I formally got diagnosed with the inattentive version of ADHD.

Prior to this I didn't have much of a sense of what ADHD really meant (associating it more with learning difficulties in school... which wasn't really a problem for me), so it took me a while to adjust to this news. 

But after spending the past year going to neurofeedback treatment + targeted approaches with my therapist (specifically Body Doubling + EMDR trauma therapy), plus now starting to look into other facets of my life I've been struggling with (sleep + physical therapy for back instability -- long story), I have a lot of thoughts now about living with the knowledge of having ADHD... and Other (see two posts ago).

First Off: What Does It Actually Mean In Practice?

Ultimately, the ADHD I have means that I struggle with Executive Dysfunction -- I have difficulties regulating my mind when it comes to thoughts and emotions.

Let me list out a number of the symptoms that plague my day to day:

- Attention Span: Probably the most obvious one given I have "Inattentive" ADHD. 

This just means I am very distractable because my brain is always chasing the next dopamine rush because I am deficient in dopamine rewards when I need it. Completing ordinary day to day errands does not give me the mental satisfaction/dopamine it gives others so I often find myself mid-errand moving on to the next thing before my current thing has finished (example: leaving a stream of things on the floor that I dropped midway into using one of those things because my mind already moved onto handling something else). 

In the long run I end up taking longer than a neurotypical person to complete a task because I was juggling 50 other to-do items I wanted to do today and context switching the whole time -- which is why my job (which my psychiatrist called "chaotic" when I described it to her) is not helping my mental life here and I frequently work extra hours to play catch up.

This doesn't mean that I can't focus my attention -- people often note that I do engage with them attentively in conversation (unless I'm frequently checking my phone, but smartphones are a whole other beast here) -- but doing so is mentally exhausting for me and I often compensate by spending a lot of time alone later. 

Rather though, I don't have control over when I want to pay attention -- and when I do pay attention, it's often hyperfocus (and I lose track of time when this happens which falls into time blindness below).

- Poor Working Memory: I compensated for this over the years with lots of note taking (because I know I will forget things), but basically if you take away my notes I am very forgetful. I often find myself walking up/down stairs to grab something only to forget midway while walking what exactly I was trying to grab and then wasting 10+ minutes trying to rack my brain to remember what it was before I sometimes move on to the rest of my day (only for me to remember what it was 4 hours later).

Also more recently, going to my email to search for something, only to IMMEDIATELY feel the subject of what it was I was looking for disappear into the ethos of my brain fog. Like my memory is a cloud I'm trying to hold onto and it's disappearing through my fingers.

Also (and friends who know me can attest to this), I misplace things in my house ALL THE TIME. Until AirTags came out I very frequently misplaced my keys. (I also had a mildly traumatic incident where I dropped my keys while picking up the mail and wasted a half hour looking for them in the bushes when I was running late to pick up friends for a show, but that was just really bad luck).

- Task Initiation: I often put together to-do lists of what I want to do today, only to immediately not do any of it because I don't feel like it today. I feel a lot of inertia trying to start something on my list that I'm not in the mood for but know that I have to do "sometime in the distant future". The only thing that literally will get me in the mood is the panic of a deadline that is impending in a few hours and then I'm subsisting off the "rush" which isn't sustainable.

Weekend transitions (Sun-Mon and Fri-Sat) are generally difficult for me as I'm usually still in either weekend mode or work mode going into either.

- Emotional Dysregulation: My therapist recently commented that this has improved for me this past year (her evidence: clearing me for EMDR trauma therapy which is only feasible when one is no longer struggling as much with emotional regulation). But basically up until recently, I was struggling with tendencies to mentally spiral and ruminate non-stop about things I had little control over -- intractable problems both at work and in my home life.

- Cognitive Inflexibility: This one goes hand in hand with the above, but I have difficulty adapting sometimes to problems and end up repeatedly doing something that doesn't work (thinking outside the box doesn't necessarily come naturally to me). 

But that said, I am very suggestible -- so if other people propose solutions for me, I can adapt to those. This is an area that has improved more with my therapist in body doubling.

- Time Blindness: This is a mixed one because people see me as someone who actually comes on time or even "early" -- but I am heavily reliant on alarms and playing tricks on myself (e.g. booking an event on my calendar earlier than the actual time so that I leave "on time") in order to accomplish this. Otherwise I'll end up doing something silly like spend an extra half hour looking up Pokemon plushies on the internet rather than leave my house at the time I intended (this literally happened today).

I generally have difficulty estimating how much time a task will actually take and I struggle a lot in this area especially when it comes to planning. And lately with the advent of AI this has only gotten worse...

- Object Blindness: "If it's out of sight, it's out of mind." I have a lot of things in my place that I forget are there and other people will notice these before me. 

This also means I can live with problems (broken things, etc) so long as I'm not actively paying attention to them.

- Internalized Shame: 

The world was made for neurotypical people. 

Other people in my life have trouble understanding why I sometimes operate the way that I do. I have spent most of my adult life being ridiculed for things like spacing out while driving, being "careless" about my possessions, constantly putting errands I don't feel like doing off until the last minute, not acting on things that should be prioritized sooner, not paying attention while someone is talking, friends asking "why are you like this?" where this means some form of being "difficult"-- 

This means that I have a lot of internalized shame over things that seem otherwise second nature to my parents and friends. These things do not come naturally to me and I have always known to some extent that I am not "normal." I have quirks. I have mental compulsions that lead me to prefer to acquire a mass collection of collectibles so I can spend hours organizing them to make my mind feel at ease rather than face the uncertainty of what exactly it is I want in life and who I want to spend my life with (to which people have told me I am "confused" over my sexual preferences).

When I think about what I have to actually do to function as an adult in society on a day to day basis, it is overwhelming and exhausting. I can only keep up with daily medicine, exercises, groceries, laundry and dishes and trash, health appointments, payments, house cleaning, remembering to eat, somehow trying to maintain a social life because "it's good to not be alone," and then on top of it my mind that won't shut up and let me sleep at night so I end up staying up for hours and am just tired the next day and next thing I know I'm sad on a couch tonight because I have no control over how my mind works.

I once had a mental breakdown over sorting mail and sat depressed in a chair for an hour before giving up and playing video games instead to make me feel better. And that only worked until I started feeling sad while playing games and the only solution was to fall asleep on accident at 8:30 PM and wake up again at midnight to mentally spiral awake in bed for 4 hours.

I make frequent to-do lists to get the nebulous chaos of my mind on paper and figure out what exactly it is I actually want to do amidst all of noise and interruptions, because every other minute I'm thinking about something else I should do that I know I'll probably forget in 30 seconds and then spend another half hour panicking about because the deadline to make it on time would've been now had I not just wasted 10 minutes looking for my hat and sunglasses because I'm paranoid about the mole in my eye developing into skin cancer and I wasn't paying attention when I misplaced them last night because work exhausted me and I forgot to respond to my coworker yesterday--

ADHD feels like a curse. I didn't really know what it was until little more than year ago, and when I told my family about my diagnosis, their first response was to tell me they didn't think I had it despite two therapists, a psychiatrist, and a team at a neuropsychology clinic telling me otherwise.

And I've spent all these years internalizing their critical voices in my head so that even when they aren't here I'm still arguing with them.

---

Anyway I'm venting a lot right now. The reality is with all of the health appointments and treatments I've done over the past year, I am trending in a better direction than I was over a year ago when I started this.

But I still have nights like tonight where I want to grieve what I experienced. Because for 35 years I had no idea and felt aimless. Putting a name to the face of this disorder has done wonders in helping me figure out what to do now, but before this I was helpless.

In trauma therapy earlier this week, I admitted to my therapist finally after 4-5 sessions working on the latest memory that I had spent all of this time rationalizing explanations for what I had experienced rather than admitting what I was feeling emotionally because I never got the support I needed to address my issues. She asked me when the last time I recalled someone in my life trying to comfort me in this area and I realized I could not remember. Instead, I've been trying to comfort myself with explanations making excuses for the people in my life I depended on because nothing else had worked. 

And I've been sad for a long time.

(journal from 10 years ago: God didn't answer me so I realized I had to dig myself out of this trench myself)

I want to move on with my life already and fix things, but emotionally I don't thing I've let myself grieve fully yet. I just keep asking myself how long the sadness will continue because it feels endless sometimes. And I feel shame over even feeling sad in the first place.

Anyways, I'm already past my bedtime and need to turn on the CPAP machine for my sleep issues. I didn't get around to doing my physical therapy and breathing exercises today because I needed to get these thoughts out of my head first and this 2 hour post ended up taking over my bedtime routine.

Tomorrow will be a better day. I still believe that. I'm just waiting for my emotional self to catch up and reach out to the hand I've been trying to extend to it.

Post-Deconstruction

Some thoughts on why I left the church.

Note that this isn't a research paper and I am citing a lot of information from memory years after when I studied these things, so (in ironic fashion considering some of the topics I cover here) my recollection here may not be entirely exact on some details, etc.

---

I grew up going to a nondenominational church (which basically means Protestant with some Baptist flavoring) + its associated private Christian school for the first 8 years of my school life. We were expected to memorize a different Bible verse every week, attend chapel on Fridays, had a class dedicated to studying Biblical stories, and so on.

Growing up in that kind of environment, you end up coming to assume that your experience is "normal." I can imagine it sharing a lot in common with more conservative environments in the US that have internalized this experience as a part of their culture. It is also completely different from the experience of church I had in my college days.

I had a bit of a temporary break from regular church attendance when I switched to a public high school, but I always had an underlying intent to return, which I ended up doing in college when I found out a few dorm-mates were attending a church a bus ride away on Sundays. This eventually led me to join Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, a parachurch (multidenominational) organization attended by other college students on campus (one of several Christian groups on campus, actually).

IV challenged me to think about religious experience in a way completely different from what I had learned growing up. Church was less a (uniquely American) cultural experience and more an actual spiritual experience one pursued through genuine community and fellowship with fellow peers who were also struggling through life. 

We had weekly small groups at people's apartments that studied Bible passages in a more academic manner than I had learned in school (more akin to rote memorization). This process was called inductive Bible study, where rather than coming to the passage with prescribed interpretations, we attempt to infer meaning from reading the passage directly (akin to how one would analyze a book from the text in English class).

I actually started thinking critically about how to interpret Scripture thematically and how its messages applied to our lives. Oftentimes these themes reflected broader challenges (i.e. how does my faith tie into my life's work? what does God have to say about suffering in the world today? how do I make sense of my ethnic identity and the privileges I was born into?) and these ideas played also into the kinds of serious conversations my small group had.

If there was one thing I gained from these experiences, which continued in my post college years as I transitioned to a church in the Bay Area that included former IV members from other schools, it was that I developed high expectations for what community and relationships should look like. Through group prayers and serious talks about the problems each of us were facing in our lives, I developed the capacity to share more openly about my personal struggles with accountability partners, some of whom I am still friends with to this day. We didn't shy away from the deep stuff, even things typically seen as "taboo" in open conversations today (i.e. politics -- some of the people I met from my IV days are the most progressive and politically active people I know).

And then gradually... I started shifting away from this in my own beliefs.

---

Underneath all of this, I had always struggled with a sense of doubt about the foundation of Protestant Christianity - the Bible itself. 

My school upbringing had raised me into the tradition of Biblical literalism, which when taken at its most extreme, assumes the Earth is only around 6000 years ago because of how the numbers in Genesis add up. It assumes that because the Bible is the Word of God, it is fundamentally perfect in inception and thus every word in its text was written for a reason. This includes assumptions about how the books were written (traditions that have it that Moses wrote the first 5 books for example), the historicity of events described (Noah's ark and where it landed; Jews moving to and then fleeing Egypt generations after; everything about Jesus' life), and so on.

This leads to a branch of Christianity called apologetics that is meant to address questions and concerns people may have when reading the text... like why there are slaves in the Bible; the widespread human suffering described in the early pages (besides Genesis/Job which I've described in other posts on this blog, try reading Judges sometime); literal apparent contradictions in the timeline of Jesus's ministry and final week, and such. There are apologetic answers for all of these if you bother to look.

These answers also tend to feel a lot like they bend over backwards a lot just to justify things being "true" if you bother to think about them beyond just accepting them at face value.

I had an underlying feeling that these answers weren't sufficient to address concerns skeptics raised (as much as I wanted to believe them), so I started reading academic books about the composition and historicity of the Bible, as well as church history from the time of Jesus onward. What I learned shook me.

Traditionally ascribed authors of books weren't necessarily who they said they were. The first five books of the Bible were in themselves a messy collaboration, stitched together from multiple authors, and this can be inferred enough just from conflicting accounts of the same story in Genesis (compare chapters 1 and 2 on the details of what happens when God makes man). 

Same goes for the New Testament authors; Matthew and John for example were both part of Jesus' original 12 disciples, but the authorship of their books date many years after the earliest Gospel (Mark) and differ enough in detail that something is off in reconciling their accounts of what actually happened when the same story is told in each book (what day of the week did Jesus die, for example? Friday? Sunday?).

Dive into this further and you realize historical accuracy wasn't even necessarily the point, because authors back then didn't have historical accuracy as a concern when they wrote what they did. That in itself is a modern-day construct. Like anyone else, these authors had agendas / messages they were trying to tell, and sometimes the details mattered less than the underlying message.

Which makes sense when you think about it from a critical perspective, but goes completely against the "facts" I had learned growing up. And I'm touching the tip of the iceberg here.

I soon came to realize my whole belief system for what happened in the past in the Bible was based on an unstable foundation, on sand instead of rocks if you go back to that one parable of Jesus. My whole purpose in believing that Jesus was my Savior was founded on the assumption that the stories about him in the Bible actually happened the way they said they did. Because what is the point in believing in a Messiah who didn't exist the way I was taught he lived? What exactly was it that I am believing in?

And if I couldn't trust the Bible on these details, what else couldn't I trust? What about what it has to say (or doesn't have to say) about homosexuality?

Because deep down, I was in denial at the time... but I wasn't fully straight.

---

I started experimenting with weed around this time for unrelated reasons after a friend introduced me to it (long story), which I treated as my vice in the sense that I never could enjoy alcohol in the same way (I have something akin to an allergic reaction whenever I have alcohol).

One of the things about weed, especially when you first try it, is that it forces you to confront thoughts that you normally wouldn't want to think about, because it is incredibly difficult to hide and compartmentalize thoughts from yourself when you are high (at least in my experience). And one thing that I came to notice whenever I got high and happened to be browsing the Internet is, I couldn't stop looking at certain other guys... in an infatuated kind of way.

It got to the point where during a particularly high experience a decade ago, I had a moment where my high self told my sober self, "Dude, you're attracted to this guy."

I immediately linked this feeling I was experiencing back to an infatuation I had when I was in third grade, a similar experience where I couldn't stop looking at another boy slightly younger than me. It was the exact same feeling, and my first time ever experiencing it. My first crush was on another boy.

And I had stuffed that feeling somewhere deep into my subconscious, in denial of what it was, because the religion I had been raised into had raised me to believe that this wasn't okay. That it was a sin to be with another man, another person of the same gender as me.

And my own father had told me to vote against gay marriage when the proposition was raised in college because "marriage is between a man and a woman."

Because I was at a point where I had normalized sharing what was going on in my personal life as the "right" thing to do in my religious community, I eventually shared this experience with my small group. It was not easy. But I felt that I had to, because this was now my struggle, and I wanted my community to know.

And the moment I did, something snapped in me. I immediately stopped attending Sunday service.

It didn't help that later around this year and the next:

• InterVarsity released a controversial doctrinal policy forcing its staff to comply with a statement not affirming homosexuality, not accepting LGBT individuals in leadership positions, and forcing those who did not comply to resign within a month.

• My church started a series on reaching out to the LGBT community, but with sermons phrased in a way that felt that they were speaking more to congregation members who didn't know how to speak to LGBT individuals rather than people like me directly.

I soon came to the realization that that all of the religious organizations that I had been part of over the years were not designed nor structured for people like me. They were designed and catered to cis-gendered (straight) people who also happened to be the majority in American society. And I now felt like an outsider in the Christian church (even while my own small group still accepted me -- this was more about the broader church in America).

The fact that it even took this long (me being in my mid-to-late twenties) for me to realize this, and only because of a morally gray (as substance use tends to be treated in these circles) experience that I initiated outside of the religious context I had grown up in - that was what really got to me. The fact that there was a fundamental part of me that I was totally blind to and could not self-actualize until I started pushing the boundaries of what church had allotted for my life. (And that was just the first of many more.)

I was the good boy for most of my life, and just being that had prevented me for so long from actually growing in my adult years. I had no idea how to approach relationships because I didn't really allow myself to pursue anyone I actually had real feelings for. And even after this realization, I still haven't for years. (which I am still working through.)

---

Amidst all of this, I didn't stop attending my small group (up until it disbanded during the pandemic). Even while my faith started to erode away, and I stopped revering the Bible as truth and started seeing it as just a man-made product of its time -- I still attended weekly studies, just with a new, much more critical lens of what I was reading. 

I still actively funded a few folks I'd known from college in their ministries -- although with the justification to myself that I wasn't funding the organization so much as I was funding these individuals I believed in as people, imperfect as the efforts now felt to me. I even got asked to lead a Bible study once or twice by friends who knew full well how I now felt about the Bible (speaking of which -- I can probably still do that today with some refresher lol).

Meanwhile, American politics dovetailed into a mess intertwined with the same religious culture that I originally grew up in, and I got into arguments with my parents over it until we finally agreed to stop talking on the subject altogether to preserve our relationship. 

Even though my college spiritual experiences had taught me to value having authentic conversations and not hide things from my community, I couldn't even be transparent with my own parents, who were supposed to be fellow Christians. They couldn't understand what I was going through, and their responses often hurt me more than they helped (even though they never intended to hurt me). Church didn't prepare them for their own kid being this way.

And then as recently as a year ago, I switched from my (Christian) therapist to a new therapist who almost immediately uncovered that I had gone undiagnosed with ADHD for the first 35 years of my life. My previously therapist wasn't trained necessarily to deal with neurodivergent individuals, and I had no way of knowing otherwise until I finally decided to shop around.

(On a more petty note, I also still have random resentment about the ways in which my private Christian school actually didn't prepare me for academic rigor in public school; I nearly did not make it out of Algebra when I transitioned to public due to failing the entrance exam, until I took remedial summer school and almost immediately improved with straight A's for the rest of high school. And my parents paid a few grand+ for that private school.)

My whole life feels like a recurring sequence of events where Christian-specific organizations and culture have failed me. They did not prepare me to tackle complex questions like doubt in the face of real concerns raised by skeptics; the nature of my own sexuality; a chronic condition that has plagued my mental and personal life; and how to authentically engage living with my own family. One of my friends has told me that my experiences are literally why he wouldn't consider Christianity. 

And when I broke down deep into depression from the weight of all of this a decade ago (amidst also being laid off), it wasn't faith that saved me in the end. I eventually climbed out of this hole on my own, because at one point I had this realization that God wasn't going to answer the questions I had for him in my lifetime. He was silent in all of this, and that silence felt deafening. 

But I wasn't ready to die yet.

---

I don't know if I can ever return back to the Church personally. There is too much pain I associate with that environment and what I see there has not really improved for me at face value (my old church recently went through a scandal after its former youth pastor was arrested for child sexual abuse in the past, which did not help at all). 

My beliefs are also not really there for me to make it work, and belief, as I have learned over the years, is not something I can force, especially when all of my life experiences have taught me otherwise. I cannot ignore the reality of the failures I have experienced, how ill-equipped I felt in dealing with life's complexities until I finally left it all.

As a book written more than 2000 years ago, the Bible is unfortunately silent or not immediately clear about complex subjects that pervade American society today like the treatment of LGBT people. Yes, people will point to passages condemning homosexuality, but they often fail to understand that relationships as we understand them today were not understood in the same manner 2000 years ago. So what exactly are they condemning, and why are they condemning it? 

And even if the Bible does condemn homosexual relationships, does that justify the downstream impact of following through the implications of that, where you have this belief contributing to a spike in LGBT individuals either committing suicide or being murdered by others who feel justified in doing so? And otherwise being treated as inferior, less than human today?

Most debates around these subjects immediately become reductive and people end up talking past each other, because they fundamentally cannot agree on how to communicate or translate across conflicting value systems. We are living in entirely different worlds, different realities, within the same nation and space.

I fundamentally do not think that church prepares people to deal with these kinds of complexities in adult life in an adequate and fulfilling way, especially for people who are born not fully straight as I am. At its core, I think the fundamental structure of American Christianity, designed around Sunday experiences where attendees go to have a message spoken at them rather than engage with a speaker in dialogue and challenge them back, is not designed nor equipped for this.

The church is often decades behind where societal discourse is at, and in America's case, American culture is a huge contributing factor to this. Many Christians in America make the mistake of conflating their religion with their culture and assuming the two are the same thing, that an attack on the mistakes in their culture is an attack on their personal identity and values. 

I regularly saw people in my Christian circles over the years who struggled to figure out how to talk to non-Christians, the people who they were supposed to reach out to, because they could not figure out how to relate to people outside of their own insular church communities. They fell into the same in-group and out-group dynamics that define American politics and all of its shortcomings today.

Church leaders in America often do not realize that they are making the same mistakes the Pharisees did in Jesus' day of gatekeeping what it means to be pious and religious, and the messages of the Bible are ironically lost on them while they go about using the Bible to justify telling people how to treat others who do not fit into their communities due to differences of opinion, belief, looks, upbringing, identity, what have you.

Finding a church community should not have to feel like having to wade through field of landmines, where I feel at risk of stepping on a bomb that could literally kill me for simply trying to be authentic and not lie to myself about who I am.

People can use the argument of God working through imperfect individuals and structures all they want, but what does that even mean when I can find much better, safer spaces for community that support LGBT people outside of the church itself? Where I don't have to literally die before I can even learn how to live?

The reality of the matter is, if God were really truly working in these organizations, I would have expected better by now. So I left, and haven't looked back since.

---

And here I am today, years later. For whatever the reason I only just now feel capable of writing this out, after a dry writing spell, and a conversation I had with someone from my college years just last week, where that person told me they still see God working in me through all of this, even if I don't see it myself.

And she is the third Christian who has told me this since I went through these experiences and shared with people; one of the others even said they felt this was the real God working in me, as opposed to the exact opposite I have been calling out in churches up till now.

I told her this and we were both at a loss at what to do with that knowledge.

I am struck by a question she asked me in response - what do I consider my anchor today, if I have one? One of the side effects of leaving the church is it can leave you feeling aimless, unclear on where to go, when most of your life you have felt God be that anchor.

I don't remember exactly what I said, but she took my attempts to figure this out for myself to mean that my anchor is the process I go through in figuring out what it means to be authentic and true to who I am. It means having to wrestle and confront uncomfortable truths when I would very much rather be doing other things.

It means not settling for conventional explanations that the cultures I have been part of have used and not taking these institutions at face value. "For you will know them by the fruits of their labor." (The literary Jesus had it right all along.)

I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life after all of this, picking up the pieces of three decades worth of shattered expectations of what I should be doing according to my upbringing. I wouldn't wish what I went through on anyone... but I also wouldn't change anything about it, in retrospect.

It feels scary in many ways, to not know and not have a sense of direction and feel lost in a cloud of haze and fog. 

But I can still hope. And hope is all we have.

Revisit

Preface

It's been 5 years.

I've tried coming back to this blog and writing up something new a few times since the last post, but those attempts never really panned out for some reason. 

These days, it feels a lot harder for me to write for myself than it used to. I'm usually either not in the mood, too tired from work, or too... 

...whatever about my thoughts, which I don't hold in the same regard as I used to. I used to operate in a manner where I actually wanted to document every little thought I had, because I liked keeping track of where my thoughts went and I tend to forget a lot when I don't document things. 

But since the pandemic (or arguably in the years leading up to it),  I stopped valuing my thoughts as much. You may notice it in the more serious posts leading up to the last entry before this, but those posts were starting to become too heavy for me. I don't enjoy coming back to them. 

I also feel like a different person today than the person who wrote them. 

It feels weird re-reading my older writings. I remember the feelings I had when I wrote them at the time, but I'm also relying on memories of those feelings and not the feelings themselves, which I no longer feel so strongly. In a way, I feel very detached from the thoughts I had then, which used to mean something more to me.

And I don't know if I like that or not.

I would say I'm much happier, much lighter today than I was in the past. The scars are still there, but they're less obvious to most people who interact with me unless you know my history. And it's not something I bring up most of the time these days anyway.

But I do miss the intensity of my feelings sometimes. Which may seem like an odd thing to say, but if you know... you know. (just kidding)

All I mean to say is though, the depths of my pains were also some of the moments where I felt the most alive in the past. These days, I'm still alive, but I also feel more muted in comparison. It's ultimately better for me in the long run, more sustainable, but what it means to feel "alive" is different to me now, I guess.

So with that said, let me try to recap a bit.

The Past Few Years

The process of trying to figure out my career, sexuality, faith, politics, and relationship with my family and friends led to me having a mental breakdown when I was 27 and a multi-year long battle with depression that I believe only really ended with the eventual return from the pandemic. 

I believe my breakdown fundamentally stemmed from me feeling unable to live up to the values instilled in me by my upbringing, which were in conflict with the values I had developed from my own life experiences. I felt like I was trying to please everyone when everyone was giving me conflicting advice, and I could not handle the knowledge that I was going to fail people in my life.

Two years after the fact, I had another quake in my life that I am not inclined to describe in more detail here, except to say that it fundamentally changed how I see relationships (whether I wanted it to or not). I still enjoy the presence of other people, but I also tend to see myself as equidistant in some way to everyone, even the people I am close to. 

About a year ago, as I was finally coming out of my nearly decade-long depressive slump, I decided to change therapists, in part because of an off-hand comment that was made one time suggesting that I might be on the spectrum (to my friend replied, "you've been seeing him for 8 years and he's only telling you this now??")

So I switched to my friend's therapist on his recommendation. Within the first session I was recommended to see a psychiatrist, which after two inconclusive sessions led to a $10K assessment at a Neuropsychology clinic where I finally got diagnosed with Inattentive ADHD... + Other. Other in this case meaning having unspecified subthreshold symptoms of autism without actually having autism. One of those symptoms being the fact that I like to spent inordinate hours of my day writing to-do lists without actually doing them.

Apparently from assessments, I'm relatively high in intelligence, which means I'm also good at masking my symptoms, which is why this slipped under the radar until I turned 35. But high stress at my job was really starting to expose cracks that bled into my personal life.

As my current therapist puts it, I didn't really have the support system to address my needs as a neurodivergent (ADHD+) person for decades. I've bled into more of a caretaker role with my family (which is half-disabled) over the years, and a lot of the underlying things I struggle with in my day-to-day were often treated as personal failings (i.e. "Ryan is careless") with both family + peers, which led me to internalize a lot of shame as an adult. 

I spent more than 17 years of my adult life not feeling like an adult, and also feeling incapable of learning how to become more like one. I had this life-long feeling that something was fundamentally wrong with me, and wondering why I struggled with issues that other people in my life seemed to have no problem with. 

I feel like everyday chores and adult skills do not come naturally to me at all, and that I do not have the physical intuition to figure things out for myself without someone else showing me how first (and even when they do show me, if it requires lots of intermediate steps, I forget very easily unless I turn it into muscle memory). I often tell people that you should assume I will break something if it is a physical object that requires being careful when handling. I am accustomed to seeing other people maneuver around me to accommodate certain things like me not paying attention to my surroundings, and while I am not totally oblivious to what they are doing, I have a kind of learned helplessness about it.

From all outer appearances though, I'm actually doing quite well for myself (at least financially and career-wise)... so why am I so bothered by the littlest of things like how to measure how many cups of hot chocolate it takes to make for a party when the container is listed in fluid ounces, and now I'm beating myself up over not being able to do basic complex mental math with unit conversion because my short term memory is shit handicapped by my ADHD impairing my attention?

(I also spent a half hour trying to reattach a cap to a shampoo bottle which resulted in me breaking the cap and substituting it with a completely mismatched bottle cap that stares back at me hauntingly everyday.)

So anyway, after all of the above happened, I went back to my psychiatrist and decided I didn't want to do drugs for now (would have worn off as soon as I stopped taking them), and instead opted for this much more expensive option called neurofeedback, which entails my sitting in front of a laptop watching Netflix while wearing a cap wired to an amplifier that sends EEG signals from my brain to the computer and makes the screen go brighter/dimmer depending on what signals the treatment program is looking to amplify/discourage. It operates under the idea that my ADHD is leading to neurotypical neural pathways in my brain not functioning the way they should (some combination of too fast and too slow), and is trying to course correct them over time.

It sounds like a lot of hokey to be honest (I honestly was skeptical), but I think studies have shown that Inattentive ADHD is one of the areas where this has the most efficacy, and I am starting to see some apparent improvements in my day-to-day, so fingers crossed this actually helps in the long run. My therapist has also noted more recently that I'm not struggling with executive dysfunction lately in ways that I did originally when we started talking.

So I have some hope that things will get better. Just a bit of a lament at how long it took me to get here.

Current

On a much less serious note, I'm trying to prepare for several back-to-back trips happening this coming week (Yosemite-London-Amsterdam-NYC) and instead of preparing for those trips directly (aka packing), I've been agonizing over which Broadway show I'm going to give up seeing on this trip due to lack of time and writing this post.

The shows I'm seeing are the main highlight for me; I'm trying to cram 13 over this trip lol. 

What I'm most excited for:

• the new Mischief play (Comedy About Spies) as I'm a huge fan of the other Goes Wrong shows for their British slapstick humor
• Jonathan Bailey performing live again in Richard II (last time I saw him was 2018 in Company in London)
• Benjamin Button on West End, which feels like they took the original Fitzgerald short story and replanted it in a Cornish folk village with Come From Away vibes
• Oh Mary!, a dark comedy play about the wife of Abraham Lincoln (the premise drew me in immediately)
• Old Friends, a revue of Stephen Sondheim (my favorite Broadway lyricist/composer) with Lea Salonga and Bernadette Peters
• Jeremy Jordan yodeling in Floyd Collins
• Nicole Scherzinger in the noir inspired Sunset Boulevard (I watched the original film with William Holden and Gloria Swanson a decade ago)
• Dead Outlaw, a Western by the composer of Band's Visit (and feels completely different/new)
• Sarah Snook in Dorian Gray, apparently like no other theater experience
• Audra in Gypsy. the only musical I was already familiar with on this trip, but looking forward to seeing her take in person (I've already been streaming the soundtrack...)
• Maybe Happy Ending (well really for Dez Duron's singing <3)
• Pirates of Penzance with David Hyde Pierce, looking forward to the camp in this one

for next time (likely September+ at the current rate...)

• I wound up giving up on Operation Mincemeat this trip, but will likely return sooner than later this year because I already spoiled myself on Dear Bill and need to see it live (edit: wound up seeing Mincemeat instead of Gypsy)
• the new immersive Phantom-themed Masquerade
• Heathers coming back to NYC
• maybe Little Shop of Horrors finally

Gaming Log

Currently playing (a lot because I have a short attention span these days):

- Disco Elysium:
For whatever the reason I start experiencing "game fatigue" an hour into this but I'm still interested in continuing. I just need to take breaks in between sessions I guess.

I think I'm used to games where you (eventually) are able to do almost everything and playing through a game that actively limits your options over time (due to specializing in specific playstyles/character development) is contrary to what I want out of a game I guess. Not to say that this is bad; it's meant to encourage replays, like say consider how different it would be to experience the story as a stupid character rather than a smart one. (Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines lets you play as an insane character which upped the ante a bit.)

Also some of the dialogue options make me wonder if I'm supposed to be playing as an insane character to begin with. I think I'm not used to having such wacky conversation options and it's great-- although I'm mostly playing the safer options for now. I tend to prefer being straightforward the first time through and then pushing the limits later, although sometimes I feel like I should try to go off even if it means antagonizing the person I'm talking to right now.

- Pokemon Sword:
I bought this used (couldn't justify new lol) mainly because I was just in a Pokemon mood again finally. I have a long list of complaints of course, but just trying to collect whatever Pokemon is available (like all of the G-Max forms which I just did in like 2 days) isn't that bad of an experience in itself. I'm tentatively looking forward to the DLC but also waiting on reviews first.

It's just disappointing thinking of what this could've been and what we got instead. The Wild Area is a nice concept but the execution feels... lacking (especially playing online).

- Dragon Quest III / VIII:
To be honest, I can't really decide if I want to play through these one at a time or just try to play both + XI simultaneously because I don't have the patience to wait to play games anymore lol.
I feel prone to getting lost easily in 3 so I end up resorting to a guide sometimes just to figure out where I'm going. The old-school-ness is nice but also making me want to just play 11 now and get the modern-day treatment of things already.

- Persona 3 FES:
I want to finally finish this after more than a decade but it's sooo hard to go back from the glamour /quality of life changes from 5. I would say they should remake this again (properly with P3P's female route integrated) but then again I don't want to replay through the first half year of this game again.

- The Witcher 3:
I only have a few hours left in this apparently but I need to motivate myself to reconnect my PS4 controller to my PC first lol.

- FF7 Remake:
The gameplay is fun but I'm put off by the extra story padding. Sephiroth has no business showing up as early as he does in this and it makes the story feel inconsistently paced / I daresay incoherent (the original was pretty straightforward in comparison).

- Night in the Woods:
I had to take a break because the first hour was starting to make me feel depressed. Mae's disconnect with her hometown after recent life changes was bringing back too many memories. But I do want to get back to this.

- Crusader Kings 2:
...let me spend a few hours trying to figure out the UI for this game first.

Sequel backlog:
- Suikoden 2
- Grandia 2
- Digital Devil Saga 2 (last time I played this was literally when I started my first job)
- Broken Sword 2 / 5
- Mass Effect 2 / 3 (...maybe)

Regular backlog:
- Celeste (might be a while as I'm still traumatized by that Hollow Knight endgame)
- Kentucky Route Zero
- What Remains of Edith Finch
- Thimbleweed Park (I feel like I should revisit some of the Lucasarts games I missed though)
- Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon -> Mystery of the Emblem (because why not go backwards)
- Baldur's Gate 1-2 (in anticipation of 3)
- Arcanum (if I can remember what I was doing, I think I might've hacked the game at one point lol)

Coming soon backlog:
- The Outer Wilds (Steam release)
- FF XIV (I might actually try this out once the patch that streamlines more of the early quests comes out)
- FF Crystal Chronicles Remastered (finally!!)
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Twin Mirror

Closure

This is something that’s been off and on my mind for a long time now.

When I was younger (say... high school-ish), I had this idealized vision of myself as someone who could befriend or talk to anyone. Didn’t matter where they came from or what they were dealing with at the moment; we could just talk and maybe have a meaningful relationship out of it.

This self-imposed ideal persisted through college, particularly in my first year in the dorms. People who knew me then have told me that I seemed to be on top of things and was pretty social, and the room I shared with my roommate was a regular hangout place for people on our floor— and our RA who literally lived next door had to come in and tell us to shut up quite a bit (before joining us anyway).

When I look back on this time after the fact, though, there were a number of people who I tried to be friends with where things didn’t really work out. I was honestly pretty new to the whole business of having a social life (or rather, having meaningful relationships that wasn’t regimented by just school and having a curfew and parents nagging everyday), which meant that it was a lot easier for me to overstep people’s boundaries and personal spaces without fully realizing it. 

I found out years later that there were people I had interacted with who apparently didn’t like me “at all” or felt that we had nothing in common, despite my persistent attempts to be social and hang out with them. And it’s not that I didn’t notice the social cues they were giving me (because when I think about it in retrospect, they definitely gave them)— I just flat out ignored or didn’t consider them at the time... including one off-putting moment where someone literally said “fuck you” to my face for no apparent reason (or at least from what I remember; I was just trying to say hi).

And then there were other people who didn’t stop me from talking to them persay, but often gave me the impression of having one-sided conversations where it was mostly just me talking— and if you know me well, you know that I can kind of be an open book about my life sometimes. This didn’t stop me from trying to talk to them, ironically— but it did feel unsettling, especially when I would try to ask them personal questions as a way of reciprocating and got either vague or shallow responses. 

Unfortunately, even though I didn’t immediately pick up on what these interactions really meant, I wasn’t dense enough to not notice them. I was aware that there was a disconnect between the idealized view of a friendship that I had and the reality of these “friendships” that I was experiencing. 

Not that I didn’t have good friendships in my life— because I did end up with those as well— but for some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about the ones who I never got to the same level with. It progressed to the point where even if I wasn’t consciously thinking about it, I’d sometimes have these disorienting dreams at night out of nowhere, where I’d be hanging out with someone who I hadn’t seen in a long time and then I’d wake up sad in the morning when I realized that this person I was hanging out with only existed in my imagination. I didn’t know them for who they really were now in real life.

I wasn’t fully aware of this at first, but I eventually started to collect moments in the back of my mind where people didn’t fully confide in me, or clearly showed a preference for others who I also considered friends. This turned into an insecurity about my own inability to really connect with people who I’d known for years, which got worse after college as I started to notice others who would show up later (on the order of months-to-years) and seem to immediately fit in much better with these people than I ever had.

In the process, I developed a really unhealthy self-critical view of myself. I would often wonder, is there something wrong with me? Am I too much for people? Do I make them feel uncomfortable? Am I a burden?

And then the few times when someone did call me out for something I actually did wrong, I’d immediately fall into an endless pit of self-loathing: I’m such a terrible friend. I don’t think or do enough for other people. I’m just not fit for these people. I’m just doing this for my own self-gratification because I want to be known for who I’m friends with. I'm not thankful enough for the friends I already have.

It’s taken me almost over a decade to finally come to terms with this (somewhat, anyway). I’ve had the benefit of many therapy sessions and long talks with real friends over the past few years to realize that this isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about my self-worth at all, and that I’m not the terrible person that I thought I was.

The reality is that in real life, sometimes things just don’t work out the way you want them to. Not everyone you meet will immediately connect with you, and in many cases they never will. Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing and not being in the right place— physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, what have you— even if it might have worked out under different circumstances. It sucks, but it happens, and it’s just something that you have to learn to live with. And you’re not the only one who experiences this sense of disappointment.

The other side of this, though, is that even with my knowing all of this consciously, there’s a part of me that probably will never really get over what happened in the past. I’ve tried, honestly. But I can’t always control the feelings that come up sometimes, especially when I come across things that remind me of the past. Why else am I writing this whole thing out right now?

There’s a part of me that wishes I could apologize for the mistakes I made, in some cases to people who I probably will never see again (unless by accident or coincidence, but even then it’s not like this subject would ever come up realistically speaking). It’s the part that wishes that we could have resolved this directly, face to face, rather than all that time spent avoiding the issue and second-guessing intentions. The part that wishes that I could have told them, “It’s okay if you don't want to be friends. I’ll understand.”

In all likelihood they’ve probably moved on with their lives. The only reason I haven’t fully is because this is an area, for me personally, that never really had closure. And I realize that having closure for me here means having certain knowledge of what the other parties in this really think about all of the above, because most of what I’ve described has been coming from my own memories and thoughts. It became the most clear to me the other day when, after yet another long day of this topic lingering over my head, I caught myself thinking, “I wish they’d just tell me how they really felt."

Maybe this was really an non-issue all along and I’ve just been overthinking (as I am prone to do) my relationships the entire time. Or maybe what I’ve said has some merit. Or maybe I should’ve just picked up on whatever negative social cues I got in the first place and moved on with my life already.

The point of this all is, I just don’t like living with uncertainty. But I recognize that it’s human to not like living with uncertainty, even though it’s something that happens in life all the time. And these people who I’ve been thinking of over the years don’t really owe me anything.

I just have to learn to live with that.

(I mostly wrote this just to give myself closure.) 

Lists Redux

1. I can't keep track of messaging apps.

- Hangouts (default for friends who have my gmail)
- iMessage (coworkers, family, and random friends who have my iPhone number)
- Android Messages (friends who have my personal number)
- FB messenger (Hilgard friends)
- Discord (now for ex-Cisco friends... and Pokemon Go lol)
- LINE (elementary school friends)
- Whatsapp (extended family)
- Slack (coworkers)

2. Mood.

- Trails of Cold Steel 3+
- finish at least one more route of Fire Emblem: Three Houses
- start booking stuff for family trips (Italy, South America)
- finish The Witcher 3 (not including DLC for now)
- revisit Dragonball (original -> Z -> Super)
- Yu Yu Hakusho
- finish some books (Left Hand of Darkness; The Dark Forest; and Blood, Sweat, and Pixels to start)

3. Comforts.

media:
- the Chrono series (always)
- Kiseki (all the Trails games)
- Ducktales (+ all things Donald Duck)
- Ghibli music (Nausicaa, Porco Rosso, and Castle in the Sky)
- Tintin (Secret of the Unicorn, Land of Black Gold, Castafiore Emerald)
- Edutainment (Humongous games, Carmen Sandiego, Magic School Bus, and museum exhibits)
- World History (Ancient Mediterranean; all of China + Southeast Asia; early modern Europe, Japan, and South America)
- Astrophysics

activities:
- Japanese food (unfortunately all the good Indonesian places in the Bay are closing :/)
- Philz Coffee on Saturday mornings
- Listening to Falcom music and songs from musicals on repeat
- Books and browsing used bookstores
- Making hypothetical Pokemon teams
- Collecting things (current obsession: PS4/Switch steelbooks)
- Making lists like this post

-

Another months old post. But in light of mentally sick days like today, it still feels relevant.

The last five years have probably been the most emotionally difficult times of my life.

I think back to that time in college (...10 years ago) when I had a mental breakdown over my academic failings in sophomore year. I thought I was going to fail a class and not make it into the major I'd been working towards getting into, and at some point I started behaving erratically-- but that's another story documented in much older (though less comprehensible) posts on this blog.

But anyway, the point being: back then, that felt like the worst I could get. Even several years into working at my last job, I remembered recounting that time period to Kuai as it still felt like an old wound that ached sometimes, and he had more of a "that's it?" kind of reaction to it. All that over grades?

Yes, it was the first time in my adult life that I had let others see me cry in public... which hasn't happened since (although a couple of incidents have come close).

Yes, it was the first time I had seriously felt challenged in my identity-- which up until that point had been focused on academics-- to the point where it quite literally broke me mentally.
(I mean, I fucking hallucinated a lion in the streets of Berkeley. Or at least Ryan says I did.)

But still, anxiety inducing as it is, school is school. In retrospect now, that time period feels like a bygone era, and it feels weird to even try to remember what it felt like anymore. Or why something like that could feel as traumatic as it did.

Though actually, when I think about it now, it wasn't really the grade situation that hurt me so much. I mean it did at the time for sure, but that's not why I still felt a wound from it years after the fact.

It was really more the experience of knowing that I could be broken. That I was capable of behaving erratically and doing things that no one, including myself, could really understand. That some part of me was, and still is to this day, dysfunctional.

Because ever since that time, I've always felt a little... unhinged, for lack of a better term.

I don’t know how exactly to explain it, except that it sometimes lingers in the back of my mind in my interactions with people— particularly the negative or otherwise ambiguously neutral ones, resulting in hypothetical make-up conversations that tend to reverberate in my mind for days, in some cases years after the fact, to the point where I have days where I'm basically not functional because I can't take my mind off of it.

It recurs in the dreams I have with people who I haven’t talked to in years; imaginary people really, because I know nothing about the kind of person they are now, and in retrospect barely knew the person that they used to be. And then I get irritated because I hardly think about these people ever except in my dreams, because I thought I had gotten over them.

It emerges in my tendency to arbitrarily isolate myself the moment I notice someone I might accidentally run into. If you happen to see me approaching and notice that I abruptly turn in a different direction (as much as I try not to be noticed), opposite of conventional wisdom, just know that it’s because of me— not you. Considering that I even do this to my friends sometimes.

It returns in the moments where I’m reminded of my own inability to fully fit in. The awkwardness of running into friends and old acquaintances who wonder where I’ve been all of these years. The events and message threads that I find out about accidentally after the fact (which feels even more offputting when they try to hide it). The group dynamics where I end up observing rather than participating, because I don't really have anything meaningful to say to these people other than to express whatever amusement I get from simply being in their presence. But most people are looking for more than just simple amusement in their relationships.

It doesn't help when I think about the past 5 years. A series of 5 (more or less; faith, work, social, family, identity) different but simultaneous quarter-life-crises at the same time, in the midst of a period of unemployment coupled with crippling depression. A season of antidepressants that dulled what feelings and emotions I had. Another year of on-and-off again frequent mood swings that killed my desire to initiate or maintain consistent social connections, with aftereffects that I still feel today. And then last year, the experience of which still makes me feel bitter sometimes.

It feels difficult trying to connect with people these days, because I always feel like there's something hidden underneath the present moment that's being left unsaid, and I'm the type of person who prefers being open and upfront about things, or at least whenever I feel comfortable enough to do so.

Maybe I'm being too self-conscious of my own history and the weight that I still feel like I carry around even now, and I don't want to make things awkward for people. Maybe I just don't want to come off as being too negative or pessimistic even though my personality just is that way sometimes. Maybe it's just certain moments, particularly those when I'm being too self-absorbed in my thoughts at the same time to really keep paying attention, which still happens a lot these days.

That said, I wish I could talk more openly about the experiences I've gone through, because they've become a part of me and helped shape me into the person that I am today... the person writing this here right now.

But I don't always feel capable of doing so. It feels like a lot to ask or expect people who I don't know as well to be willing enough to listen. Most of the time I get the sense that the people who I wish I could be closer to just aren't interested enough. Or even with those who could or I know would be interested, it just doesn't feel like the right moment for it, but I don't know when the right moment is or if that day will ever come. Maybe some things are just better left unsaid... even with your closest friends.

At what point do you just message someone out of the blue, ask them to talk about something important to you just because, even though there's nothing specific or even particular with this person that's really pressing for you to do so? At what point do you stop caring about propriety and just do it because if not now, then when, ever?

I'm tired of having to be strategic about social things. I miss being spontaneous and not having to worry about giving a damn of being honest about how I feel.

I wish I could just be myself sometimes, even in my disappointments.

London (post-trip)

I actually wrote this within a week of my trip last November but didn't get around to posting it for mood... reasons. And now I'm in the mood again. Anyways.

People were asking me what my favorite experience in London was... and unlike usual, I actually can’t think of a favorite this time because there were too many things I liked. So I’ll settle for a list (like usual) of highlights, in random order:

Oxford:
Is it bad that I want to make the 1.5-2 trek to Oxford again just for the bookstore? (Well okay, that and the Ashmolean and Natural History museums, but still).

Seriously, the moment I walked into Blackwell’s, I realized that it was one of those bookstores that I could spend an entire day in just book browsing, and I felt sad that I had only an hour (which was already pushing it) to wander at the expense of seeing the rest of Oxford. But ugh, such good shelf arrangement. And that basement, full of book-snob quotes and maze-like walkways through books I would probably never buy but still, I was in awe the moment I saw it all. I want to go back already.

I also did a literary tour of Christ Church and the surroundings, but I have to say the real meat of what I saw related to Alice in Wonderland (which was fine since out of the authors connected to Oxford, Carroll’s works are probably my favorite of the bunch anyway). Got to see the church that C.S. Lewis preached The Weight of Glory at, which felt quite inspiring since I’d read it a while back.

The Bodleian Libraries Tour was great as well, in part due to the British humor of the guide we had that day.

(“The men lost. The women lost. Even the goat lost.”)

(“I told my son I had a smoke with Sir Ian McKellen. He handed the phone over to his wife and said ‘Mom’s been smoking again.’”)

(“They filmed X-men here [at the library]. X-men. Can you believe it? And not only that, but Transformers, too. [to two boys:] Do you like Transformers?”)

And lastly, fish and chips done right, from the pub that Bill Clinton famously “didn’t inhale” at. Possibly among the best chips I’ve ever had in my life. Apparently the secret is to triple fry them. Who knew.

Company:
Never would I have imagined that a gender-bent version of a musical would turn out to be my favorite rendition of it. And I may be gender-biased here, but particularly for the male renditions of “You Could Drive A Person Crazy” (I feel bad saying this but I finally get this song now) and “Not Getting Married Today.” What made the latter stand out for me was its examination of pre-marriage anxiety from a gay person’s perspective, which was completely new to me, and really funny to watch to boot; Jonathan Bailey practically stole the show for me with his frenetic spazzing... and his character’s deep vulnerability.

Greenwich:
Lived up to my personal hype-o-meter, even though it’s quite a bit far out from central London.

For a subject that seems kind of niche to probably anyone else, the Maritime Museum does a great job at making Britain’s maritime past interesting, accessible, and not overwhelming, with a great combination of British paintings (for the art enthusiasts), authentic relics (for the history enthusiasts), natural history exhibits (for the science enthusiasts), and technologically up-to-date and interactive experiences (for the educational technology enthusiasts— shut up I own this fully).

Pacific Encounters was probably the highlight of the main galleries, but I also really liked the animations of the explorer journeys in Tudor & Stuart Seafarers, and the art of Polar Worlds eerily reminded me of the horror works inspired by them— the likes of Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, and The Thing.

The Royal Observatory was also awesome, although the path to it is practically pitch black at night, with a treacherous uphill climb that made me wonder why I thought coming here was worth it (but it turned out I could’ve taken a shuttle from the park entrance instead >_>).

But once inside, I was wowed by the astronomy galleries and their technical, not to mention really accessible presentation—it never occurred to me how mind-blowing astronomy words appear when conveyed in sign language. That female interpreter has an awesome job. So many hand explosions.

The planetarium show made up for the sky being obscured by London clouds and light pollution; it actually was the first time I feel like I’ve seen an accessible and animated layman’s explanation of how to look for objects in the night sky: from the distinction between planets, stars, and galaxies in the sky, to the identification and placement of the Zodiac constellations, to the movement of objects in the sky throughout the night, to the zoomed-in shots of Saturn’s rings, the Moon, the rest of the solar system, and I forget what else because (I’m ashamed to admit) I was so tired from being out from 7 AM - 11 PM everyday this week that I actually fell asleep during parts of the presentation -_-“. And I had to leave early to get to my cousin’s dinner party anyway. But I definitely want to come back again when I have more time to appreciate it.

Cream tea:
I don’t care who invented it first (although I have to say I prefer the Devon over the Cornish method of preparing this), but cream tea was probably my favorite meal, so much so that I had it a second time at the British museum. Clotted cream with strawberry jam atop a plain scone served with English breakfast or Earl Grey tea, mixed with milk. Why did I not discover this combo sooner. Ugh.

English breakfast:
The ingredients for this are incredibly basic, but also comforting af. Baked beans on hash browns. Two things I hardly ever eat, but when combined together GAH I want to eat it again! Plus regular toast with butter and milk tea. Like rediscovering a long-lost friend.

Agatha Christie plays:
Witness for the Prosecution with its crazy ending.
The Mousetrap with its classic Christie setup (literally felt like watching one of her novels come to life) and amusing characters. I love Christopher Wren (obviously not the architect) especially.

Westminster Abbey:
Maybe one of the closest things I’ve had to a genuine religious experience in a long while, a bit moreso than St. Paul’s for me actually (though if you’re really into architecture, you can’t go wrong with St. Paul’s). So much history buried in between the cracks, perhaps literally given all the tombs here. The tomb of the unknown soldier. I almost cried on the spot.

The Globe:
Lady Macbeth sob-screaming into a pitch black theater was probably the most horrifying sound I’ve ever heard in a performance. This is how you do Shakespeare right.

They weren’t doing performances in the actual Globe proper, but during our tour of the outdoor theater we saw a bunch of theater students practicing on stage, though I can’t really explain what exactly it was they we rehearsing for aside from enunciating gibberish vowel sounds and practicing interpretive line dancing. Or something.

The tour itself was also great. Shakespeare apparently burned down the original Globe theater during a production of Henry VIII because he thought it was a good idea to fire a cannon into the theater from the top of the stage. And apparently there were no casualties apart from a man whose pants caught on fire, only for him to be so drunk that he attempted to put it out with beer.

Also it was perfectly normal to heckle/yell at the actors during a performance and sometimes the actors fought back, which meant that it was also perfectly normal for audience members to randomly die from fighting during the middle of a performance.

The Tintin shop:
Not super special or anything, but I’m [surprisingly late in discovering that I'm] a sucker for Tintin merchandise and this was pretty much heaven for me. I didn’t have room to fit the 37cm Snowy plushie in my suitcase, but I did buy a miniature Haddock and Thomson bust and a Marlinspike Hall notebook and I’m probably just going to order the rest online because they have a Black Friday sale this weekend...

British museum:
The I am Ashurbanipal exhibit was great as expected. My favorite part was where they took a giant relief that had a ton of not-actually-simultaneous events going on at once (this being before the age of comics) and broke down each scene by flashing lights on the reliefs themselves to highlight key characters and actions. Some of the actions that I wasn’t clear on at first glance turned out to be surprisingly brutal. But such was the ancient Middle East.

Also I like how the exhibition gift shop thought it was a good idea to sell these cute lion plushies after going through a whole exhibit about ancient Assyrians torture-killing lions for sport. Too soon.

Victoria and Albert:
The Video Games exhibit was also great as expected, though a little more sparse in content than I’m accustomed to for a museum exhibit. But I understand that even showcasing this stuff is new for museum curators and I have to commend them for even trying to document what modern-day video game culture is like.

The first set of exhibits showcased notes, concept art, and videos documenting the design process for notable games like Journey, The Last of Us, Bloodborne, Splatoon, and Kentucky Route Zero, highlighting the ways in which the process of designing a game itself is an artistic experience. The next section brought up examples from some of the more difficult subjects in the gaming community at large: violence, censorship, cultural homogeneity, racism, misogyny, and sex, although these were displayed more as a starting place for discussion than anything else.

And lastly, a video collage of social phenomenons sparked by some of the biggest games in recent memory: Minecraft, Overwatch, League of Legends, and Eve Online. As someone who enjoys games but often feels out of touch with the latest trends (since I don't have the attention span to keep up with things on twitch/discord regularly), this was nice to watch.

As for the actual museum, so many objects to look at. The presentation is eye-catching and in some ways meant to force you to really pay attention to the design and culture underlying everyday things, not just in the past (though much of the collection is indeed from the past) but even in how these objects are ordered and displayed to you now. It’s a different experience from a jack of all trades museum like the Met or a pure history museum like the British museum or a pure art museum like most other big museums. It feels special. And of course I wish I had more time to actually pay attention to the little things I was seeing because I honestly didn’t have time to pay attention to everything.

Tate Britain:
Was here mainly for two things, both of which I LOVED:
The Edmund Burke Jones exhibition: which made me realize how much I really like the art of the Romantic era, and particularly the pre-Raphaelites and their refreshing treatment (after all those Medieval and Renaissance rooms, anyway) of classic art subjects like the Bible and Greek mythology. Plus a dose of Arthurian legends and fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty. I’m just glad that actually let us take pictures for most of the exhibit.

Other Romantic era British painters, or namely Turner, Constable, and Blake: I’ve had a thing for Turner’s paintings ever since being introduced to him from a DeYoung exhibition a few years back, and Tate Britain happens to have the largest single collection of his paintings in a museum which was great, some of which I actually remembered seeing at the DeYoung exhibit previously. The other artists don’t have as many paintings there per say, but what they did have was good as it is. I need me some more Blake in particular, cause I really like his stylistic (and sometimes morbid) approach to the Bible and related subjects.

The Tower of London:
So much gruesome (and silver linings) history in one place. The twilight tour was nice in that the campus itself is closed to the public so your group has exclusive access to the area, although you don’t really get to see inside most of the buildings like you would during the day. But this gives a pretty good overview/introduction to all of the important parts of the Tower, with enough historical coverage to understand what happened here and who/what else to look up later (note: Guy Fawkes, Sir Walter Raleigh). Our yeoman tour guides were pretty funny too.

The British Library:
I love looking at old books. The main collection here covers an extensive overview of how mankind has kept knowledge since at least the Dark Ages, with some bonus showings from Michael Palin/Monty Python and the Beatles-- two British pop culture groups that were foundational for me growing up. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms exhibition basically educated me on how British history actually does exist before William the Conqueror (woops), and of course, Beowulf!

St. John’s Bread and Wine:
Duck foie gras toast. omg.
Unfortunately they didn’t have the bone marrow on the day I finally went for this, so I have to come back again.

Afternoon tea at Fort Mason’s:
The $70 high tea experience was worth it if only for the truffle mushroom bread I had at the very beginning of this. Oh my god I wanted to cry.
Also, after having just had shitty airline tea, the tea here was amazing. I don’t usually like black tea without milk, but the raw English breakfast tea alone here was just on point. I feel like I could never find this anywhere else but in London.

John Soane museum:
This guy was clearly trying to make a statement with the way he arranged his house. That painting room trying to show off how better he was at showcasing art than the National Gallery, with hidden secret compartments that made me feel all giddy the moment they were revealed. And the model room with its huge diorama of the Pompeii archeological site at the time it was being excavated almost 200 years ago. Madman or Renaissance man, who can say.

St. Paul’s Cathedral:
I traded getting to eat pies for seeing the inside of St. Paul’s Cathedral instead, and I don’t regret it. That dome is the closest thing you’ll see to the church architecture in Italy, but it still is quite amazing in its own right. It’s crazy how well the building survived after being bombed on during WWII, having been built back on the 17th century. Christopher Wren (obviously not the Mousetrap character) was a genius.

National Portrait Gallery:
I was foolish enough to think I could combine this and the National Gallery in a single afternoon and wound up having to do this alone on a separate day. Luckily I had enough time to cover most of it.
It was nice to finally put a face to names I’d only read about before like John Donne.

Favorite portraits: Richard III, young Queen Elizabeth I, JMW Turner, Sir Walter Scott’s bust, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Beatrix Potter, Robert Scott, George V and his family, Rudyard Kipling, and I have to say, I think Charles Darwin probably had the most epic looking portrait in the museum.

Millennium Bridge:
I walked back and forth on this bridge on multiple days like the mad tourist I am.

Other notes:
I basically visited or saw a different part of London everyday on this trip, and it was kind of cool to realize how expansive and vast this city actually is.

Clerkenwell, Westminster, Covent Garden, Soho, Notting Hill, South Kensington, South Bank, Millbank, Bankside, Victoria, Bloomsbury, The City of London, King’s Cross, Spitalfields, Canary Wharf, Greenwich

London (pre-trip)

Currently Listening: Civ 6 OST - England (Atomic)

You must be somewhere in London
You must be loving your life in the rain
You must be somewhere in London
Walking Abbey Lane

I'm flying to London next week!

Okay, so this trip is kind of a big deal for me (and it's only just hitting me now lol) for a few reasons:

1. First time traveling alone internationally. Well, technically I did arrive alone in Japan for maybe a couple of hours, which is the closest feeling I've had to this, but yeah, I'll be alone for a week this time. It feels kinda late for me to be doing this, actually, but I'm glad it's finally happening.

2. I actually chose to go Thanksgiving week as part of a deal I made with my parents not to come home for Thanksgiving (which I usually do for Dad's birthday) in exchange for coming with them to Indonesia over the summer (which I didn't really want to do, but whatever it's family).

3. I've been to London before, but the last time I was there was around 7th/8th grade so I don't really remember that much of it. I asked my parents what we did back then and apparently we spent most of our time waiting for other family members and then failing to make it in time to Buckingham Palace lol.

I do vaguely recall St. Paul's Cathedral and Paddington Station, and the Tube of course, but part of me is wondering whether those memories are made up recollections and ugh I have to ask parents again. My British second-cousin also introduced me to Theme Hospital on that trip, which happens to be my favorite Sim game of all time.

4. London's (and rather, a good chunk of the UK) been high on my wishlist for years now, in part because of my love/interest in:

- British history (seriously, I spent the better part of a year reading about the War of the Roses and the Tudors and I'm still nowhere near done with that era in my history-learning bucket list)
- British literature
- Museums
- Historical sites
- Theater
- Tea and scones

---

Anyway, people are apparently surprised that I'm already complaining about not having enough time with 1 full week in London, so let me break down what I have planned and what I've already decided I don't have time for.

1. Museums
I have this travel bucket list/goal of seeing all the museums (okay, maybe not all, but at least most of the important ones) in the world, and London pretty much tops the list for me here (followed by Florence/Rome, Madrid, and then Amsterdam/Berlin/the rest of Europe because I'm saving Paris for last lol).

Museum of London
Felt it appropriate to start with an introduction to the history of the city. I did this with Chicago last time and it went pretty well, and London has even more history at that.

The British Museum
Apart from the fact that it's freaking huge, I'm really looking forward to the ongoing I am Ashurbanipal special exhibit. Past experiences at the Oriental Institute (University of Chicago) and the Met's regular collection have left me with a soft spot for ancient Middle Eastern history and this just hits the spot.

And yes, we can argue about the ethics of the British effectively showcasing stolen treasures from other countries... but I'm not planning to travel to Syria anytime in the near/distant future for obvious reasons, so I'm okay with this in this case.

Victoria and Albert Museum
Jade is in London right now and just told me today that this is now one of her favorites... so yeah, really high expectations for this one haha. Victoria and Albert is the world's largest museum about decorative arts and design, so for anyone so inclined into thinking about design, this is the place to be.

Also I can't recall the last time I saw a big museum do an entire special exhibit about Video Games... super hyped!

National Gallery
Because no trip to Europe is complete without seeing a shit-ton of European paintings. Also currently displaying the Courtauld Gallery's Impressionist works due to that one closing for renovations.

National Portrait Gallery
I never thought I'd be into looking at a bunch of portraits for hours, but then I wound up spending an entire day at the National Portrait Gallery in DC, and this is London which has even more historical figures, sooo this is a given haha.

Tate Britain / Tate Modern
Modern is usually the one that everyone talks about, but I'm actually more interested in seeing Britain simply because British paintings (pre-Raphaelites! JMW Turner! that Ophelia painting!). I'm kinda sad that they're not doing the William Blake exhibition till next year because I'd have to return at around the same time next year to see it and I've already got plans for next year...

Sir John Soane's Museum
If the website doesn't give it away, this house looks amazing. And those models! And I'm trying to squeeze in a tour here between two British Museum visits :(

British Library
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (Beowulf!) and a tribute to my favorite member of Monty Python (Michael Palin!).

National Maritime Museum
They recently renovated this with four new main exhibits, three of which cover subjects that I have had past/future obsessions with: Pacific Encounters (Captain Cook!), Polar Worlds (Robert Scott!), and Tudor and Stuart Seafarers (Francis Drake!)

Royal Observatory
I'm starting to add an astronomy requirement to all my trips now. Lbs (...thanks, Chester) but seriously, when there's an observatory, there's an opportunity to see stars.

What I had to cut:
Imperial War Museums
Not that I'm not interested in war... but this felt more appropriate for a return trip; I'm still kinda high on pre-20th century British history right now. Similar to how I'm holding off the Holocaust museum in DC for the next return trip and ugh I need to start planning that.

Natural History Museum
Think I got enough coverage/overlap from the ones in NYC / DC / Chicago / LA for now, but I'll probably see this next time.

2. Historical Sites
The Tower of London
Doing a special evening tour. I think it fits the reputation this place has haha.

Westminster Abbey
I have another soft spot for historical religious sites and also the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries.

Shakespeare's Globe Theater
Technically a reconstruction, but I've always wanted to see a Shakespeare production in its original context (see also Shows section below).

Oxford University
Doing a custom Literary Oxford walking tour with this agency. Lewis, Tolkien, Carrol, Pullman, Sayers, Eliot, aaaah!

What I had to cut:
St. Paul's Cathedral
Not open on the day I was hoping to see it and too hard to squeeze in elsewhere. :(

Churchill War Rooms
Too much extra planning involved, but I'll probably combine with the Imperial War Museums next time.

Houses of Parliament
I have to come back when I have an open Saturday >_>.

3. Shows
Company
Oooh, a gender-flipped Sondheim. And OOOH, THEY ACTUALLY DO TICK-TOCK-- sorry, the Broadway nerd in me is coming out right now.

Witness For the Prosecution
An Agatha Christie mystery in a real-life (historical) council chamber!
I'm trying to see if I can squeeze in The Mousetrap (another Christie mystery) on another night as well.

Macbeth
Macbeth happens to be one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, in part for its varied adaptations that have left an impression on me over the years:
- the interactive theater experience Sleep No More, which I previously reviewed here
- the hot Michael Fassbender version
- the creepy Kurosawa film, Throne of Blood
- the illustrated children's version from Tales From Shakespeare (I'm not sure who thought this was kid-appropriate, but it got me interested lol)

So it felt only appropriate to see this at the Globe in its original glory (including uncomfortable seats just like the old days lol). I'm just bummed that the pre-show talks were sold out already when I went to buy tickets.

What I had to cut:
RSC's Don Quixote production, but eh I still need to read the book anyway.

4. Food
I'm actually trying to make food more of a priority this time...
Not 100% committed to places yet, but here's just a sampling of what I'm looking for:

- Afternoon tea (SCONES)
- Sunday roast (with Yorkshire pudding)
- Fish and chips
- Scotch eggs
- St. John restaurant, as featured on Anthony Bourdain's show. (mm roast bone marrow...)
- also St. John's doughnuts
- British pies
- English breakfast
- Bread and butter pudding
- British Indian food (where do you think chicken tikka masala came from?)

5. Other

The Tintin Shop in Covent Garden
Because I can't find enough Tintin love in the States and FUCK I WANT THAT SNOWY PLUSHIE

Foyles Bookstore in Charing Cross
Do I even have time to go book browsing...?

6. Next time
I originally wanted to go to the UK so I could visit other parts of the country outside of London, but I'll probably have to come back in the summer when it's a bit more clear and I hopefully have more free time. Some places I had in mind:

- Bath (b/c Jane Austen)
- the Lake District (b/c Beatrix Potter)
- Yorkshire Dales (b/c the Bronte sisters)
- Glastonbury (b/c King Arthur-- okay, I know it's a medieval hoax but still)
- Stratford-Upon-Avon (b/c Shakespeare)
- Hadrian's Wall (b/c the Romans)
- Edinburgh (b/c the Scottish National Galleries. Their exhibit at the DeYoung in SF was one of my favorites.)
- Isle of Skye (b/c ugh, just google the photos)

Dead to Life

Currently Listening: The National - About Today

So you don't have a problem with solitude. But rejection hurts.

I finished cleaning most of what I set out to clean in my place that isn't papers (add at least a month for all the papers...) or in the garage (ugh) last week, with the help of some Chinese house cleaners who probably got more out of me than I could've haggled for, but whatever.

And then I sat down on my couch. And sighed. And thought to myself,

I don't know what it is I'm living for anymore.

(Usual disclaimer: I'm not suicidal. I still like living. But this is about emotional living.)

For the past while, perhaps for as long as I can remember since my depression period over a year ago, I've been feeling a deadening in my life. Like I can't seem to fully appreciate being alive as much as I used to, back when I was more optimistic about friends and relationships and other things. Like I couldn't just settle down and be... in the moment anymore. And know that I'm here.

Even now, this month, we've been doing this meditation challenge for work-- it comes with its own app (10% Happier, to which a friend said, "What, only 10%?"), with video lessons and guided meditations you can sit through, which is really helpful for someone like me who feels the need for a sense of "progression" whenever I'm doing something. But in the times where I sit down and try to pay attention to my own breathing, thoughts, and emotions for 15 minutes at a time now... I don't feel like I'm really all there even as I'm doing it.

Even when I manage to notice my background feelings and emotions and recognize that these things aren't who I am, that they don't define me, and that I can control how I respond to them in the moment, I somehow end up feeling a bit deader inside after. Like this isn't really what I signed up for, and I'm only doing this out of necessity to survive these days. I mean, sure, this'll help me manage during those ever-increasing span of days in which I find myself trapped alone in my flooded emotional world, but I don't particularly enjoy or appreciate having to do these things. I feel in some ways like I'm forcefully killing a part of my mind in this process, the part that was used to experiencing life in all its good and bad moments this way. Or maybe I'm just doing this wrong. (Or maybe I just haven't hit the lessons where they address these things yet lol.)

And then I have a moment like this past weekend, which was a brief breath of fresh air-- a moment of connection with a good friend, whose presence I hadn't been able to enjoy in a while. I mean we technically still met up for lunch once in a while, but that was always in a rushed between-work context and not so much like the older days of just being. There was always something else going on in the background preventing us from doing much else. Or perhaps preventing me more specifically.

And it suddenly reminded me of what it was I'd been missing lately. What I had felt like I'd forgotten-- what it was I used to live for back in the day. Those moments that I had assumed were no longer feasible anymore, because people in all parts of my life had started fading away for real this time. Moments where I could fully be myself in all the ways I didn't feel like I was allowed to be normally.

Because eventually I had to start respecting people's time and be less extreme and be more aware of boundaries and all the little things I hate about trying to maintain connections with people when they're no longer conveniently within reach anymore... which became even more difficult after I'd starting sinking into the sinkhole of depression and felt incapable of managing myself any longer, let alone managing connections with other people.

And then that was what started to take over my life. Assuming most of the people I wanted to see would just be busy all the time or just weren't as interested anymore. Or that I personally just didn't have the energy to engage with them again with all the emotional baggage I was carrying. And then having to rebuild new relationships from scratch after all this time had passed.

So I'd take matters into my own hands. I'd spend whole days and weekends and weeks to myself, doing the things I'd usually do when I was alone and had nothing better to do, because I always had a never-ending list of things I could be doing when no one was around: walking; catching Pokemon; museum exhibits; shows; concerts; eating out; working; cleaning; studying; games; books; other media; window shopping; looking up things to collect; planning future trips; and so on and so on. Things that had started as ways to occupy time in-between life events eventually became the event in themselves, because I had no other real end to look forward to anymore. I often felt like I was just doing these things as a way of trying to rekindle old feelings from experiences where I did feel something special in the past.

Sure, I'd still keep in touch with some friends and catch up with them in the interim, but compared to the regular flow of my life, these were just one-off moments. I'd always come away after the fact feeling at least a little disappointed, because something wouldn't work out the way I wished it would or I'd feel distant because of some pre-existing circumstance or things would end before they could even begin. And moreover, these didn't satisfy what my therapist calls a "daily shared living experience." Or you know, what most of my friends these days relegate to having with a significant other.

Which I always struggled with, because I never felt like that specifically was the mold that I was aiming for with my life. Especially not now, not with my own emotional volatility and instability stemming from my own pre-existing relationships already. People would talk to me as if a significant other would solve my issues and I'd scoff, because really, the risks that could come with an unhealthy relationship (given what I'd seen happen in my own circles), and the notion of having to be fully present for another person when I already struggled so much with myself, would just make my problems even more worse. I already feel broken inside from all of my personal issues and then on top of that my interpersonal ones, not to mention the more specific problems I've been having even more recently with some of my closest friends. But sure, just add one more fucking relationship to that equation and surely my life'll fix itself.

Add in a summer of extreme interpersonal distress in a place really close to my heart. I remembered Sarah asking me last year if I'd been exhausted from the feeling of continually being disappointed by people, and thinking I'd already hit the worst of that feeling. But of course, as with all of my past problems, it just got even worse from there. Worse than I was willing to imagine.

I don't bother asking how low my expectations can go anymore. I just don't expect anything. It's easier that way.

Days, nights of living in a daze.
Being unable to fall asleep or waking up in the middle of the night and suddenly being trapped with these thoughts again for hours until I'm dead tired again at work.
Restlessness, constantly getting up and away from my desk and people and just thinking, "I don't want to be here right now."
Tears at times when no one else could see, because I didn't feel like I could do this in public or even in front of my friends who I did see, even while at the same time wondering when someone else would finally see through my facade for once. (I apparently have a reputation for being stoic.)
Eventually debriefing with some friends and then still crying over it overnight and then the next day and then the next night, because forcing myself to be openly vulnerable and explain what I've been going through is like repeatedly taking a knife and stabbing myself in the same places again, just so people can see what kind of hell I'd been having to live with, the things that I've been wanting to forget, just so that they can finally understand for once why I've been distant for so long. If they even can understand.
But really, I can't forget if I'm still re-experiencing the impact somewhere in the back of my head continuously to this day.

And on top of that, worrying if what I'm feeling is even reasonable, only to reassured by my therapist and others that given the specific circumstances I'd experienced, my feelings are actually reasonable... but that still sucks.

Because right now, the only solution I have to avoid deadening further is to try again with a process that's already seemingly failed me multiple times. To rely again with establishing relationships when I feel like I have plenty of reasons not to. And I'll be honest, there's a part of me that fundamentally just doesn't want to trust people anymore, because that is the naturally human thing to do when forced into circumstances where people close to you break your trust.
And not just one time, but over. and over. and over again.

But the conclusion I came to in the midst of last weekend was, I don't want to live a life where I've given up on living itself, on the little things that used to inspire me and get me excited. And more specifically, the times where I felt like I could actually be more empathetic in spite of the limitations I felt that I was having in that area personally. Now that I know for sure that I'm still capable of experiencing these things just yet.

I feel like I'm on the edge of a new season of my life, starting now. Of learning to still have hope even in the midst of my greatest disappointments, and whatever I still have yet to overcome. Of not just making do with who or what I can still see, but somehow making something more out of it, even though I don't quite know what that is yet.

But maybe, for me, right now, that means learning to have patience with those who are still in my life, even when they aren't quite ready to meet me in the places where I wish I could meet them. And knowing that even if a loss does occur (as far as these things do still happen from time to time), that it's not the end for me yet either.

Maybe I'm just trying to make the most of what ultimately feels like a bittersweet feeling for me right now. I can never have exactly what I want, but at the same time it feels like this is what I need right now. Because even though I wouldn't say I'm happy currently... I think I finally know what it means to still be content.

I'm still hurting, but I'm still standing. I'm still alive. And I can finally feel it now.

And that's the best thing I could have asked for in this moment.