Stay Alive
Don’t engage; strike by night.
Remain relentless ’til their troops take flight
Make it impossible to justify the cost of the fight
Outrun, outrun
Outlast, outlast
Hit ’em quick, get out fast
Stay alive ’til this horror show is pastHamilton: Stay AliveI think about death a lot for someone who seems to be so young. I mean, the coronavirus pandemic has made it so that we’ll all think about the…
Forgiving Myself
I have an upcoming job as a Software Engineer next year, so I’ll be moving to the Bay Area and not coming back here for a while. (AND! I’ll finally be with my boyfriend and have a stable income and be financially independent! I’m very excited about this.)
But to be honest, coming back here for the last time has made me think about the things that have happened while I was here, whether that means…
Careful
“Xiao xin!” my mother cried as I skipped down Bei-An Road in Taipei. Be careful, she said. I knew she meant that there was a car coming behind me, and I was probably going to die if I didn’t do something. I didn’t waste my time checking to see if that was the case. I’d checked many times before. It was always the same thing.
Be careful. There’s a car behind you. Be careful.
My brother and I were…
Sunflower
In middle school, I tried to grow bell peppers for my guinea pigs to eat. It was my first foray into gardening. It didn’t last long.
—
That was around the time that the bullying worsened. Oh, how often I looked over my shoulder, just waiting for the next nasty comment. Oh, how often I wondered if those boys in my class really liked me, or were just pretending all along.
—
Plants. Oh, plants. How…
i can’t make you love me if you don’t
To Thine Own Self Be True
You don’t have to take this class if you aren’t in the mood, despite how much pressure you have for yourself. You deserve happiness. You need to take care of yourself. You are allowed to take four classes a semester, like everyone else. You are enough. Sometimes, after three strenuous years of college, I look back and wonder if I like the person I’ve become. In 2016, I was most certainly a…
Two Roads
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood… …which one do I take? The beginning of my senior year has brought me to reflect on my past 3 years at Scripps College, and the work I have put into it. I’ve come a long way since my first semester, taking 5 classes nearly every semester, bending over backward to make things work. My hard work has paid off: At the end of this semester, despite spending an…
Homes Away From Home
My first home away from home was Taipei, Taiwan. By the time I turned 18, I’d already made 10 trips to Taiwan, and was well on my way to having my own place there… possibly. Taipei brought me a whole new world that I, more and more, grew to love and appreciate. It was my satellite city. It taught me how to connect with my extended family, with my ethnicity, with my culture. It taught me Chinese.…
The Numbing, The Emptiness, The Healing
5 p.m. and you’ve just come home with your flatmate after a long day of classes, and you start talking about what you’re going to eat. They want to have a community dinner, so you’re starting to cook.
6 p.m. and your flat meeting with your RA is over. Your flatmate mistakenly opens the wrong can of corn, so you’re stuck making another corn soup as they cook dinner for your friends upstairs. Community dinners are always a positive thing.
7 p.m. and you’re almost ready. You have to run into campus to meet up with your advisor, but it’s quick - good dessert, ice cream, brownies, quick catch up with friends.
8 p.m. and it’s time to eat! Good food, nice long dinner. Your friends enjoyed eating your corn soup and this time, there weren’t any flies! Cheers - a successful day.
At 9 your friends leave and you’re settling back down to your computer, thinking about the work you haven’t done, the readings you need to do, the friends you haven’t caught up with.
The pleasant feelings fade. They never lasted long anyway.
So it turns out that in all the life that was happening to you this evening, your boyfriend is about to go to sleep and refuses to talk to you because it’s too late.
Well… then… that’s… disappointing.
Me. Me the local depressionite. It gets me to wonder.
The way my boyfriend mentioned it, like, his tone was cold and harsh, his later words disappointing. I felt quite hurt by it all. I had done nothing wrong other than enjoy my life.
Honestly, his leaving makes me want to cry. But I don’t even cry. I just feel sad… empty… the usual.
It’s strange how I feel these days. I feel like I should be upset, should be intensely emotional, should be disappointed, should be angry, should be feeling abandoned, should be crying and screaming and sobbing and wasting 2 hours crying and trying to resolve this and beg him to come back.
That’s, sadly, normal for me.
But I don’t know, and I can’t even tell.
I can’t tell if I’m healed and I trust him to know that it’s okay, or because, honestly, I just don’t give a fuck. About anything. About everything. Or maybe just this one thing specifically. But then again, I’ve not really given any fucks about anything other than basic survival, so I don’t know.
It’s a little scary though, to feel a lack of desperation. It makes me realize that love and desperation are so closely linked - but makes me wonder, do they really have to go together?
In the early days of our relationship no doubt I loved him desperately, painfully. In the earliest days, I cried most when he went to sleep, accused him of abandonment, needed him to heal my anxiety. It was, honestly, the most unhealthy dependency I’d ever experienced, and I madly prayed for myself to be broken free.
These days I am more empty than not, less desperate, more stable. Supposedly it means I have healed, and I have grown.
But it scares me to just feel like I don’t really give a fuck. Like, almost like my brain is screaming at me, “Look at how hurt I am! Look at this shit! He just left us and didn’t even feel bad about it! People always hurt us and never show us love! Why aren’t you more upset? You should be crying over this! You should be making him apologize! Seriously!”
Don’t get me wrong, I was quite upset. But unlike the days of the past, it’s never been a full-on breakdown. It’s been ages since my boyfriend and I needed a full entire day to resolve a disagreement. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown an ability to let it go. Or maybe it’s because I’m depressed to the point where I don’t give a fuck, and one day, when I’m not depressed again, I’ll start giving too many fucks. Honestly, neither seems like a positive outcome for me. If giving zero fucks makes me feel empty, giving too many fucks leads me to easily get hurt.
My boyfriend didn’t respond to this message? Previously, I’d be panicking. Okay, cool, whatever, I don’t care, I can ask him to respond later. Oh, yeah, me and my boyfriend had a disagreement? Yeah, whatever, like, we’ve had them before and nothing bad really happened so I don’t care, we can just figure it out, not a big deal. Oh, I asked him to respond later and he still didn’t respond? Oh well he should probably respond or I just might be annoyed forever, and that’s also not a problem either, because I don’t care. Oh, I thought I would be annoyed forever but I have no energy to fuel my anger? Eh, don’t care either, it doesn’t really matter, because I’m pretty tired anyway. Oh, my boyfriend didn’t say good night today? Yeah, I don’t care either, because sometimes he forgets. Oh, but what if that means he doesn’t love you anymore? Well, yeah, I don’t really care either, because, well, I don’t even know if anyone loves me anyway, and what the fuck anyway, like, if he wants to leave he can leave, I don’t care anyway, because who the hell would want someone who doesn’t want them back, like, literally if you are going to leave me, literally just leave already the door is right there nobody is stopping you I won’t even stop you because I no longer have the energy to feel anything! And if you are not going to leave then great, nobody is stopping you from leaving, so that means you’re here of your own free will, which means we can work out whatever shit I don’t care about that got us into this mess in the end, which means there’s no real reason to panic or give too many fucks since it’s gonna be ok in the end, right?
Yeah, I don’t know. It’s weird, I’m so empty, my emotions are just so muted, and it’s so strange. Back then I loved him desperately.
I do not think I love him desperately anymore.
Rather I think what has grown out of this is something more… healthy, more stable, more trusting. Of course, I still require lots of affection, and I still feel afraid to say anything other than “if you don’t send hearts I’ll get anxious” because you never know when I might start getting anxious… and then giving too many shits. But I’d like to reach a point where I can say that I like getting hearts for hearts’ sake, because they are good and lovely and make me feel good, and the absence of them for one night doesn’t make me sad. I haven’t reached that point yet. The absence of them just makes me muted-disappointed until the next anxiety swing comes along and uses it as ammunition.
I worry though. I’ve never been a confident person, and my anxiety always likes to tell me I don’t really love him. So. There’s that.
But it’s strange, that’s for certain. To relate to him in a different way. To have the proof in the past of, “Well, it worked the last 100 times and they were all worse, so no need to freak out about this one.” It’s an ironic sort of thing, though. To have that proof means that it’s been worse, and to have been through worse is to have been through hell and back, to have already experienced hard times. You would wish you’d never experienced any of them. But depression and anxiety and suicidal thoughts is hell and back. My family has always told me: the hardest part is not dying - it is laying on your death bed wishing for death but not being able to die. I suppose the price of reassurance is, sadly, having “worse times” to compare to.
Most importantly, it’s strange to have lost the person living in my head who specializes in analysing each interaction to see whether or not he still loves me. It’s the strangest thing I’ve experienced this year. Before, I would have it, but also have this self-made lie, like, “even if he doesn’t, it’s still okay!” And that’s bullshit, because if he doesn’t, it’s fucking not okay, and it’s cognitive dissonance to try to convince yourself that you are okay with it. But here’s what I’ve found lately: It doesn’t matter. Trying to find out all the time isn’t the point. You just have to let the tide take you where you may go. And here’s what I would say to my past self: In the grand scheme of things, he’s still with you, he’s still doing this shitty thing called distance (which is shitty enough, and then you add an upcoming 8-hour time difference to that), he’s still putting in effort to remind you that he loves you because he doesn’t want you to worry (emojis), he still talks to you, he’s listened to your preferences and picks up the phone when you call… like, you don’t even have a good reason to worry. Like, dear 19-year-old me: Girl, if ya ain’t important, ya wouldn’t be doing thousands of miles of long distance (with no end in sight, no doubt). Of course, I still have those moments - and that’s why I appreciate the emojis, because it’s a constant reminder. I have really no other space to doubt when he answers all my doubts with hugs and kisses. Sure, sometimes I doubt his sincerity, but… I trust him. In the end, if I’m doubting the emojis to no other end, I always get the non-emoji reassurance I need. And until then, I get by on emojis.
But the emptiness always strikes back. When I loved him desperately, emoji/hearts/feelings always made me chock-full of happiness. But then again, pathological dependency is bad for you. Now it’s just muted and it’s strange. If I didn’t know better, if I didn’t know that my initial level was unhealthy as shit, I’d think that I had stopped loving him, or loved him a lot less.
The journey to healthy emotions has been a long and bumpy road, and even then, my anxiety is saying, “You’re not good enough to love anyone, you don’t really love anyone, you’re so mentally ill that all you ever do is depend on people!” But I know better. I know.
And anyway, it’s not like I feel anything much lately, either. Even while whitewater rafting two weeks ago, I felt like I really enjoyed it. But I never really felt at peace with anything, or 100% satisfied and happy and in the moment. Sure, I smiled, I laughed, I screamed… but I still felt numb. Like I was still missing something.
Sometimes I wonder if my long distance relationship is not just negatively influenced by my depression, but also an antecedent. Reciprocally causal. Being away makes me sad, being homesick makes me sadder, I get depressed, depression makes my relationship harder to sustain, I drop off the face of the earth. But, like I have thought about hundreds of times before when I wonder if my relationship is bad for my mental health, I have never found losing him a viable option for healing. Maybe my mental health suffers as a result. But sue me, I don’t care. I have often wondered about what would happen if it would end now. Would I have to start over with learning to trust people? Have I learned to better trust people as a whole, or just him? Would I miss him too much and then inevitably find life pointless? Would I become suicidal? Would it be really weird to get used to at first? I’m not sure, and I don’t think I’d like to find out.
New Zealand has a way of making me realize how important the important people in your life are. Thousands of miles away from home, I realize how much I need to have my family, my friends. It makes you really appreciate the familiar, and I think I’ve gained an additional dimension of gratefulness for the extended shared history and understanding that we have. So I know I still love him. Just with less flavors of desperation and more flavors of maturity, appreciation, understanding.
Still, though, it bothers me that he sounds so cold and unloving when he leaves tonight. Yeah, to tell the truth, it really kind of stung to be left like that, so abruptly. I’ve never really taken to those things well (people leave! am I supposed to be happy and smiles about that?) and he should know me well enough by now, so it upsets me when he almost expects me to be fine with it instead of respecting my needs. And I should be more upset about it, but I’m tired. And upset, I guess. Mostly about the part where I’ve discussed the importance of him using a better tone when he talks to me so that he doesn’t sound like he’s being mean as shit. I should be upset about that, at least, about the number of times we’ve already had this discussion. But I think he knows. Either he already knows, or he’s going to say something where he’s right, and I’ll be convinced.
Either way, if we’re going to be together, we will, like we have before, always find a way to figure it out. I have faith in that, in us, you know. I really do. I realize that now.
Instead of worrying, pessimistically counting down the days until we break up, dare I say… there is a part of me that may believe we have a future
You feel a little something other than emptiness in your chest and you realize… that it is healing. that it is conviction. that it is hope. that it is trust. it is love.