Hey, Cool Life!

I quit! I'm cured! Congratulations me! I'm perfect! Or why I am taking a break after 8 years of intensive therapy to stop looking at game tape of Ls and Wins and start experiencing all the ways I will be always be okay.

This one is about how I use social media to tell me how to feel. And how I use other writers' motivation to tell me what's wrong with my storytelling when I need to trust my own intuitions around my emotions and my work processes. It's also about happiness and finding meaning.

You know what's impossible to mask? Being a tourist who knows NOTHING. This one's about how traveling makes me way more Autistic and how weirdly great it feels.

Week two in Japan. This one is about enthrallment and how any intensely joyful feelings also hold grief. And how I'm reparenting my inner teen by revisiting the most hilariously, bizarre fashion wormhole.

I am Japan and working MANIC hours and feeling spectacular. This one is about not immediately vilifying erratic behaviors and accepting quirks with humor, openness and loving support. This is about affording yourself grace and asking the question: what if I am not in trouble or doing bad things but instead I am CRUSHING.

You ever get burnout from trying to avoid burnout? I do. Plus, remedial affirmations for people who sorta don't believe they work. The world is a sad, cruel place. Please be gentle with yourselves.

When I say have a gentle day what does that mean? How does a dog wear pants? What does being kind to yourself and your cognitive needs actually entail? For me it's been a lot of tiny things that I am never quite convinced is real or will make a difference. Also, how being tired makes me feel like I'm under attack and how that unfolds.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom! The writers strike is over and what that means inside my brain. Bees! It means bees. Also, how you can have FOMO for F'd up bad things because there are so many bad things for authors and creators to contend with. And how to find some gallows humor and gratitude in all of it.

Guess what? I'm Autistic. What that means for even more gentleness and how I arrived at the decision to be assessed.

This is about conversation and audience. Media platforms (RIP Buzzfeed and Twitter) as well as safe spaces to create story and work out individual truths. It's also about banned books, how it feels to have banned books. Plus, how AI storytelling technologies are not it. Plus, the director Joanna Hogg and the feeling of unwritten dialogue.

This one is about what it's like to feel your feelings. And how growing up as a Korean immigrant made feelings unsafe since anything outside of ‘gratefully chill' was an insult to parental sacrifice. This is also about the Netflix show Beef.

This one is about scheduling. And how for creative work, the line between social engagements vs career obligations can be confusing. Plus, how I can tell if I really REALLY don't want to go to a work thing that masquerades as a fun thing.

This one about how abundance feels dreadful and terrifying! And how to ease into the reminder that this is what it is to want and wish and actually do the work.

Learning when to trust your instincts and when to listen but intentionally ignore them in order to seek growth and do scary, vital things (in my case, ask people for money).

This is a reflection on Adderall and creative work. And where I've landed on taking it as it relates to writing my novel. And how much I've learned in eating disorder recovery about how to frame struggles with neurodivergence. TL; DR self-loathing quickly outlives its usefulness as a tool or energy source!

This one is on how I want ADHD medication to be a magical solution that doesn't affect other aspects of my brain. And how seductive it can be to believe that my unmedicated state is a purer kind of creativity.

This one is about emotional sobriety and drama addiction. And what dread and doom feels like in my body. Plus, the stunning revelation that I have been a maniac with my mom and not solely the other way around.

My memories are coming back. They're not chronological and they don't feel profound but as there's been more healing and thawing and the fear is lessening, glimpses of my adolescence are returning. I'm remembering what it was to be inside a body I hated in a family I loathed and being totally petrified and overwhelmed and I am so grateful! It's almost as if those corridors are opening up as I'm trusting myself to get myself back to where I need to be.

This is about moving as an emotionally sober person and how it sucks that I'm not totally dissociated but how I know it's also better for me.

How I was diagnosed with ADHD and how being medicated and genre-aware of this hostage situation known as MY BRAIN is helping me be gentle with myself. And also how, as a dissociative person, diagnosis seems wild unreliable since it requires me to be the one who knows how I'm FEELING.

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.

This is about how all feelings are complicated. How most joyful things are bittersweet and how love is almost painful to hold in your body. I also talk about how leisure and pleasure isn’t modeled for a lot of us in immigrant families and how difficult it is to get out of a transactive mindset about careers.

I am in Texas with my family and feelings loom large. This is about how perfectionism can afflict every moment and decision. And the contradictions inherent in loving a deeply flawed family in real time vs loving them as a platonic ideal from afar.

I have been an author for four years as of this day. This is about how making art is teaching me how to receive love without feeling as though I owe everything back. This is about true abundance and how I felt like I knew what the word meant but also really didn’t.

A lot of people have been asking what can we do? What if the action you can take is small, self-serving, scary and ultimately entirely radical? What if instead of doing, what if, in this moment of trauma, you let yourself be?

Is being more of an asshole an antidote to non-confrontational Asianism and resentment? Maybe? But maybe not in the way you’d presume.

On healing in the absence of apology.

On the failings of Asian parents and how that makes us desperate to protect them.

This one is about the utility of feelings. And how feeling feelings can seem so pointless and how ripped off I felt yesterday about recovery and healing and therapy when all the work can still lead to depression and despair. I only want to feel feelings if it leads to healing or “better creative work” and maybe that mindfulness is the recovery. And learning to let the expectation go is just a new level.

This is about being Asian in America on this day.

This is about codependency and the ways in which I thought I was passive, meek and overly accommodating when in fact I was in manipulating, controlling and playing the victim. This is GREAT news. I can’t change the way people act or the way they perceive me but I can change my behavior.

This is about optics and allyship. And this instinct to create a moral issue out of actions. It’s about virtue signaling and authenticity and how you are the only one who knows the tone with which you’re doing things. This is about how I am surprised at my own discomfort, shame and fear around acts of dissent. This is also for people who can’t protest for one reason or another and don’t think they can do anything else without being a hypocrite.

Does good news around your career immediately make you panic and feel wretched despite also being aware that you better feel grateful because how dare you? This is about how professional anxiety and how imposter syndrome is universal but also a weirdly egocentric tact to take. Maybe people don’t expect you to RULE at something you’ve never done before. And maybe you can’t totally sabotage a project in which you’re playing one part among many.

This one is about mothers.

This is about how watching nature documentaries can get you out of dissociation and remind you that you are a living, breathing animal that has physical needs. And a gentle call to interrogate any personal mythologies or made-up stories about how long things actually take.

This is about how my routine in the morning and evening are what’s holding me together in this time. Because my natural inclination is to abandon my body and the present moment whenever things get tough.

This is about stinginess. And how I’ve been noticing a parsimonious quality to what I’ll let myself enjoy during this lockdown time. Austerity measures are all around us and economic insecurity is so real but are there small acts of kindness to self that aren’t verboten as outrageous indulgences?

TW: This one is about eating disorders. Specifically binge-eating. And how to invite some gentle mindfulness around meals during a time when food is loud for everyone.

This is about how it’s beautiful and sunny outside and how I can ruin my own mood so easily by being my neighborhood’s self-appointed hall monitor. It turns out that ruining your own mood does not actually change anyone’s opinion or behaviors.

This is about wanting to try on every tight-fitting pair of pants because I’m dissociative and I want to change the channel in my brain to create chaos. Basically it’s about weird highs or random self-harm thoughts that don’t serve you.

This about how creativity, in the time of a pandemic, is indifferent to agendas and ambition. And how to go slow, allow for receptivity and just trust that the work will take shape as long as you gently do a little each day.

This one is about petulance. And how tiny tantrums are distractions from fear and uncertainty that need to be processed. This is also about the small routines I put in place so that muscle memory can carry me on days where I need extra help.