Hey, Cool Life!

You ever have total semantic satiation around words like depression or anxiety? How I define the terms so I actually know when they show up in my body and my thoughts. When I’m convinced everyone is mad at me and that’s why I can’t make a decision? Depression. When I stop chewing, talking, clenching, smoking long enough for my teeth to chatter? Anxiety. IDK drilling the terms down work for me because I usually feel hella vague.

Do you ever cry and then sort of watch yourself cry and don’t believe yourself? Like, it doesn’t make sense that you’re still feeling some type of way about a thing or else that you can’t possibly be feeling so awful about the one super obvious thing because that means you’re textbook and also possibly boring or unhygienic or mentally unwell or tiresome? That. A live report from being exhausted from not letting myself feel the thing I am truly feeling.

How I do affirmations so as not to eye roll myself to death when I say them. Also, a few observations around how feelings move and become trapped in my body. TW: binging and purging.

Eating your grief vegetables, mourning apocryphal parents and trying to race back to work to minimize feeling.

When the feelings around being tired makes you so much more tired… and perfectionistic and critical. Aka the one where every time I say “tired” take a drink (of water).

So wait, I have to grieve and STILL have an eating disorder and ADHD and a hilarious narcissist mother? Surely I deserve a reprieve. On feelings of butthurtness and the lack of a pause function for other dynamics.

My dad died last week and yesterday we had his funeral. This one is on grief.

There is a wonderful, abundant thing happening in my writing career and I’m finding myself resorting to false modesty and derisive, catastrophic talk when I discuss it with other people which is only freaking me out! Do you do that? What is that? Do you know how to stop?

The way I can also weaponize gentleness to isolate, restrict joy and keep my life small. And how it’s often a weird trick I use to indulge in workaholism and achievement addiction.

This is about my personal misconceptions around self-esteem. And how I confuse it with ego. And how collectivism and the immigrant experience as an Asian-American makes it really hard to know what you want. Plus, the dysfunction inherent in immigrant households with intergenerational trauma.