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.
