Winnie Lim » journal

journal/

on-going mostly unedited stream of thoughts

April 14, 2024

messy thoughts while in hong kong

I haven’t been well since my birth day. The very next day I woke up with elevated heart rate again – I am more aware of this because I use a bunch of health monitoring tools. Without them I may not know I am in bad shape, and would probably unknowingly put my body under more stress. Sometimes I find myself thinking about all the “knowledge” I’ve gained because of my chronic illness and sars-cov-2. It is not knowledge I’ve sought out of intense curiousity or desire to learn, but rather out of necessity. I now know more about nutrients, mitochondria, exercise science, electrolytes, ventilation, neurodivergence, viruses, immunity, ventilation, etc – more than the average person, and arguably more than the average doctor. Is this a good thing? I don’t know, except that I cannot really choose who I become. So much of it is dictated by the whims of my body.

It is worse now that I am also ageing. Of course everyone is ageing, but I am also undergoing the early phases of the dreaded perimenopause. So when episodes occur now I have no idea which part of it belongs to my original illness, post-covid effects, or perimenopause. Probably all of the above. I probably wish to write something smart on this blog, but these days my life is very much coloured by my mind and body. Still, I remain faithful to my commitment to document the thoughts that plague the forefront of my mind. We think so little of our experiences because they seem so mundane, but we’re like rovers exploring life with different configurations and equipment. No two people can be the same, or even remotely similar if we truly dial it down to the most intimate of their thoughts, interpretations and preferences. This is extremely interesting and intriguing to me. Is it for you?

Every time nowadays I see a person wearing a mask I would really like to ask them why. In fact if not for my social awkwardness and fear of conflict I would approach them to do a humans of new york style interview portrait series of them and their masks, with a story of why they are still masking. I mask myself because of all the research I’ve read, but most people are just going by government advisories. Most governments are like YOLO because the virus is “mild”. So it becomes intriguing to me when I see people masking – why are they resisting that annoying discomfort and alluring social pressure? What makes them different?

It is weird how I think it is weird that some people actually care about their health. I guess it says something about the world nowadays.

I feel a lot less depressed since travelling to Hong Kong despite being mildly physically unwell due to some form of dysautonomia (thanks covid). It has been 8 years since I was last here. Like Japan I wanted to know how my relationship with this location has changed, because I have changed so much.

photo of a crossing at mongkong, hongkong

I have many thoughts and feelings about Hong Kong, which I would probably write in another post. But one thing I know for sure: I need travel to survive. Travel is not just a fun or pleasurable thing for me. It is sustenance. It provokes me and keeps me awake. It is my umbilical cord to life. I know it sounds frivolous, like how dare I say something like this. But I am sure throughout history there were others like me, people who wanted and needed to know the world as a whole. Because it develops us as a whole too, to get to know the different parts of our selves that slowly awaken every time we venture to somewhere previously unknown.

I am struggling to navigate this realisation with my covid cautiousness, because travelling is always riskier than just holing myself up at home. In Singapore we can’t do road trips or local travel, since a marathon runner can basically run across her in an afternoon.

Do I really have to choose my soul over my body? I can only hope our current covid travelling protocol is good enough.

I guess I am writing 3 different posts in one. I used to be uncomfortable with this, but now as part of my ageing goals I would just really like to be my messy self.

April 6, 2024

43

I wrote this time last year that I felt like I was coping better than the year before. This year I don’t feel like I have made much progress, and perhaps I feel like I have regressed – possibly a trend detected in the darker tone of my recent posts. But unless we can truly zoom out and have a top-down view of our lives, who can truly say what is progression and what is regression?

I think in general human beings are good at playing roles. We take on roles of a child, parent, educator, student, friend, lover, etc, and plenty of times we act according to what we think is expected of us including expectations we have of ourselves. We all want to be certain types of people, and so much influence comes from environmental conditioning that I no longer really know who do I really want to be, versus who I think I should be. It is no longer very clear to me when I am playing a role and when I am just being my self. Does my self even exist? According to buddhism, it doesn’t – because our selves are never truly independent of conditions.

The roles I consciously or unconsciously play affect how I perceive my life. Sometimes I get too caught up in a role, and playing it well makes me believe I am making progress in terms of how well I am coping with life. Other times I snap out of it and break down, realising whatever progress I perceived was just an illusion I have created for myself. I don’t really want to be unhappy all the time, so I try to pretend. Is the breakdown a regression if it allows me to get closer to myself? I don’t really know because this world functions precisely because we’re all very good at upkeeping these illusions. Is functioning more important than truth?

As usual I don’t have an answer. As I age I feel like I have less and less answers because I am now seeing the complexity and nuances that age have gifted to me. When I was younger I thought truth is everything. Now I am not so sure. If truth makes me want to stop living, then is it worth the pursuit?

I guess I just want to be more at ease with myself. Or more at ease with the unease I would perhaps always feel for the rest of my life. If I live till 80ish I’m at my mid-life now, and it seems unlikely I’ll develop a positive relationship with life at this point. And if I do develop one later, then was it worth it having the navigate more than half my life in this existential pain, aloneness and confusion?

Sometimes I think that I am contemplating the wrong question and answer. That perhaps it is meaningless to wonder about the worthiness of existence. It is just something that has to unfold, even if it is meaningless, empty and worthless. Us human beings like to derive value in everything we do: we seem to only want to do something if we consider it to be valuable. That attitude has poisoned every part of my life and unconscious thinking, even if by now I am a lot more comfortable with meaninglessness and purposelessness than the average person.

There doesn’t need to be a reason for everything. Ageing one year doesn’t automatically confer more wisdom. The passage of time doesn’t equate to progress. Why are we so obsessed with progress anyway? The environment is always dynamically changing, it is just neither practical or sustainable to always expect things to get better.

Part of my internal suffering comes from so many “shoulds”. I want to be a certain way, and it gives me a lot of anguish that I can’t be that way. I once made an observation with my therapist: I said all my life I was expecting a fine-dining experience from a world that is actually a MacDonald’s.

Similarly I have been wanting myself to be able-bodied when I am actually disabled. Wanting reality to be different from what it is can cause a lot of suffering. Just like wanting myself to be someone I cannot be.

There are complex reasons why I am the way I am now. Why I go around living life as though I have not much life-force left in me. Everything takes so much effort. I have lived so much of my life against the mainstream, and sadly even being covid-cautious (which is just basically being concerned about my health) also invites existential loneliness. This is triggering for me because it reminds me of the painful loneliness I had felt as a child. The feelings of being abandoned.

I wish I can be like some others who are clearly a lot more comfortable being different. Again, wishing to be someone I am not. It seems I will never be part of the mainstream because we just have different living philosophies, and yet these differences trigger so much existential pain because I fear being abandoned. It doesn’t matter what I intellectually think, my body simply reacts (apparently rejection sensitive dysphoria is an adhd thing, and they think it is related to the brain structure).

If I can have a birthday wish, I wish for more emotional strength. To just be the way I am. To truly be able to accept my self, not just an intellectual acceptance, but with the whole of my body. I don’t want to keep on feeling immense sadness in my body every single time I get triggered. It really sucks especially when I intellectually know the trigger is truly innocuous, yet my body cannot help reacting. There is unending sadness in me, and I can feel it bubbling up even as I am writing this.

If this is something that has to be with me for the entirety of my life, then I wish I can co-exist better with it. To just be able to tolerate the sensations, or to compassionately hold it. Maybe I can’t abandon my self too, no matter how uncomfortable and painful she makes me feel.

Growing old is perhaps becoming more accepting of all the painful realities that exist, whether they are external or inside of us. I thought I’ll be less unhappy as I get older, because it seemed that was the trajectory. But I think I am becoming more intimate with my sadness.

I write one of these every year.

March 30, 2024

sending out pieces of my self

In one of my recent posts I documented my experience with the risograph, and at the bottom of the post I wrote that I’ll be giving away 5 pieces of the poster to anyone who deemed it worthy. Honestly I wrote that thinking no one would respond, but I thought it would be a nice experiment anyway.

Surprisingly someone responded almost right away, and more trickled in over the next few days. I had to figure out how to send an A3 poster – I thought I’ll send them in postal tubes but my partner reminded me that the risograph ink may leave marks on the paper if curled, and it may tend to have a memory of being curled. She had a rigid A3 envelope on hand (it is very convenient to live with an artist), so I made sure the post office is able to accept it since they have strict restrictions on dimensions.

I bought plastic sheets to protect the poster, put them into the rigid envelopes, and sent them through registered mail. US, India, Canada and Italy. I thought that was pretty cool, to distribute them to different geographical locations.

I felt like I had a taste of what it is like to be an artist. The wonder of having someone appreciating your art, so much that they are willing to place it somewhere in the intimacy of their homes. Yes, I am giving them away for free, but somehow it seems unbelievable still that someone out there would like to have them.

That I channeled a part of me out into a physical media, and reproduced them into prints, and now they are floating somewhere out there on some postal route. One day, hopefully they will reach their eventual homes. This seems like a miracle that this is even possible – imagine living a couple of hundred years back, how difficult would it be to accomplish this?

Thanks to those who took the effort to request a poster, I am in your gratitude. Maybe it seems weird to have this gratitude because I am the giver – I don’t know how to articulate this accurately, but I lived a life feeling so much alienation and rejection, the fact that some stranger out there wants my art is difficult for me to fathom.

I cannot objectively appreciate something I’ve worked on, so to have people visibly appreciate it for me is truly a gift.

I still have one copy left if anyone’s interested!

March 24, 2024

the dam

[tw warning: suicide ideation] Yesterday I had another episode where I spent hours crying. This actually feels embarrassing to write, but intellectually I think it is society that conditions us to think that crying is embarrassing. I also feel like it seems wrong to keep writing posts about my sadness, but why is this so? The reason why I keep writing posts like these is because it is reflective of my on-going current state. I have to do a lot of conscious and unconscious pretending in real life, I don’t wish to also feel like I have to cut out parts of myself at the only place in the world where I can be truly myself.

It was another seemingly innocuous trigger, but some dam broke in me, and overwhelming sadness and helplessness flowed out. At times like these I am surprised by the velocity of my sadness, it is as though I am so good at hiding it that I am hiding it even from myself. I walk around with a lot of chronic sadness, but the intensity of the sadness I feel during these episodes is obliterating. I would feel like I truly cannot go on, even for an inch. That I am very, very tired of trying. That I have spent decades trying, and I am sick of it. These are no longer mere thoughts, they are very visceral physical feelings that emanate out of my body.

In a way I am used to these episodes. I have been having them all my life. So they shouldn’t take the wind out of me. I should know that they are temporary and if I manage to tide it through I will slowly recover to a survivable baseline. But each and every time it happens it feels like the breaking point. I’ve written about this phenomenon before – that I can totally relate why people make irreversible decisions at times like these.

Thankfully my partner was there with me. She did not dismiss my feelings or try to use any form of positive psychology on me, but instead she told me she will be supportive if I am really suffering this much (I had discussed with her the possible option of euthanasia overseas, though I don’t know if this is truly a legal option). Just to be clear I am not saying this is the right thing to do for anybody in similar situations but for me it was, because I’ve just been dismissed all my life it is really important for me to feel acknowledged. As long as I am sane I would never voluntarily cause such immense suffering for her, but it means a lot that she sees why I have such a desire. In the background I always have this fear that one day she would tire, and I will lose the only person who genuinely knows me.

The sadness is still lingering as I write this post, but the worst is over. This seems to be a cycle: as though there must be a release after all that pent up pressure. All the pretense and masking has a cost. Once in a while I must meet my sadness at full force. Maybe I am learning to understand this is simply a spectrum of my existence I must have instead of being traumatised by it. Can I honour my own sadness?

I realised belatedly this morning that both recent episodes were after a strength training session. Out of curiousity I googled, and surprisingly it seems like a common experience to cry during or after a workout. Part of it seems to be hormonal since exercise triggers a cascade of hormones, the other seems to be somatic – exercise seems to put us closer to our body and feelings. Once my TCM physician asked me if my neck has always been this tight, I told her I honestly don’t know because I am very out of tune with my physical body and that’s why I wear gadgets.

My own interpretation is that mental strength and physical strength somewhat draw from the same inner reserve. Strength training takes a lot from that reserve, hence whatever dam I have in place is vastly weakened after a session. I also experience the same weakened dam during the last week of my luteal cycle. The question remains: is it healthy to experience this dam breaking once in a while, or do I have to do everything to avoid it? I reckon it is something like exercise and muscles. Controlled damage can be healthy, and over-doing it can be detrimental.

I remember reading that therapy/psychoanalysis/meditation can be detrimental to some people because they are not in a state to face the full force of their true feelings. In some cases the dam is there for a reason, and maybe it is better for people to survive living in a shell versus having a permanent mental breakdown.

I feel like this is a huge reason why I am still covid-cautious (as though we need proper reasons to care about our own health). First of I’m barely getting better after years of chronic illness and I have no desire to go through it again. I don’t deal well with feelings of being trapped. That is what chronic illness means to me: being trapped in a body and existence that feels suffocating and tiring.

Secondly I have so little will to live as it is, I don’t think I can survive long covid. I know what it is like to have hormones and neurotransmitters working as though they are trying to kill you, and I cannot imagine having them in a worse state than it is now. I am also still dealing with feelings of perpetual fatigue and it is already hard enough as it is. I cannot imagine having crashes just from showering.

That’s where a major part of the sadness comes from currently. To live in a world where most people have no qualms giving you an illness that will disable you. And worse, they don’t even believe you’re disabled. Millions of people live with long covid and other chronic illnesses, and they have to put up with being dismissed by doctors, family and friends all the time.

I am always being told I am already very lucky, why should I feel like this? I have a partner who loves me, and I am not suffering economically, at least not for now. But I wish I can get them to live in my mind and body for just a bit.

The guilt-tripping continues, so does the dismissing and denial. I am tired.

What is it in it for me? I am perpetually tired, and I don’t particularly enjoy anything. Most of the time I feel like I am putting on an act so that people around me will not feel uncomfortable or hurt. That I have such a irreconcilable relationship with life fills me up with immense survivor’s guilt. There are people who desperately wants to live, and here I am struggling to keep myself alive.

There are some bright spots I have to admit. When I am faced with either annihilation or social rejection the choice is always clear. People say I have the courage to write honestly here, but the courage to put up with any societal judgement pales in comparison when faced intimately with one’s power to self-destruct. There can be liberation found, when one is not very attached to their selves.

There is a concept of psychological death, where instead of killing one’s physical existence we kill our psychological existence. We kill our old selves in order to have our new selves emerge. I have done this several times in my life, consciously or unconsciously. This has given me the strength to explore new dimensions of my life that would have never been possible if I was very strongly attached to my old selves. We can be addicted to the old images we have built: the social validation and acceptance that comes with those images. Societal admiration and belonging is very intoxicating. Conversely societal rejection is very painful. But I had to decide whether I wish to bear the pain of social rejection or self rejection.

And so ironically, I have always chosen my self over society. It can be psychologically exhausting of course, and there is accumulated fatigue, the feeling of having to do this over and over again. Watching other people ease into life with no effort, while I scream and flail as though I am drowning.

So sometimes even I am confused if I have a strong or weak sense of self. I have no qualms thinking about self-destruction, but yet I am still willing to choose loneliness over belonging. I protect my health like a vigilant hawk, but I contemplate my own death very often. Is this paradoxical or is there some coherence somewhere?

I am not sure where I am going with this. Today, I just want to write as my self. No attempts to mask or belong. I want to attempt to write as I am, even if language cannot fully convey my internal states.

Thank you for reading, if you’ve made it so far. I guess the only thing I can do while navigating all of this is to document it as faithfully as possible. People are like “why would they kill themselves?” because they cannot comprehend who would choose death when life is so precious. I cannot speak for anyone else, but here is a look into my mind.

As far as I know I’m not practically suicidal because as long as I can have some self-determination I would never bring suffering to those who would suffer from my decision, but I think about it often, because that’s the way I respond to my pain.

March 18, 2024

my first hate comment

This morning I woke up to my first ever hate comment in response to my latest post in the history of this blog. I am sharing a screenshot because I don’t wish to publish the comment:

screenshot of comment:" Your story isn't unique or even special. You're experiencing the same symptoms as humans hundreds of thousands of years ago, it's called the human condition. Suck it up buttercup and stop acting like life is as hard as you make it."

This blog is more than 10 years old, so it is quite something that I haven’t gotten more hate comments before, since I tend to write about controversial topics. My writing is not that popular and it is pretty niche, most of the time most people don’t actually care about what I write. I think people tend to get trolls and hate comments when they reach a popularity threshold. I found myself wondering if this means I’ve finally made it on the blogging scene. I kid.

I guess I can understand why people simply turn off comments, or don’t bother to build it. But I love comments – I may not have the psychological space to respond to them in a timely manner, but I love them in general. In this day and age where people are used to instant messaging and status-based social networks, it takes a lot of effort to come to this website and type into a traditional online form.

Which is why I am also mind boggled that this person took the effort to leave this comment. They seem to be unable to tolerate the way I write about my life. No one is asking them to read my writing? I am not sure what is the sort of reaction they are trying to provoke? Shame? I had a ton of that while growing up. That I will read this comment and decide to finally pull up my socks? Wow thanks I’m finally cured.

I have never claimed that my story is unique or special, but the point of having a blog is to write my truth. When I was younger I really believed everybody felt like me, only to find out most people have never even once contemplated what it means to end their own life. There is inherent suffering in being human, but people will endure incredible suffering just to stay alive, because they want to be alive. To them, being alive is a gift.

Yet I struggle every single day. If this makes me a buttercup so be it. I’ve admitted multiple times on this blog that I am a very fragile person. It is precisely this fragility that makes it difficult to endure life, because I feel so sensitive to everything.

I’ve also endured this sort of comments from people supposedly close to me for my entire life. Do people really believe this sort of rebuke will make people like me have more will to live and survive? This comment is proving my sentiments right: that this world is hostile and relentlessly judgmental. If I was at a different place this could be a trigger for me to contemplate disappearing off the face of this earth. I mean, why bother to survive when people say and think such mean things about me?

Does this person feel better after saying this to a so-called buttercup? That a person is already admittedly weak and vulnerable, and that the next best thing to do to this person is to punch her down?

Honestly. I am not upset or even offended. I am just disturbed. I am fragile in many ways, but I am numb to these things because well, “training” from many years of enduring this sort of shit from worse sources because it fucking hurts to hear something like this from people I actually care about.

I am disturbed because who knows what else is being said to other people who are in an emotionally vulnerable state right now? This is unfortunately the world we live in. Though this person is not representative of the many kind and thoughtful people I interact with, it is also true that there are a ton of such people around, and bullying is still a thing.

I feel sympathy mostly, because I cannot imagine the process of becoming a person who genuinely thinks this is a worthwhile thing to do.

To the other buttercups like me: for what it is worth I think it is perfectly fine to be a buttercup. There is no rulebook in this world that says we have to toughen up and be thick like hide. This is the sort of insidious narrative that is causing so much unnecessary suffering in this world, because we are all afraid to be our true selves openly in this world. So we suppress and repress, and we knowingly and unknowingly hurt each other like this. In my opinion, it is better to be a weak buttercup that is mindful of the presence of the other buttercups in this world. That to me, is strength.

March 16, 2024

pretension

Lately I am trying to have more compassion for myself, but it has been a struggle. I tell myself just like I wouldn’t expect someone without a leg to run a marathon, I shouldn’t expect myself to function like a normal human being because my brain is dysfunctional.

I can’t tell how much of my mental state is inherent in me, and how much of it is impacted by the current conditions of the world. We’re entering year 5 of the pandemic but most of the world is denying that it exists, every day there is incredible violence and war, the weather never ceases to remind us that climate change is happening, and society is relentlessly judgemental. Is it truly a sign of health to be able to ignore everything that is going on and just go about as though everything is dandy and fine?

I try to imagine myself living in an imaginary world where people actually care about each other, where a pandemic like this would never drag on for five years because everyone would just agree to do the right thing for each other. A world where I would not feel insane for caring about my health or other people’s health. Or get gaslighted into feeling like I’m a hypochondriac when I know my anxieties are fully backed up by the research. Would I still feel the way I do now?

I think a lot of my feelings comes from my belief that this world is hostile, though it pretends otherwise. That is the messed up thing: because perhaps it would be better if it was outright hostile.

Every day I wake up I feel like something is wrong with me. It is like I don’t belong here. Some people have body dysmorphia, I have an existence dysmorphia. I feel like most days I am just pretending to be a human being – half the time it is because I love my partner and I don’t want to be a drag. Without her, would I simply let myself rot?

I have such a complicated relationship with life. If I didn’t care about it I guess I wouldn’t even be writing here, and I wouldn’t be so obsessive about documenting my memories. Yet I struggle. I can’t tell whether is it my brain that is uncooperative or I am just truly disinterested.

I feel like the only way I can cope with this is to continue to pretend to be a human being, to go through the motions of life, to intellectually participate. Maybe I can fake it till I make it, or maybe through the pretension I can find the sort of joy that comes from the immersion of acting in a play, or it is through travelling the lengths and widths of this void that I can find my way?

I guess I am somewhat still hopeful for a positive outcome, but maybe this is just my relationship to life. After reading a ton of autobiographies I know I am not the only person in history having this tenuous relationship with life. If this is my lot then perhaps I have to figure out how can I best cope with it instead of wishing I can be another person or have another brain.

March 10, 2024

documenting my first experience with the risograph

Last weekend to celebrate our 94th month anniversary we decided to attend a beginner’s risograph workshop at Knuckles & Notch. To be very honest I haven’t heard of the word “risograph” until last year – and I actually worked in print design for a few years so that is a tad embarrassing. Back in my day (early 2000s) there were hardly any art fairs – or at least I was too busy working to know about them if they existed – there was also no zine or sticker culture like it is now.

We encountered risograph prints at the Illustration Arts Fest last year. They have a distinctive neon-ish retro look. There was also where we first encountered Knuckles & Notch, and since then we’ve been following them on instagram. That’s how my partner knew of their workshops, and she asked if I was interested. I was, but the idea of attending a three-hour workshop in covid times sounded a little precarious and exhausting to me, so I just pushed the idea aside.

But we ran out of ideas of what to do on our 94th month, so at the very last minute my partner popped the idea again, and this time I agreed albeit reluctantly. We decided to wear n95s for the entire workshop.

I enquired if we needed to bring our digital devices to work on the designs, but they said no, we’ll use their materials available on-site. Thinking it was somewhat like letterpress or woodblock printing I was anticipating doing some cut outs to make some simple prints. I was half right! They offered paper for cutting, and I was surprised to learn that we could actually draw anything with markers.

There is a set number of fixed colours which we could pick any 2, and we can dictate the transparency of the colours via shades of grey. The overlap of translucent colours may produce beautiful effects.

I decided to hand-letter a haiku I wrote in 2017 (because this was the sentiment I intensely felt at the particular moment in time), and opted to keep the colour scheme stupid simple. Since this is our first time, we had no idea what to expect or how to visualise the potential outcomes. Hence I was more conservative.

Here I am lettering with correction liquid to make white letters (my hand tired from perpetually squeezing, had I known earlier I would have brought my giant white posca marker), and my partner elected to cut shapes from paper:

photo of me using correction liquid to determine the white areas

The lay outs of the separate two colours were created with a black marker and pencil. To create the giant block containing “heavy weight” I cut out some black paper and used correction liquid on it. The left would determine the pink areas and the right would determine dark blue areas:

left for the dark blue print, right for the pink print

The risograph printer in action:

photo of the printer completing the poster print

photo of the risograph printer at knuckles & notch

The risograph stencil:

My partner browsing risograph the art at the studio:

photo of my partner browsing the risograph art at knuckles and notch

Close-up of the overlapping blue and pink hearts – this effect is not obvious on the poster when seen from a distance, but pretty cool up close. But on hindsight perhaps I would have used a grey marker for a more translucent blue:

For the two lines that sandwich the word “only” I wanted to experiment with overlapping pencil lines. Since pencil is naturally grey (rather than solid black) I thought it would create an interesting effect with the overlapping colours. In the end the effect was pretty cool but I think it should have been more pronounced. Also since this is the first time I am hand-lettering blind I couldn’t balance the weight of the type properly – too used to being able to quickly toggle different typographic weights in a software. I felt this part of the poster was pretty weak:

closeup of the overlapping pencil markings on the poster

Another attempt at overlapping colours but again it wasn’t obvious except when seen close-up:

close up of the pink block with words "heavy weight", and the words "of existence" printed with overlapping blue and pink ink

The full poster:

Us with our posters at the studio – the effect of my partner’s overlapping colours were so much better:

photo of my partner and I with our risograph prints

Overall this was a very enriching experience for me. It is so cool to create a poster almost entirely manually versus using a software. I regard my hand-lettering as trash but I wanted to see how far I could go with it. After this experience I guess I can see why there are so many artists who are enamoured with risograph prints. It offers a different spectrum of creativity and creative constraints that often produces extraordinary results. I mean the only reason why we became aware of it is because the risograph prints at the art/book fairs kept catching our eye.

I’ve spent so much of my life creating with the computer and making digital visuals. I think there is some evolutionary biological reason why we are very drawn to analog things. When I first started to learn how to draw I thought I would be happier drawing on the ipad. I was wrong: I feel so much better sketching with a pen and painting with watercolour.

Risograph prints can never be perfect. My hand-lettering would never look like type set on a computer software. But there is perfection, and then there is beauty. The more encounters I have the roughness that comes with handmade and analog stuff, the more I am moved by the beauty that emanate from those layers of rough imperfections. Is it because nature is also never perfect? That the petals of flowers are never symmetrical, there is always a browning leaf on a tree. We gasp during autumn, when things start to decay. There can be an exhaustion that comes with endless summers.

p.s. I’m giving away five copies of the poster with free shipping if any of you deem it worthy. please leave a comment and i’ll get in touch with you.

March 3, 2024

some ruminations on the inherent dislike of my self

[cw: suicidal thoughts] I guess this does not come as a surprise to anyone – I think I have an inherent dislike for my self. No one who inherently likes them selves would keep having thoughts of whether their lives are meaningful, or if their lives are worthwhile. Them simply being alive should be enough.

A typical person being in this world cannot help but be affected by this world and in turn, affects the world. Their mere presence changes the world through their interactions. That to me, is the meaning of one’s life. The universe can one day implode, but nothing changes the fact that we were once there. We participated, even if it is a simulation.

This is where I stand philosophically at least intellectually, at this point in my life. But personally and psychologically I keep wondering whether my life is worthwhile. I don’t think the world is better or worse with or without me. I struggle to participate, because everything just seems so heavy and meaningless.

I just don’t have a good relationship with my self, life and this world. On a meta level I think this could be a good and fruitful thing. This void or conflict has pushed me to examine that space instead of living life like a drone on auto-pilot. There are a lot of things that most people take for granted that don’t come easy to me. But it feels difficult: living like I am fundamentally incompatible with life.

I wonder if a lot of how I feel stems from being the odd one out. Will I feel this desolation if I am surrounded by a community of people like me? I once believed I had found my tribe when I lived in SF for a while, only to drift apart from that spectrum of weirdness.

I think mentally I have a very strong drive to be independent in my thoughts and actions, but emotionally I wish to belong. That is the main difference between people who are unapologetic about their unique selves and me. I feel perpetually apologetic for being me.

Sometimes I make the mistake of thinking of myself as fully abled like the rest of the world, only to realise again and again no matter how many kilometres I can run, how many streaks I can accomplish, how much weight I can lift, I am still chronically ill. I have a lot less migraines than before, but they pop up when I am not careful. I still have to be hyper-vigilant about my health, and I tend to feel ill a lot more often than the average person. But I am so used to feeling unwell that it feels so normal, so I fall into the trap of thinking I am normal. Then I get irrationally upset when my normal sense of unwellness becomes sickeningly unwell.

Like many other people who minimise illness, I too minimise it for myself. If I truly believe I am ill, I would have way more compassion for myself. I would understand that I was incapable of doing all the things I thought I should do. But no, I feel contempt when I am unable to do anything. Memories of being labelled as lazy comes flooding back into me. I start to detest myself for my ongoing uselessness. There is an overwhelming sadness about my existence. Sometimes the pain feels unbearable. And this is when I wish for it to end.

I don’t have a lot of capacity for normal living. I am very easily overwhelmed. People are not very kind to this sort of fragility, because we prize “resilience”. It was worse when I was younger, and there was so much self-hatred and shame accumulated because I could not hustle. One day I just decided to finally acknowledge that I am fragile. I heaved a sigh of relief. I can finally stop pretending and trying to be who I am clearly not. We can’t keep asking the fish to climb a tree.

I dwell on things I cannot do – it grates on me slowly, draining the life out of me. But I don’t give myself credit for the things I can do. I just cannot think of and see my self clearly, like how I would objectively and logically evaluate someone else.

I don’t really know how to surface out of this, or if I even could, if this is something I have to learn to work with in order to have a better relationship with my own life. I am already in my 40s, if I lived in another era I would probably be dead by now. It seems unlikely that I can ever reprogram myself to think of myself differently. All I can do is to articulate these in ways I know how, like writing this now. Maybe just the act of processing is enough.

February 25, 2024

from creativity to activity

I started making websites and dabbling in photoshop when I first got my computer at 15. I never felt particularly creative as a child and I hated art classes so when that part of me emerged it felt strange and exciting. I had never felt like I had any direction in life or particularly strong feelings about what I wanted to do until then. If lucky, finding our own vocation is like falling in love: it suddenly seizes us and we have eyes for nothing else.

It is a very powerful feeling to be strongly led by something, because otherwise life can feel very meandering and meaningless. That is why years later when I’ve gotten chronically ill and had to give up my career, it felt like I had lost my life’s purpose. It is pretty depressing to bank our entire life on work, because when it goes away for any reason we may find that we are empty without it.

I think that is why after leaving my career I still hung on desperately to my identity as a creative person. Without any visible output what is there to indicate whether our lives have been fully led?

So even till today I struggle when I am unable to feel creative or be creative, in my own narrowly-defined ways. Somehow things that come easy to me like writing on this blog do not fit under the creative category. Being creative has to be this whole exhausting endeavour, it must feel like I went to the ends of earth to excavate something extraordinary out of me.

We have different parts of our selves, and at least for me they often contradict and conflict with each other. Because of my chronic illnesses I had to dive deep into learning about nutrition and exercise, and because of my hyperfocus I can really go deep into a rabbit hole. Like it is not enough for me to be satisfied with knowing that in general eating whole foods is healthy, I have to go into minute details about how insulin, mTOR, leucine affects my body and how different nutrients affect them. Then it is also not enough for me to do some exercise to stay fit, I have to know which zones to do cardio in and how many sets of weightlifting can cause hypertrophy. I spend hours reading reading research papers, and I like reading anecdotes from different online communities.

Because I am focusing so much energy on my health and fitness, I don’t have much energy left to have any meaningful creative output. Not being creative makes me feel bad, as though I am wasting my existence away. It was causing a lot of unhappiness in my internal state.

But all of a sudden last week, I came to the realisation that perhaps I was just too attached to my identity as a creative person. Again I am putting labels on what is creative, valuable, and meaningful. Life in itself as a creative act and process – we are constantly creating our selves. Yet because of societal conditioning we see only certain activities as creative, whereas we don’t place much value on the easy and mundane. I feel like this is not a new realisation for me, but something I just keep having to remind myself again and again.

Most of my life I’ve just been focused on work and I have never paid much attention to my body. Chronic illness forced me to be otherwise, but even then it took me years of denial trying to live the same unhealthy ways as I did before before I really did anything concrete about it.

Over the past 8 years I’ve tried to work on my fitness and health on and off, but they were never sustained. I go through cycles of obsessive strict routines, and then I get tired of them all so I go back to having a “spontaneous” lifestyle. The past 2 years is the first time in my life that I am sustaining a lifestyle that has exercise as its priority.

In 2020-2021 I walked an average of 2 million steps per year, but in 2022 they increased to 4 millionish, and last year I almost hit 6 million steps. We are only at the second month of the year I am already at 1 million, a milestone that would have taken me 6 months previously.

screenshot of the number of steps I've taken per year

I started this journey because I was just so tired of being tired and sick all the time. I was more active because I wanted more energy to be creative – it was a means to an end.

Now, I am not so sure if it is still a means to the same end. Maybe I’ve aged and deep down I no longer care about being identified as a creative person. Life has changed me in so many ways. Is having creative output really so important for me? Is it truly important or is it that I believe it is important?

All I know now is that I face no motivation or inertia issues going to the gym or running, but it takes a lot out of me to do anything creative. Is this an adjustment phase as I previously believed, or is this a permanent change?

My partner calls me a walking brain attached to a body because I spend so much energy thinking and my body is just a vehicle for the brain. But now I feel like I am less interested in thinking and more into moving. This is the opposite of who I’ve been for my entire life so I am quite confused.

I want to do physical things and have physical experiences, and am no longer so interested in facing a screen more than 10 hours a day living my life out on the internet. I was always so active on social media because I had not much of a life in the physical realm.

I am not sure if this is a temporary phase, that I am just ironing things out while my body adjusts to new levels of fitness. Or that this is finally a compensation to the overly-digital life I’ve led since I’ve discovered the internet. Maybe this will lead me to new ways of being creative instead of being so married to my own narrow definitions before.

I frequently ask myself what is the sort of life I would like to have led if I imagine myself on my death bed. This question would hopefully clarify my priorities. Obviously I cannot know the person I would become when I die, so I can only project to the best I can. But for the past few years the answer has been consistently the same. I simply want to be the deepest and widest version of my self I can possibly become. What does that really mean and entail I do not know, but I do know being stuck in old ways of living, perceiving and thinking is definitely not what I want. I am glad enough as long as I am making inroads to learning and developing more of myself.

Since I’ve started thinking myself as an active person instead of a creative person, I am considerably less unhappy. It is quite fascinating how mental shifts can impact our lives so much. We grow so attached to old narratives of ourselves that we cannot see the truly remarkable things about our selves and our lives. I know I am committing the same potential error of attaching a label to myself, but I am only human after all. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to stop fixing labels on myself before death catches up with me.

February 18, 2024

a wet mouldy sponge

Yesterday after a strength-training session I had a very innocuous mini argument with my partner about misplacing some things at home. Which after I simply slumped and curled up into a ball on the floor. I laid there for a long while, unable to move.

I go into these frozen-like states once in a while. Sometimes I am not physically frozen, but internally I am. When these happen I am not sure how long it takes to unfreeze myself. I just have to wait for myself to thaw.

There are a lot of things I intellectually wish to do, but somehow I am unable to do them. As a result I feel knotted – like how a muscle has knots – it makes me tense and anxious. I could “easily” untie some of those knots by doing the things I wanted to do, but somehow I just cannot bring myself to. I tell these to my partner, and she says I am unable to do those things because I have too many difficult feelings surrounding them.

I probably know what she’s telling me at some level, but it feels very clarifying to have another person analyse the situation and deliver their observations. I guess that is why therapy is therapeutic. I am lucky that my partner can be quite astute when it comes to my internal struggles. After all, she’s the only person who has witnessed everything I’ve been through the past few years.

Yesterday she described my brain as a wet mouldy sponge. Because I seem to absorb everything and mould grows on everything I absorb. Instead of feeling upset or insulted I felt a sense of relief. I felt seen, because she understands how I feel.

scanned image of my partner's illustration of my brain as a wet mouldy sponge — illustration by @launshae

This gets worse as I age and I chalk up more experiences in life. Most people cope by denying, forgetting and moving on. I absorb and grow heavier. On the surface nothing seems wrong with my life, internally I feel like I am about to break anytime. So something small that wouldn’t bother most people would threaten to unhinge me.

I don’t really know how I can overcome this. I guess in another alternate universe or timeline I would pack up and live at a monastery or something. Maybe in the wrong timeline I would be committed to an asylum.

I wonder if there is a light at the end of the tunnel somewhere. Or if I have to accept that this will always be my internal reality. I am never in harmony with my mind, and I am constantly struggling against it. I am growing sadder and sadder as the years go by – it is not just me, the world is getting more insane too (or some people may argue we have always been like this). I am at that age when people’s mortality is starting to impact me. Do we ever get better at coping with grief, loss and trauma, or do we simply get better at acceptance, but acceptance doesn’t alter the degree of pain?

I try really hard to get better. To feel better. Most of the time I try to ignore how I feel, because if I let myself feel all my feelings I would never get any living done. But once in a while a dam breaks somewhere and I find myself curled up like a ball, unable to move.

I strength-train so I can bear more physical weight. Is it possible to strengthen the psyche such that I can be a wet sponge with growing mould and yet feel unimpeded by it? Maybe one day carrying an increasing load will feel more effortless. Or on a more meta level, if it is not possible to feel unimpeded by my mind, is it possible to be in acceptance and integration with a mind that constantly weighs me down? I won’t even attempt to imagine that I could one day be less of a sponge.

But at this point, everything feels impossible. I write these entries in hope that one day I can look back at them and notice the psychological distance I have travelled. There have been so many things I have struggled with but they don’t bother me much anymore. I feel like I have grown so much, but in many ways I still feel I am stuck at the same point. Or worse, that I have regressed.

I guess my psychological states are a lot more dynamic than I would like to believe. Sometimes I feel like I’ve finally transcended my past selves, other times I think there is a core in me that will always be sad and full of grief. I have to keep on reminding myself it is not the states themselves that problematic – I think it is perfectly reasonable to be sad and grieving in this world – but rather my response to them.

I don’t like myself for being a certain way, and that is the second arrow the Buddha was talking about. It is through writing these entries that I am able to zoom out and look at myself with a more objective lens. Will these insights accumulate and be my salvation the next time I am in pain?

Perhaps one day even a wet mouldy sponge can find a place in this world. Or maybe it will finally be okay that it will never belong.