On coping

Currently Listening: What Lies at the End - Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia
(I just reached chapter 4 of this game and this song comes on... I like.
The final section almost reminds me of the last section of the Heimdallr theme from Trails of Cold Steel, although it doesn't actually get there or have any relation otherwise lol.)

---

I know I said I was going to do less serious posts... but psyche.
(Or as an old high school friend once wrote, "sike.")
Today was actually a decent day, but this has been on my mind for too long now.

Where to start.

I realize I haven't really been tracking the progression of my "recovery" in the past year and a half, so to speak, if you could even call it that. I have called it "learning to cope" in recent months, only not the happy kind of coping. It's really more like "meh I'm coping" if anything, because it has meant learning to accept situations that I've never really wanted to accept in the first place.

...the side effect being this ever increasing insecurity that I've been struggling with of late: the sense that my voice, or my sense of self, has no meaning or power. That I have no real agency in my life.

Well, I technically still have agency in the ways in which I can respond to situations I have no control over (until I stop trusting my mind, that is), but I don't have agency in the areas that matter to me more.

For lack of a better term, I'm sick of compromising.

The way I'm describing this so far, it makes it sound like I haven't really accepted anything yet. But really, I acknowledge that there are battles in my life that aren't worth fighting, things I want that might actually be unhealthy for me, people whose behaviors I have no control over, and dreams I have that will probably never realistically happen. I've said my peace with those things already, and I'm being purposefully vague here because I don't really have the capacity to elaborate in detail right now, nor do I really want to.

It's more that the process of "making peace" with those things has kinda drained me of a lot of the optimism I used to have. If anything, I was probably too naively optimistic about things I could do with my life in the past, and even now I still find myself having random bursts of wanting to re-initiate those things, though not as strongly as I used to.

But eventually, when situations turn and people don't live up to my apparently unrealistic expectations, I end up reinforcing behaviors and thoughts I never really wanted to have in the first place:

- "I have to keep a distance in order to protect myself."

- "It's not worth my energy or time to argue over this."

- "Just deal with it."

I never said my means of coping was healthy.

I bring up memories that have irked me in the past with multiple people in my life, situations that have actually triggered me (and God, I hate using trigger as a verb or the fact that it even applies to me), and they don't even remember saying what they said or doing what they did, so it's effectively as if the thing never happened in the first place. Or worse, they call my memory of the account into question, so it's basically as if I was getting upset over literally nothing. Then why did I get so fucking upset about it in the first place?

One person told me it's because I'm too "sensitive."

Please, learn how to empathize with and understand victims of abuse, even if you don't know anyone else personally who has experienced it, because that language is one of the worst things you can say to someone who has experienced abuse. Even if it's just "low level abuse over a long period of time," as my therapist has called it. Just like how my dysthymia isn't as severe as real depression, but still persists long enough for it to affect my ability to function at work and in my day-to-day at random moments when I least want it to.

It's abuse that's made worse by my own mind repeating those words over and over again, long after their originator has stopped saying them, to the point where I've internalized their voices in my head and still subconsciously torture myself with them mentally when I'm not self-aware enough to realize it. And people will never know when that's happening because I never voice what I'm thinking in those moments until it's too late and I explode and then they think I'm suddenly overreacting over nothing.

This is what it feels like to feel powerless, to feel like you're being silenced no matter how loud you try to scream. Because what you're screaming might not be worth screaming about anyway.

That time a year and a half ago when I screamed into my pillow in the middle of the night, in the midst of one of the worst nights of my mental life, asking for God or someone else to come, and no one came. I stopped believing in hope that night.

Well, it was my fault for expecting anyone to come in the first place, because I never actually asked anyone else for help in real life like I was supposed to.

But I was depressed, so I literally didn't feel capable of asking for help at that moment because that's what depression does to you. And I couldn't trust my mind either, as I didn't know how I would react if the people I went to for help responded in a way that might actually make me worse, as has already happened before. And has still continued to happen to this day even after I supposedly got better. So why would I still trust people after all of this?

It doesn't matter what your intentions are, even if you never intended to hurt me, because I still feel consequences from your actions anyway. I just have to fucking deal with it. Like I deal with everything else in my life.

I realize that I've been making large-scale generalizations about people, and that most of my friends and family aren't the way I've been describing, but my mind has this tendency to magnify the worst of my experiences until it's all I can ever think about. Such that when I do experience a legitimate negative moment or interaction, it becomes all the more worse instantaneously and I literally don't know how to process or react in that moment, and end up living with two+ weeks worth of depression instead.

I have to ask myself everyday if what I'm thinking or feeling right now is reasonable, because at any given moment the thoughts I'm having could suddenly become "unreasonable."

And that's what I have to learn to deal/cope/what-have-you with.

(That said, it's nice to have someone validate your thoughts once in a while so that you know it's not you who's going crazy.)

Another Update

Currently Listening: Porco Rosso - Joe Hisaishi in Budokan
(if I could describe what bliss feels like, it would be this song. amazing live.)

I recently (as in, yesterday) just got off a two week depression period that came with not really wanting to do anything (aside from playing Pokemon Go in distracted I'm-walking-40,000-steps-today bursts), and now I feel like want to reclaim my life again.

I also randomly had a feeling that I wanted to write more often again, but I don't necessarily feel like doing long-form posts as much right now because it takes too much of a [mental, emotional, time] toll for me to write them right now... and a lot of what I'd have considered writing in the past has become too personal/interpersonal to publish here, so I'm going to revert back to a little more frequent but less serious format akin to how I used to post back in the old days; most of my thoughts tend to occur this way anyway. So let's see how this goes.

I'm also bringing back the Currently Listening feature I used to have back in my livejournal days, because it's nice to keep track of what I'm listening to in a non-automated way sometimes. Although this may be less "currently listening" and more "currently stuck in my head," as I've been wanting to know where my involuntary recollections have been taking me lately.

Ambitious

I feel like I'm too ambitious for my own good-- not in the professional sense of the word, but more in terms of experiences and wanting to see things.

Take this past month:

- Chicago trip
- LA trip
- SFMOMA + Simon's party + board games in one day
- NYC trip including 2 Museums, 4 Broadway shows, buying 6 more books at the Strand, Sushi Nakazawa, and an Andrew
- catching up on 15 movies
- SF concerts immediately before and after NYC trip and another concert this past week
- Comedy festival in SF
- suddenly getting back into Pokemon Go and hunting down Mudkips at a park where I had to pay $6 to park
- Ryan visiting

And now I'm sick with a disease that mainly affects children (Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease... bleh), knowing nothing about how I got it. But it sucks. (cue Dr. Mom joke: "Maybe your body still thinks you're a child.")

Sicknesses aren't usually supposed to be that big of a deal, but something about this one has been really irking me lately.

Maybe it's because of this sore throat that still freaking hurts like hell after 5 days. I haven't had throat pain this bad since that killer flu I got from China three years ago-- although that time my head also hurt regardless of whether I was lying, sitting down, or standing, and I was sleeping so much that I got sick of sleeping.

Maybe it's because of this stupid rash I now have on my hands and feet (no mouth thankfully) that's been making it painful to walk cause it hurts almost like blisters. Ryan had a good laugh at my expense cause I was creeping around my own house in lieu of losing my ability to walk normally without cursing myself.

Maybe it's because of the anxiety in my mind that just seems to get worse when I'm sick. I have a tendency to magnify the worst of my feelings and emotions when I'm sick to the point where I can't tell if I'm just being extremely paranoid or seriously having illness complications.

Maybe it's because I wanted to do so much else this weekend and couldn't. And not so much doing, but even just being present, and feeling like I couldn't just be.

When the serious questions came and I couldn't answer them the way I wanted to, because I never got the chance to reflect in the past month... even though I've technically had plenty of time to myself by now.

If you look at my list of the past month, it looks like I've been really social, but in reality more than half of that list was done alone. And lately, I've been feeling a strong sense of isolation even when I'm around people, like nothing ever really clicks with them the way I want things to click. Let alone the isolation I already feel on a day-to-day basis.

"What do you want to do most today?" - I've pretty much structured my day-to-day life around this question already, and have found that at the end of the day, I still feel empty. All of those things I've done are great and all, and I'm glad I got to do them, but it's not enough to just do all the things you've been wanting to do in your life. There's more to living than that.

Because as my therapist put it, it's not about what I want-- it's about what I need.

And my own inability to answer that question honestly.

Xenoblade 2

Haven't been in the mood to write much about personal stuff lately, so in the meantime I'll settle for random impressions. First off:

Finished the main story the other day. This game gets a lot of flak for regressing into cringey anime-cliche territory (especially compared to previous Xeno games), and while I agree with the overall criticisms, there was a decent amount of stuff I actually liked:

- The music. I haven't heard Mitsuda put out new game music in years, and he apparently collaborated on the soundtrack with the people who did the music for Xenoblade 1 which was decent as well. I like Gormott's day theme more than Gaur Plains now, and the choral arrangements (specifically Indol and Tantal) are great as well.

- The setting. It wasn't as awe-inspiring as the first time I was climbing the titan in Xenoblade I and trying to figure out which body part I was on, but seeing each of the different titans in II and how they functioned in space relative to each other along with the World Tree was pretty cool. In some respects I actually like the setting more than the one in Blade I, given that it felt like you were seeing more of the entire world and not just limited to one main "continent."

- The whole concept behind blades (their relationships to drivers, their life cycle) and how the main plot actually explored the implications of their existence thematically when it could easily have been limited to a gameplay gimmick, which it actually felt like at first when I was still trying to figure out the whole complicated mess of a battle system lol.

- Rex, even though he was more or less a standard generic JRPG/shounen protagonist (aka naively optimistic and impulsive teenage male). He actually had sass at times and matured a good amount by the end of the game, which was enough for me... or maybe I'm more forgiving of him because I actually like his in-game design, stupid outfit and all? Lol. (But not so much the official art.)

- Random references to past Xeno games. KOS-MOS, the gear designs, the concept behind Pyra and Mythra, the ties to Xenoblade I, and other story elements reminiscent of Gears/Saga (specifically thinking about the Zohar from those games). I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff.

- Having played most of the Xeno-games since the beginning (Gears, Saga I-III, Blade 1... skipped X just cause), it's been interesting to see how Takahashi's directorial style has changed over time. Some of these developments I've known about for a while; especially the tendency towards lengthy cinematic action cutscenes as was happening in Saga III... but it feels more appropriate here; I wasn't into Saga for the action.

- All that said, I hate the gacha system for rolling blades. Most of the rare blades themselves aren't very interesting imo, and all the time you have to waste to try getting all of them doesn't really feel worth it.

- I have to agree that in many other respects, this game doesn't respect your time much either. I don't know if I could do another game like this one for a long while.

Final verdict: I want to play Xenosaga again. Or at least ep I-II DS (if that game ever gets a translation) + III because I don't really have the patience for the mess that was the original ep II anymore.

Unequal Exchange

So I haven't really been able to put this into words for a long time, but I've been thinking about this on and off lately until just last night when the apparent root causes suddenly came into focus after reading a tangentially unrelated FB post (which is another story). To be honest, this didn't really come out as coherently as I'd have liked even after all that, so please bear with me.

The closest analog I can think of to what I've experienced (which I also experience but that's also another story) is imposter syndrome, but that's a term that's usually relegated to professional contexts. In this case, I'm thinking more about social contexts-- more broadly speaking, about having participated in multiple communities at least semi-regularly over the course of some years, but never really feeling a true sense of belonging in most of them. And why that is so.

And wondering if I'm just turned off now by any notion of participating in a larger community, to begin with.

There isn't a real starting point to this, so I'm just going to list off some things that may not actually be all that related to each other and probably aren't the best examples of what I'm trying to express, but seem just as relevant to me with regards to what I'm talking about.

1. The time when the Left Behind book series came around and popularized a [specifically dispensationalist pre-tribulation interpretation of] phenomenon in Christian circles known as the Rapture. And the paranoia that inevitably came about when I started wondering if I really truly believed or not-- which hasn't ever really left me since. (I could go on about how stupid this understanding of the Rapture is but meh.)

2. Nathan and I going over all of the occasions in the past number of years where he didn't remember me being present when I actually had been there all along.

3. The moment at Sunday service that prompted me to write this post.

4. When I said bye to Steven at Camp Jitterbug last year and thought, "I may not be back for a long time." Because at that point I was already feeling, "I can't keep up with this anymore."

5. The fallacy of how I somehow can feel up-to-date with another person's life just by keeping up with what they've been posting on social media when I really have no idea what's actually going on with them.

6. Lately, I've noticed that I've started forgetting how I interacted with people I used to know in high school but haven't kept up with since. And started wondering if I ever really knew them even back then, although my understanding of what it means to really "know" someone has shifted a lot since back then anyway.


The one thing that springs to mind for me right now after listing all of this is a sense of unequal exchange. In some of these cases I feel like I've sacrificed a not insignificant portion of time in my life to at least be present -- at Hilgard, at church, at swing (could even add Cisco-friends, IV, other roommates etc), and at the end of the day, I often still feel like a stranger, or that it's not that much different from me not ever having been present anyway.

But the more I think about it, the reality is... I probably actually haven't really been all that present after all. I mean, I haven't been to swing in over a year, Sunday service in a couple of months, and most of my other friends I see irregularly every one-to-few months or so. I am actually making what I've been feeling a reality at this point, and I don't really feel much different. If anything, I still feel just as tired these days as I felt when I was more socially out there in the past.

It may be that my stamina for being social has gone down a lot in the past couple of years. But I feel that what I had to start with as a base wasn't that great in the first place. I feel like I gave what little energy I had just to be able to be around people ("I go to parties just to be an introvert at them."), but that wasn't really enough to sustain a longer-term presence or relationship in the community that I would have liked to have, so I end up feeling exhausted at the end of the day and wondering what was the point-- other than the impression that these experiences might have left on me.

Which leads to where I am now. I went through a bunch of extremely low periods between last summer and this one, and only just now have felt like I've recovered enough energy to possibly reinitiate some of these things and be more social again. Only now, I actively experience feelings of resentment at the notion of returning. What exactly am I "returning" to anyway? Why should I be sacrificing more of my time to places and relationships that haven't really borne fruit from all of the time that I did commit in the past, even though that time may not have been as substantial or meaningful for other people as it was for me?

If anything, all that last thought tells me is that I'm not cut out for these communities. That I don't have what it takes to really be part of an active community again, because I don't have the patience or fortitude to work through another period of potential disconnectedness and heartbreak. It also reinforces another feeling that I've been having for a long time now.

"I'd rather be alone."

I don't know if I've really recovered at all.

and so it goes

Current status: I got a job offer last week. And it was exciting! But it was also nerve-wracking, waiting in a state of limbo for the entire week for them to finally contact me with the offer itself, several days later than originally intended. But I finally got the offer I wanted. And all was good.

Or well, that's what I'd like to say, anyway. To be honest, my emotions have been out of whack for a long while, so the times where I feel like I should be happy, I'm not... really. Or only briefly. Or at least, I don't feel as "excited" as other people seem to think I should be. But I'm not as stressed with anxiety of uncertainty about the future for sure.

But it's not the same as happiness. When all is said and done, a job is a job.

You know what made me happy today? Getting the comics I wanted because I got to the store today right when it opened. Followed by green milk tea with lychee jelly from Sharetea. Followed by getting some plans straight with friends I anticipate seeing in the week to come. Followed by getting lunch with Kuai.

Technically, I still was doing these things to an extent even before the offer came. But I guess what changed this time was that I didn't feel as guilty about pursuing the things that I wanted to pursue-- because I felt secure in my situation now. No more worrying about wasting time not doing enough to get myself back on track. I have time now.

But I recognize that happiness is fleeting, and you shouldn't be pursuing things just to make yourself feel happy. Especially when what makes you happy isn't necessarily what's "best" for you in the long-term... like making spontaneous decisions to buy things rather than budgeting for them ahead of time.

Lately, I've been trying to think about those times where I've been feeling dissatisfied of late, where I feel unhappy when all else seems to suggest otherwise. The little things that brought me into this pit I've been living in in the first place.

People seem to think that my depression was a result of my jobless situation, and that now that I have a job coming, and now that my career is progressing somewhere again, things are looking up. No reason to feel depressed anymore, right?

Wrong. Most of the factors contributing to my mental state existed while I was still employed, and none of the triggers I experienced in the past were job-related at all. It was only recently that my mental issues bled into my job situation.

But now that that's resolved for now, I still have a lot of other issues to deal with. It's more telling to me that even on the day that I got my offer, I had a moment of weakness later in the day after taking care of some logistical things and broke down crying in my car again before dinner. (Luckily, Ryan was able to cheer me up.)

Anyway, it's hard for me to just narrow down one thing right now, so I'll touch on a few things that come to mind:

- Had a conversation with Kuai a couple of weeks ago regarding my interpersonal issues with people. Realized that almost all of the problems I spoke about tended to stem from my perception of how other people see me, and how the mistakes I make might put that at risk even when in hindsight I shouldn't have any reason to worry in the first place. Almost everything we talked about wound up becoming about being self-centered to an extent.

I think the knowledge that so much of what I do in my relationships is really self-motivated makes me have a dim or pessimistic view of relationships in general. If I can't trust myself to be selfless or truly good to other people, how can I expect anyone else to do the same for me?

- Recognizing the limits of community in my own contexts. Some of the things that people try to say to me as way of reassurance come off as entirely alien to what I am actually experiencing, even if I know they mean well, and I don't know how to respond properly. As Michael framed it to me the other day: it often ends up feeling like my friends (or well, some of them at least) don't really know me at all.

Part of it is probably due to the fact that I haven't really let on all of the things I experience. I don't like to "burden" people, and I often feel like a lot of my true thoughts are just too dark or inappropriate to share (where do you draw the line?). I've also apparently been very good at being in denial about things pertaining to myself such that for some issues, it's taken years for me to really admit that I have a problem in the first place.

- Oh, boy, where do I start.

Disappointment in church. In family. In some friendships and the way things turned out (and wondering what I could've been done differently). In my upbringing. In our political system and this country. In humanity. In myself and how I let my situation stagnate for years on end.

Giving up on God answering the big questions that I have in my lifetime while at the same time wondering if I ever really gave him a chance in the first place.

Feeling like the entire life I've built up for myself is just one big construct just to pass the time "distracted" until I die.

Feeling like I can't fully trust anyone anymore and always expecting to be disappointed if I try to raise my expectations any higher than motivated self-interest.

Not trusting anyone in church or living existence to "speak" for God, let alone myself, and consequently not knowing where else to turn to.

Continually being disappointed in myself.

Being unable to maintain composure when wracked with the pressure of having to figure out how to function normally while my sleep schedule, mood swings, and mind are all over the place and consequently experiencing frequent debilitating migraine-level headaches.

Being fed up with some false conception of what society considers "normal" and how much I don't fit into that picture.

Wondering why I have to settle for what little time I get to share with some people, and why I can't selfishly want to take up more of their time.

Wondering if it's okay to simply be sick and tired of humanity in general.

- Current thoughts:

To be human is to know suffering. And joy. But more so suffering.

Even when I'm not happy about something, that doesn't mean I don't want to be happy. Emotions just aren't something you can force yourself to feel when the situation calls for it.

I wonder what I'll think five years from now.

status

Still alive!

Okay, I'm not sure what I'm getting all excited for. I'm actually the opposite of excited right now. Life is rather ho-hum hum-drum right now, and I couldn't think of a better way to say that (sorry).

I've been stuck in the midst of another writer's block rut for a long while now, and whatever I do end up putting out tends to feel too painful to read (in the not-good writing sense, not the emotional one); cue past discussions I've had on writing frustrations from before.

But I mean when it comes down to it, it's just frustrating to not be able to articulate what you're feeling, especially in the more intense moments that you partly don't want to forget but partly do because this hurts too much. What's the point of suffering if you're only going to forget it later? And for some reason that feels like such a privileged millenial thing to say. 

Anyway, the past year has been... rough. I get the feeling (unsure how realistic this is) that some of my past entries have felt melodramatic even though they felt perfectly real enough to me at the time-- it's just more that my mind tends towards the depressing and cynical, and once it senses a downward spiral it just wants to go all the way to the bottom. Think the worst thoughts you can think. Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! (sorry Dr. Seuss)

In the two months leading up to the election last year, coinciding with the last few entries on this blog, I basically went through a series of emotional breakdowns (read: sleepless nights while sobbing at home regularly) for reasons that would basically change every two weeks. Random things friends and family said or did, or more often than not my own mistakes and mishaps, would just trigger me into going off on yet another one out of a long list of long-term developed insecurities. I would be fine one moment and then in the midst of an uncontrollable mind-death-spiral the next.

Around the same time, my therapist diagnosed me with dysthymia, a form of depression that essentially is less acute than severe depression but tends to be more chronic and cyclical. In other words, it's less intense, but it lasts a lot longer-- typically on the order of years.

I'm not going to go into full detail about everything that's happened since then, but basically, I've gone through more ups-and-downs while slowly trying to discern for myself how to get back into a normal mode of living again. What originally had little to do with my job situation (read: original reasons for depression) has been starting to affect it in the past couple of months since I've begun searching again, and I'm not happy with how slow the process has been, but that's just something that I've had to live with.

If anything, I've been trying to learn to be patient with myself, because I think a lot of my issues and insecurities stem from lacking patience with myself and the subsequent disappointment that I've felt inside.

I find it difficult to be patient with myself when I can see something better already, only to find that I am blocked by my own inadequacy and fear of failure. And even when I do attempt things and fail, the experience of failing itself and manner in which I perceive others responding to it has in some ways done more to reinforce the anxiety and despair that I've felt in the long-term. Especially when I'm told that my situation isn't really "all that bad"; when I can see how much I could be doing right now, but for some reason just end up not-- insert how much of a "noob" I am for all those stupid little things I won't mention because they really are that petty (and yes I've internalized all those times I've been called that even though they were jokes and I know I shouldn't have).

I know I shouldn't care so much about what other people think, and yet, I do. I know that my life situation really isn't all that bad relatively speaking, and yet I can't help but feel a sense of despair and disillusionment with life- no, living, right now, and no, I'm not suicidal; I just don't feel like doing anything a lot of the time. And I honestly can't help but feel disappointed in myself when I can often see some solutions to my own problems but otherwise feel too helpless to actually do anything about it-- a helplessness that at one point culminated in convulsive sobbing after an otherwise 'reassuring' phone call, while screaming, "WHY WON'T IT STOP WHY WON'T IT STOP WHY WON'T IT STOP-"

Because the one thing I couldn't control, when I needed it the most, was my own emotions.

I have moments where I start to see how everything in my life is a construct of some sort (society, work, church, "normality," what-have-you), and I start to wonder, what's the point of all this. It frustrates me when I'm told that things will get better when I have a job, or perhaps someone else will be able to make me feel better, or that God will just make things work out in the long run; honestly, to me, this runs much deeper than that, and these kinds of suggestions strike me as lacking awareness in how to engage with individuals struggling with mental illness (although to be fair, not that I would know much better either).

I don't have faith in such simple solutions; ones that strike me more as trying to cover up the symptoms rather than deal with the cause: a deep brokenness for which I have no other words to describe, and even just calling it that sounds juvenile and trite to my own ears. (It's an affectation from all those church years.)

The annoying thing about trying to write all of this, is that I don't think there are any real words for whatever this is. Words can only mean so much if you haven't felt the source for them for yourself; all I can describe are the symptoms and try to rationalize something out of them, something that ends up coming across (at least to me) as reductive and a poor reflection of what it really feels like to experience an overwhelming sense of hopelessness when all other social and personal indicators seem to be telling you otherwise.

Maybe I'm trying to give this more weight than it actually has to begin with. Or maybe- you know what, never mind. I give up trying to wonder about these things. I honestly don't know. I'm just tired, man.

I'll try to have more faith in myself and other people and the world when I wake up tomorrow.